Ameen Khwaja (SEO & SEM Expert)

Twitter strategies that you should know........

2011-10-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

Most of us failed while using Twitter as a brand-building tool. At the same time we were not able to get influencers who would re-tweet us. With the introduction of Twitter, branding has resulted in instructive course of action. Now it has become imperative for the companies to teach their staff and clients about smart engagement, genuine conversation, useful links, consistency, trickery brand worthy of their company. The companies which aren’t aware of social media or lack the manpower who are efficient in using it overtime can lead in to form of brand killing. Such companies must first raise the step in protecting their brand.

Given below are few brand killers of Twitter strategy:

Talking-heads tweets:

Attending business conferences or participating in a universal event, hash tags are a method for tweeters to combine and form a unique resemblance. Most of the well targeted hash tag driven small areas often result in becoming an arcade of talking heads. It’s all about brand progress dead end.

Auto Tweets:

Programmed tweets are on the spot brand killers and are shoddier than spambots. The twitter version of converting the novice followers into leads and producing auto-DMS will risk in misplacing followers. The scheduled tweets when compared to auto tweets are not so terrible but they call for caution and knowledge. You need to immobilize the automator and arrange the scheduled tweets with caution. Need to take a big step when it is mandatory and scrub out if the content is extraneous.

Sandwich tweets:

Most of us dislike Sandwich tweets. It is a form of tweet where the user or consumer donates to the cause of consuming a sandwich! It is deficient of substance. It offers no chance for extra chatter in personal terms and offers detested opportunities from professional perspective.

Troll tweets:

It is not regarding distorted old age men tweeting forcefully from underside bridges. It is all regarding the ones who contaminate the Twitter ecosystem by pitching malicious messages in to the each. It is not that Twitter must result in bonfire of the new niceness that abruptly becomes web chic. But it should continue to remain a dynamic place to socialize in terms of professionalism and personal. Troll tweets don’t fall into any category. The only thing that they really work on well is shutting down the productive conversation. You have to be good or be a B2B bete noire.

Copy cat tweets:

There exist few users who aren’t aware of social media and haven’t detailed or decided any branding strategy. They generally block the eco system by retweeting instead of original content. And there comes the hindrance with this loom that it never accounts into anything than a water-down aggregator. This implicates that they are remaining in the gloom of industry instead of shining out. The users need to be original and unique in the way of approach.

NSFW tweets:

The progress of business nattering is nosy at best. With the trend of social media, we are in the times where sharing is too casual and at the same time it’s confusing. It is imperative to be casual at the same time it has to keep in mind that we are professionals. Keeping a tab on the medium of respect, language spoken and in case if you want to share any dirty jokes then doing them off the record will not put your brand low. The professional brand when compared to personal brand takes much time to recover from

massive social media breakdown.

Tone-deaf Tweets:

It is very important to have a tone that is unique while using Twitter. While coyly mannered tones work for showbiz personalities. Knowing one’s limits and sticking to a reliable tone will fetch you. Talking what is necessary on the Twitter will save your face else the brand value will run down.

Vacuum Tweets:

Asking questions is one of the greatest methods to benefit your Twitter mix. The questions illustrate that you are expecting reaction from the followers. But in profusion, it actually kills the plan. If most of the tweets that you tweet are full of questions then it lasts an impression that you are inexperienced. This will narrow down the brand value of the company. Instead of posing questions it’s actually better to create an opportunistic and interactive, inspiring environment.

Eavesdropping Tweets:

Imagine a situation where you along with your friends are talking something important and suddenly a third person interrupts and oppose your flow of speech. Wouldn’t it anger your temper? Definitely the same happens with the tweets that you display on Twitter. It is very important that you do not dictate words between the conversations of two persons. Until and unless the tweet that you engage between two people is worth don’t impose it. Learning rules before you breaking them is important.

Starting a PPC project???

2011-10-13T00:24:00.000-07:00

Developing a PPC campaign with out any proper structure will make you land in to serious risks and problems in future. It is very important to have a perfect plan and design while dealing with the PPC project. Keeping in mind, I have set a few guidelines in starting a PPCproject. Let’s have a look at them.

Decision maker: While working on a PPC project you come across various people who

stand for your client. They are also a part of the project and have their own set of opinions but it is your responsibility to decide the authority over the project. In case if you do not determine this, you may have to face problems in the future.

Fee details: Initially before making an agreement with the client, it is imperative to think how much the client would get as a profit and what is your share in that? You should also negotiate on time limitations in order to optimize the campaign and for meeting customer expectations.

Budget matters: One of the key matters that has to be focused while the campaign development procedure is Budget of the client. If you really are not aware of the budget and has already developed a strategy then you cannot meet client expectations. With out knowing the budget, you aren’t supposed to confer important points of the campaign.

Conversion: What do you think about the conversion? In many instances, it becomes easy to appreciate about the conversion by seeing the client site. Every person has his/her own thoughts, like wise your client may have different opinions for services, products. Some times they want emails, phone calls or do not need any conversion at all. You need to first clearly fathom about the conversions needed, their value, tracking of the conversion that in turn sets the way for reporting and campaigning.

Campaign goals: Every client has their own goal in the campaigning process. But it is your responsibility to aim at client expectations and have goals wherein you both together are of the same mind on to evaluate the campaign victory. If at all the client is not aware of the goals then you may not able to be with them for a long period. In this situation, you should be capable to consent CPA goal, leads, etc. This has to be both aggressive and attainable goal to get the best out of the campaign. The goals can be re-examined in case they are too lofty.

Campaign time period: There are generally two kinds of campaigns. They are small term and lengthy term campaigns. If you have a time period of only six-eight weeks to deal with the campaign, then you have to be more aggressive compared to six months campaign.

In the initial stages of the novice campaign, there is a time period where you may not be able to meet the goals of the client. Landing pages, ads, keywords, searching for the right mix of bids and optimization of the content will generally take long period. It is your job to educate the client on this and see that they make it up.

Creative resource: It is crucial to confer with the client if they have a designer of their own to design the landing pages and banners. In very minute cases, you may use the clients’ site for PPC landing pages. You need to discuss if they have a designer to design these landing pages or you have to bear the designer fees. If at all they have a designer, then you have to clear the terms if he can help you in the development of banners and pages. And in case if the designer is a novice in designing the landing pages, then you have to guide him through out the process for a successful campaign.

In most of the cases, it is important for the clients to look over the keywords and the ad text that you use. This is applicable in big industries which have brand rules and regulations. So it is important to know if the client is looking a head for any approval or review before finalizing the process.

Usually few industries have set their own restrictions about advertising. They may consist of few websites in which their ads cannot become visible for which you are supposed to obstruct from networking campaigns. They can’t offer the opportunity of shipping process to some states due to various legal statements. They may have already surveyed about the campaigning and have their choice of opinions which can work and which cannot. It is necessary to ask the intelligence sources of the company before starting the campaign, which in turn will save the energy and time.

One of the important things that you have to do in a PPC campaign is to detect the opponents of the client. In the study, you may find the client competitors who do not have any online presence or no advertising. So inquiring the customer about their rivalry will pave the way for a lucid vision about the keywords to be used. Some times the client may have pleasant accord with the opponent in usage of the keywords, so you have to know about them.

Client communication: In this cutthroat era, every one has their own set of expectations from the promoter. There are few of them who are lenient and ask only for monthly news. At the same time they are few of them who require daily reports or weekly reports about the campaign procedure. So, it is essential to converse with the customer about their expectations and act accordingly to steer clear of the risks and problems.

WordPress SEO plug-ins that help you in many ways

2011-06-08T21:49:00.000-07:00

Word Press SEO plug-ins that help you in many ways

In the recent era, Wordpress occupies the position of being the most admirable tool for publishing the content online or in the web world. Various kinds of features can be added and also can be used as blog, e-commerce websites etc. With the introduction of plug-ins, free themes, categories, tools it has become a cake-walk for many novice organizations to publish their content. Just publishing the mere content will not achieve results; along with that using technology will fetch you a lot. Given below is the list of Word Press plug-ins for Search Engine Optimization that progress the sites rank.

a) SEO Rank reporter:

Many of you all are interested in knowing the traffic that comes to your site. Usually the traffic is measured using different tools which are expensive. To make you feel good on Word Press site, SEO rank reporter plug-in is used. It is a tool in the admin panel that offers easy ranking measurement. This permits you to add certain keywords in the site and at the same time it also produces a report for every 3 days. When there are changes taking place in search engine ranking, then all these changes are alerted to you with an email.

b) SEO Content control:

One of the key factors that affect the Search Engine Optimization is the quality of the content. The site’s ranking will go down in case the quality of the content is poor or is duplicated. The SEO Content control tool helps you to overcome problems like missing of a Meta tag or the posts with less content etc. This makes the blog to look attractive and will persuade the reader to read your blog. It increases the ranking of your site.

c) All in One SEO pack:

The All in One Search Engine Optimization pack is another best feature proffered by Word Press and is a perfect solution for all problems. It helps in optimizing the site page titles and search engines by producing Meta tags. The advanced search engine optimization users are offered the freedom to customize tags, Canonical URL structures, descriptions and titles. And if you are new to Word Press then downloading this tool is a gift. Also has the backward-compatibility option with wide range of plug-ins like warrior, ultimate tags, auto Meta tags and many others.

d) SEO Friendly image:

Another friendly option from Word Press is Search Engine Optimization friendly images that insert TITLE and ALT attributes to your images or photographs. If at all initially you are not set with TITLE and ALT then SEO friendly will make the necessary changes to the site. The ALT attribute is an imperative part and explains the images to search engine and if a user is searching for this kind of image then this works as an important factor. The TITLE attribute does not play a high role but it is indispensable for the traffic as this data will involuntarily become visible in the tool tip when the user clicks the image.

These plug-ins when installed on your site will create wonders and improve your page ranking. Though in the initial stages, you may not understand but later once you get grip then things will go smoothly.

Bye Bye Content Farms, Google searching the right mix to offer the right search

2011-02-25T09:22:00.000-08:00

Google has taken a well appreciated step towards offering its customer the better search results by filtering out the copied contents and unwanted data. As per the officials from Google, they have taken the first step towards improving the search results by changing its algorithm. This change is said to affect 11.8 percent of the queries and though this incremental change will not show initially, it will definitely offer a big change in the search results in long run. This change will be applied in the US market first and later on introduced all over the world but one thing is clear from all these that very shortly you will find only original content as well as thorough research and analysis on the websites.

Change will affect the content farms too

The said change will affect the content farms a lot. They will now definitely start working towards offering better and original content. Yahoo is aiming to hire about 400,000 writers just to generate content merely in terms of quantity will now hire only those writers that will offer the quality content and not the quantity content. It is usually observed that people searching for anything don’t go beyond the first page of search results and hence the ranking of many websites are increased just by adding unnecessary content.

No direct link with Personal Blocklist on Google Chrome

The changes in algorithm made by Google are not directly based on its new product Personal Blocklist that is launched on Google Chrome. The personal blocklist enables the users to block the portals they don’t want to view in their search results and after the change in algorithm it is estimated that about 84% of such blocked domains will get affected. Hence, it is a clear indication that what users want is just what is going to happen after this change.

Better Content and precise search

Once this change will be introduced all over the world, it is quite apparent that the search results will become more precise and the contents that the users will get would be more accurate and reliable. It would be a good move in the search engine industry and the outcome would be the benefit of users. The content farms will be affected for better as they will start delivering only original research content and no more spam.

Do SEO Experts Know All Search Types?

2010-06-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

SEO experts are familiar with three primary search types, including:

Informational search: It involves search for a specific topic.
Navigational search: It involves search for specific website or web page.
Transactional search: It involves search for information required to purchase a product or service.

Besides, there are other types of searches that most of the SEO experts don’t take into account. The following discussion helps the inexperienced SEO experts to recognize other search types that can help you achieve improved search engine rankings.

Ad Hoc Search

Consider an online surfer who is completely unfamiliar with a particular topic. While searching for the information, the user would like to find all possible documents relevant to the topic. A good example in this regard could be of reviews related to a particular product. So, what SEO experts should do is write reviews for the business products and services of their websites embedding important search keywords in it.

Search for Known Items

A searcher might prefer to use a search engine to search for a specific website or web page he had already visited in the past. In fact, it is a usual practice of online searchers to search for the known items using search engines only. The reason for this is that most of the searchers don’t remember the exact URL of the website, but some special part of it. For example, login page of Google Adwords. If the user directly wants to reach the login page, he would sue search engine and queries like “google adwords login”.

So, what’s the role of SEO experts in this? An SEO expert must optimize each and every page of the website using title tag, Meta tag, heading and other things.

Search for Named Pages

An online searcher who had already visited a named page of a website in past would like to recall it using search engines. To explain it better, consider the website of a health clinic specializing in the treatment of a cancer. So, a page of the website might be named as “cancer treatment”. So, a searcher might use the query like “cancer treatment ABC”, where ABC refers to the name of the organization. An SEO expert need to optimize such named pages of the website effectively.

By constantly viewing the search behavior of various online users, an SEO expert can implement features of various search types in the client’s website.

Extend Your SEO Expertise by Building Proficiency in Your Niche

2010-06-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

What do the SEO experts and search marketers usually lack? What restrains these experts from becoming top performers is lack of expert knowledge in the industries they work for. At this stage, it is endurable to have little knowledge about the business niche. Still, many new online businesses are beginners in employing SEO strategies. So, an expert in SEO can easily keep ahead of them. But, the situation is going to change very soon.

Those who lack knowledge about their business niches come out with average content, which is passable for the time being. But, the future search marketers would require making use of their knowledge base to generate quality content. There will be tough competition among the websites to get top ranked in the search space. Then, only the experts in niche and SEO would make it to the height. Here are some of the advantages of having niche expertise:

To be innovative: Those having expertise in their niche can discover innovative solutions to be on the top of the search space. They are innovative in creating fresh content and also in attempting new ways of link building.

To be a predictor: Staying ahead of rival businesses require one to predict the upcoming trends of the industry. Those having the knowledge of the past and present of the industry can utilize their knowledge to predict the future trends.

To be unique: Search engines are always in need of fresh content. However, most of the content they index is an attempt to be unique. With knowledge of your niche, you can be unique in presenting the ideas and content which is fresh and more informative.

To be fast: Experts in their niche can deliver content at a faster rate and thus, stay ahead from others.

To be a real expert: The knowledge of niche can draw the line between a mediocre and an expert. When you start utilizing your niche knowledge to entertain the query of your audiences, you are placed in the category of the real experts.

How to Obtain Niche Knowledge

Obtaining niche knowledge is similar to building SEO expertise. You must start reading books and watching videos related to the industry for which you work. Even the blogs of experts in that industry can help you in this. Remember that it is not all about researching a niche, but it involves a process of continuous learning about the niche.

With a great combination of SEO expertise and niche expertise, you can definitely have better returns on investment.

How to Make Business Blogs Achieve SEO Success?

2010-05-31T22:32:00.000-07:00

Bringing SEO success for a business blog is important to substantiate its existence on the web. There are some simple to perform things that can make a business blog visible among the search engine’s top results. While the tips mentioned below might appear vary basic to the SEO experts, they can be of great help for new business bloggers.

Directing Traffic to Posts

A post on your business blog needs to be indexed in the search engine result pages. However, the home page of the blog is indexed most of the times. The reason behind this is that some business bloggers are habitual of posting the entire post on the home page itself. This is a bad practice that restricts the indexing of internal blog pages containing individual posts. So, you must have a brief introduction of the post on the home page, so that the single-post URLs are indexed in the results.

Utilization of Tags

Without focusing on important tags on your business blog, you can’t expect the SEO efforts to pay. Here are some tips to help you:

Take care of differentiating the title tags form the post titles. While the titles of the posts are usually creative, the title tags need to be keyword specific.
If most of the posts on your business blog contain images, you should unleash the potential of alt tag for SEO purposes. Keep in mind the keyword strategy of each post while adding image tags.
Meta descriptions may or may not get indexed by the search engines, but making them informative and rich in keyword can help your blog posts to attract the web traffic.

Controlling the Indexed Content

It is a waste of efforts to let everything and anything get indexed in the search engine results. For example, allowing the results generated using search tools on you business blog to get indexed share the indexing value for your posts. You must learn and employ the tools to control the content that you want to get indexed.

Using Redirects

One usual problem faced by the blogs is indexing of several versions of the same page. This leads to sharing of search engine rankings among content duplicated through multiple versions of the same page. This problem can be solved using redirects.

As promised in the beginning, all the above-mentioned tips are easy to employ. Use them to let your business blog achieve its due respect in the search engine result pages.

Important Roles Played by Deep Links for a Website

2010-05-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

Deep links are the links to a website’s internal pages, other than the home page or main page. Talk about them to webmasters and some of them would criticize the existence of deep links. Deep links are considered bad because they take the focus away from the website’s main page. However, it is just one side of the coin and should not pass any conclusion against the deep links.

Deep links are of great use for a website and they are no less than any other SEO tools. Let’s trace some of the positive aspects of deep links from the following discussion.

Improve Website Ranking

Deep links earn recognition for the internal web pages of a website. Isn’t it indicative to a search engine that the website as a whole is useful enough to be indexed in the search engine result pages? However, this would happen only if the deep links are provided by good and popular websites. If the websites linking to your website’s internal pages have bad reputation, little can be gained through such deep links. Getting deep links naturally can easily improve the website’s standing in the search engine results.

Increase Website Traffic

The internal pages of a website are less likely to be visited by a visitor to the home page. This is mainly because of the fact that visitors have difficulty finding the way to an internal page. However, if the internal page is directly indexed in the search results, it is visited by the surfers looking for specific information. This in turn increases the overall traffic to the website.

Target Different Keywords

Not all the keywords can be stuffed on the home page of a website. So, deep links extend the use of more and more keywords through internal pages. One group of keywords can be targeted for one internal page and another group for another internal page using deep links. In this way, all keywords of a particular niche can be targeted for your website.

Keep Old Popular Pages Alive

The popular content of your website gets concealed with passage of time and addition of new content. How about keeping the old content popular throughout? This can be made possible by providing deep links to the old popular pages of the website.

Finally, deep links can help you assess and improve your website. Using the analytics tools, you can learn about the pages that attract more traffic than others. So, giving importance to deep links should be a part of your overall SEO campaign.

SEO Called Expensive – Get a Clear Picture

2010-05-20T04:17:00.000-07:00

People keep on calling SEO an expensive affair. You can believe it to be true but then it requires a lot of elaboration. And once you get familiar to the elaborated view of the same, you will find yourself in the opposite clan of website owners. Let’s see how a so-called expensive SEO budget can be made to look affordable.

Consider the ROI
First of all, the idea of taking your business online is worth appreciating. With an online business setup you invest far less than an offline setup. Thus, it is sensible to spend few hundred dollars per month on search engine optimization. Top search engine ranking and increase in web traffic are the returns on investing in SEO.

Competing with Big Brands
Don’t get amazed by the fact that top-brands in different niches spend millions of dollars every year on SEO and internet marketing. However, by spending only few hundred dollars on reliable SEO techniques you can be in competition with big brands. SEO is effective because it is impartial to the brand value and treats big and small online business equally.

Saving on Alternative Promotions
Spending on SEO can help one save the cost of using other and more expensive promotional media. For example, an advertisement on radio, television or print media can cost as much, or even more money than you spend on SEO. And the results achieved through SEO are comparable, sometimes more effective, to other promotional campaigns.

Considering all the points mentioned above, you can invest trust and money in SEO. However, there are some ways to find the best SEO services so that your investments flow in the right direction. Here are some suggestions:

Choose a SEO company for long term to make best out of your investment. SEO is not on-time job and you need it constantly for your website.
Show your willingness to participate in SEO campaign so that you can measure the results through updates provided by the company.
Learn about the plans and techniques employed by the SEO company.
Look for a SEO company that uses analytics to measure the overall impact of the SEO techniques on the client’s website.

All you need to do is maintain a SEO budget right from the beginning. With this, you can actually find SEO to be a cost-effective solution for achieving desired business results.

How Microsites Become Bad SEO Idea?

2010-05-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

The concept of Microsites, when launched and adopted by biggies in the online business world, gave the impression as promising and potential-bearing profit-making strategy. No doubts that online businesses have made fortune using them, but the idea just doesn’t click a number of times. Let’s criticize the use of microsites, based on the experience of webmasters and SEO experts.

Losing Identity of Existing Brand

You already have a well-maintained website with good amount of web traffic visiting it regularly. By launching a microsite for a new brand, you actually try to conceal the popularity of the old brand. So, rather than allowing a microsite for a new brand to piggyback your main site, it is better to launch a full-fledged separate website.

Missing Auxiliary Interest of Audience

By maintaining a separate microite for each type of product you wish to sell, you might lose the ability to entice the interest of a section of the audience. For example, the visitors interested in buying shoes and clothes from the same website might purchase only shoes from your website, even if you have a microsite that sells clothes. So, integrating different product categories on the same website can help your business better.

Creating Confusion

Suppose your audience gets a link of your microsite that sells clothes from your main website that sells shoes. But what if they reach your microsite through search engines and don’t find a link to your main website. It might give rise to the confusion about your business products.

Microsites can also create confusion for search engine spiders. You will definitely wish the search engine to index the web pages of your newly launched microsite. But, search engines are more interested in indexing the pages of your old and existing main website. And if you plan to block the pages of your main website, it obviously damages the search engine value of your main website.

Adding to Site Management

Microsites, especially when they are good in number, can add substantially to site management. Would you like to include all your 15 or 20 microsites in one press release? Or, will it be convenient to maintain so many social media pages for each of the microsites?

Division of Link Building

With one or many microsites, you actually raise the competition for your main website. If you are inspiring five websites to link with your main website, you would links to have same number of links for your microsite. So, why not to have one website and total of ten links for it?

Microsites are good, when you promote content or things like coupons through them. But considering them as a strategy to extend your business profits can be damaging.

How to Save Your Links from Disappearing?

2010-05-13T02:10:00.000-07:00

SEO experts have always been faithful to link building as one of the promising SEO strategies. However, not every webmaster or SEO expert makes best out of the link building tactic and there is a very simple reason behind this. Do you care to notice that most of the links generated some six months ago suddenly disappear from the search engine result pages? Even if you try to compensate the loss with new links, the cycle keeps on repeating.

So, are there any ways to make the website links permanent? Yes, there are and using them you can build a power SEO strategy.

Be Consistent in Approach

Consistency is an important aspect of building links. Creating useful and relevant content regularly and promoting it through article directories and social bookmarking websites should be an unfailing approach.

Make the Links Relevant

Obtaining one link from a relevant website, forum or blog is equivalent to five or more links from irrelevant sites. One of the reasons for the links to disappear from search index is their irrelevant nature. Getting a link from a website related in someway or another to your own website has more probability of being permanent.

Target Diversity

If the links to your website are spread over diverse online portals, there are more chances of them finding relevancy in search index pages. So, it is good to consider social websites, blogs, article directories, forums, web directories, RSS feeds and video websites to spread your website links, rather than focusing on two or three of them.

Regular Participation

One of the most damaging mistakes committed by the SEO experts is to distribute the link and never return. To maintain the quality and age of the link, it is important to get involved as a regular participant on the website. For example, if your have links to your website on a forum, it is good to participate in discussions, reviews and through comments.

Progressive Link Building

Search engines are loyal to the websites that grow steadily in terms of popularity. Be progressive while distributing links on the internet and don’t be irregular in your approach. By maintaining a healthy graph of link building, you can expect most of your links to maintain their quality throughout.

A lot of efforts should be put in to keep every single link to your website alive. Only then you can expect this tried and tested SEO strategy to work for your website.

EXPERT SPEAK

2009-10-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Search Engine Optimization – Easy to Conduct on a Usable Website

2009-06-08T03:00:00.001-07:00

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.

Disclosure of an SEO Experiment

2009-05-24T22:36:00.000-07:00

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.

The Trilogy of SEO Strategies for Making You Think

2009-05-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-05-10T23:28:00.000-07:00

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.

The Importance of “Trust” while Outsourcing SEO

2009-05-03T23:15:00.000-07:00

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.

High Value Link Building: What to Do and More Importantly, What Not To?

2009-04-26T22:16:00.000-07:00

On the chart of a website promotional plan, link building (read high value link building) comes second to no other strategy. Long term success to your website is relative to the value of the backlinks you obtain from reputed websites, but then the big question- how do you actually go about obtaining these links?

What to do to obtain high value links?

Set the right targets: You can’t just blindly aim at the clouds, but if you aim accurately and wisely, you might very well shoot the stars down! Setting the right targets needs lot of research work to be done beforehand. You need to know your current position and you should envisage a futuristic position for yourself too. Say, if your competitor has a dozen of ‘high-on-value’ links from reputed sites, you can’t just catch forty winks after you’ve fetched a couple of equally valuable links. You need a couple of dozens, don’t you? So, plan wisely and have a more subjective definition of your ‘targets’.
Recognize the authorities or reputed sites: This is not going to be simple and advice from other peers on this matter

can be of great help. Here are, few possible consideration:

Leading authorities in your space: Lookout for companies, not necessarily your competitors, but other respectable independent authorities in your space.
Backlink competitors: Target the domains with the highest pagerank linked to them.
Media: Columnists/ eminent media persons anyone near you in the cyber space?

Content strategy: Plan out a content strategy once you’ve found out your targets. Devise a more individual or target-specific strategy. What would attract them or interest them in your website? Obviously, they aren’t going to link your website if you are of no use to them or their users! The content strategy or plan will be dependent on your goals or targets and the diversity of the authorities you are intending to pursue. Assemble your best cards together and play them rightly, something similar to a marketing tool package should get you there.
Finally, the contact content: Again, be more target-specific. Let them know you have been through their website with utmost concern and you really want yourself linked with them. Be as creative as possible and expressive. Remember, this is the beginning of what might possibly be a long term relationship (a profitable one).

What not to do?

Do not buy in the easily available spam links or do not link yourself to such websites either (it might result in the downfall of your Pageranks). A single link from a reputed website is a hundredfold worthier than 1000 of spam links (too much of numbers, huh?)
Do not generate mass emails to all the target websites, no matter how good you are in camouflaging them as customized ones. Talk one-to-one for better relationships (I know this doesn’t quite work after marriage though!).

Flickr shuns the usage of photos for SEO!

2009-04-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

This should be bad news to all the SEO buffs, but being informative about the bad news is good news, isn’t it? Flickr, as we are aware of is the in-vogue photo sharing website. Interestingly, the usage of flickr was recommended as one of the tricks of the trade called SEO.

How did it work? Well, the point was simple. You don’t need to have a hawk’s eye to observe that youtube videos and flickr photos do prop up in search results. So, there you go? A potential chance of getting higher pageranks and web visits! This aspect of flickr was noticed by many of the SEO specialists and it soon became a vital ingredient in many of the SEO related discussions, lectures and recommendations.

This recommendation of using flickr extensively would usually go by the tagline ‘image optimization’. The steps to be followed were quite simple in nature too. All one needed to do is to open a flickr account (it’s free, so that isn’t a big deal). Next, the person needed to find out or click by himself or herself and upload unique and interesting photos to the flickr account. Again the keyword research spells its shadow here. Better headings (read keyword optimized headings) and descriptions are always beneficial. Basically, every photo that’s put up on the filckr account is its own web page- a web page with a title, a tag and a description. When the search engine scans for various websites for relevant keywords, the title, tags and description of the flickr account photos too are taken into account and thus, the photo may find itself a good position in the search results attracting good number of visitors and links. Further, the user could enhance his or her chances by linking back the photo to his or website. Sharing of these photos through social networking sites and through other relevant websites was another good way of marketing. Flickr photo submission to directories and related websites was treated like submission of HTML pages. So to say, flickr, which was supposed to be ‘personal’ platform for sharing of photos, soon went on to become a ‘business’ platform for SEO!

Great idea indeed! Unfortunately (for some), the idea won’t work anymore. Flickr has now decided to crack down the usage of its account for such business practices, a step they believe will help make flickr a cleaner place! A letter saying ‘usage of flickr for selling products or services will lead into termination of your account’ was all that many of the SEO guys got in reply when they contacted for the reason behind the sudden axing of their account! So you see, not all on the internet go easy with guidelines and terms and services. All the SEO conferences will now have no ‘image optimization’ slides and perhaps, its one count down on the number of SEO tactics until, of course, the SEO guys figure out a new method!

SEO outing: Double standards!

2009-04-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

The SEO outing strategy is based on a strong belief that manipulation of SEO is harmful and deteriorates the quality of the search engine. On the face of it, these thoughts are buyable but on second thoughts, isn’t the entire concept of media formulated to manipulate and garner attention (that’s how they make money!).

What’s hot- sells!!

Media follows a simple rule of selling what’s hot, be it any form of media- T.V, newspapers etc. The flowchart to success is quite simple too- create a bubble (or take an existing one) then promote it through media channels, make your gains and then hunt for the next bubble, most probably larger than the last one! Of late, we saw the mortgage fraud bubble taking place of the tech bubble. Soon, the bubble of mortgage fraud will see itself losing sheen to something else (say, green energy or counter-terrorism!).

Media pandering isn’t something unknown to you and me. It’s the second nature of media to make things seem more important than it actually is. Further, to flow with the tide is innate with media. Take for example, the same ones who show stats on mortgage fraud that causes panic and suggest you to cut down expenses, secure your finances etc were suggesting you to opt for a second mortgage, take advantage of the loans and credit cards few years back!

Advertisers’ interests top the priority list!

FOX news fired few of its reporters for a quite weird reason of wanting to report the potential link between cancer and rBGH. Well, the actual reason behind the firing of the reporters was that if the beans were spilled, it would have led to a cut down of rBGH ads! Yes, this is shockingly low media standards!! However, not all belong to the same standards. Some biggies like Google try to strike a balance (notice the usage of ‘try’) between advertisers and ‘ethics’ and this can be bluntly attributed to the enormous revenue they make!

Channels of misinformation

There are numerous ways of dressing up misinformation:

Hyped public relation- Google actually came out by initially that page ranks leveraged the unique democratic structure of the web! Why couldn’t they just say it was an indigenous algorithm that’s supposed to mechanically calculate and assign relative rankings to each website?
Sensationalism and distortions: Sensationalism works and so does some flashy images and fancy lines! Further, what about billboards with scantily dressed models or magazine page cover alike?
Reductionism, lies, politics, and capitalism: Better not speak much about this topic; coz its existence is an open secret and talking about it seems like prattling.

Even governments manipulate the media. Take for example, the biggest economy of the world U.S. twiddling with information regarding the Iraq war or of inside trading prior to the credit crunch!

So, why are SEO techniques like selling links considered a taboo? At least it isn’t as harmful as lying! People need to carry out a living and thus, they practice some tricky SEO techniques for gaining profits. The game’s been played smartly not by harming others, so even if it isn’t fair it isn’t completely unfair either. SEO outing to some websites by Google seems foolish coz even they hire SEO’s for search engines and what about their ads being the favorite hotspot of spammers and illegal websites?! It’s time we shunned the double standards of SEO outing!

15 Link building tactics to market your website effectively!

2009-04-06T00:27:00.000-07:00

Link building plays a pivotal role in marketing your website and thus, it becomes more than just necessary for you to play your cards smartly with the use of the right tactics. Make yourself aware of the effective link building tactics to market your website by reading on:

Are you aware that robots.txt and meta-nonindex will block the search engine bots from indexing specific sections of your website? Do keep a track of the people visiting these sections of your website. Contact their webmasters and provide them with a URL to another relevant page of your website.
Grammatical errors, spelling blunders and poor English are the biggest turn-off of netizens. Let your articles be free of all those and pleasure the reader rather than exasperating him/her.
Do not forget to leave comments on the blogs/websites/communities you visit. Just type few lines of frank opinion about the website or blog- it would just consume a minute extra but thetime is worth it at the end!
Do create a ‘link to us’ page and update it regularly. It’ll ease the way other websites can link to you (many bloggers do not go out of the way to link to some website unless it’s damn necessary!).
Error 404!! We all know what a letdown it is! Monitor the 404 statistics and rectify it by providing a working URL to the respective webmasters.
Constant optimization of your links by requesting the webmasters to change the ‘click here’ hyperlink to a hyperlink containing relevant keywords will make it more enticing to visits.
Advertising the sorted after keywords by using various search engine advertising programs should be the preceding step before you canalize the targeted traffic into links!
Keep in good contact with the high traffic generating websites. Use Google Adwords content network to figure out which websites generate huge traffic and conversions.
Affiliating with other websites (useful ones) should be a profitable trade. Similarly affiliate yourself to other upcoming good websites too.
Find out the websites that mention your personal name or URL and business name or URL but is not yet linked to your website. Further, just link them to your website! Yahoo can be of great help in this task.
Use breadcrumbs- its one of the good internal linking tools that can be used for anchor differentiation and usability.
Ensure a smooth navigation persists throughout your website. You could equip your website with text-based navigation or image based navigation (supported by appropriate alt attributes).
Use a sitemap as it facilitates easier navigation to the users and is found to be useful for search engines.
Optimize the usage of in-content links. They are found to have a higher click through rate given in the relevant surrounding text or image.
Submit your URL’s to the right place- high quality niche directories, social media websites, general directories, RSS feeds to RSS directories, blog directories, CSS directories (to flaunt a good design), use ezinearticles and twitter to publicize posts/articles etc.

The bloggers network: The art of getting linked by bloggers

2009-03-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

This topic has been in discussion since long, but didn’t quite steal the limelight the way it’s been doing of late. One of the biggest reasons for this is the recently downsizing of page ranks by Google that has screwed all the spams and has compelled bloggers to take the ‘white hat’ route for better page ranks. There have been several posts describing as to how can one build links and awareness with fellow bloggers, prominent in them being the ones in problogger and the post by Peter in SEObook.

There is a mixed baggage of opinions on the effectiveness of such tactics, however it should be agreed that contacting relevant bloggers and requesting them to review your blog should give you the much required boost for your website. Now, why do you think this link build up strategy (through bloggers) will work?

Bloggers around the globe (yet in front of their PC’s!) are in search for new ideas and resources of their interest. Perhaps you may just give them their piece of cake!
Even if immediate response isn’t bestowed to your website i.e. the bloggers do not link it up instantaneously, they will surely mark your site or idea for future and your idea may probably find a mention in their link round-ups or some of the related posts in their blogs.
Niche bloggers do have their own powerful network. The word of mouth here spreads in seconds and what one writes of, is bound to be a topic of discussion amongst fellow bloggers.

Now, let’s have a look at the tactics to be employed. Lets start from the basics (trust me! It’s important).

Relevancy of efforts: Contact bloggers who are more likely to buy in your resources or ideas.
Don’t be a turn off when it comes to grammar and spellings and do not let unprofessional vibes surround.
Customize the email subject (so as to not get filtered away by spam filter-adding a date would be good!) and let the tone of the subject be unlike that of spams and promotional mails.
Use the blogger’s name wherever required i.e. personalize the message.
Let the message be brief and let it make your point! The reader should get on to the message’s important part right in the first glance of the first mail- you are just another name amongst thousands when your first mail hits his/her inbox.

Typo SEO- Success in spelling mistakes!

2009-03-22T22:50:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization or SEO is hanging on with every possible way that’ll increase the page visits and most probably the page ranks too. You as a web surfer must have many a times, typed wrongly! No! Not that you are necessarily poor in your English, it’s just that your fingers inadvertently hits the wrong keys. So, don’t you see a strategy there, waiting to be exploited? So, did some smart SEO minds!

Here, deterrence to the typo SEO strategy would be the fact that search engines actually prompt a message ‘Did you mean…’ in cases of typos and thus many users click on it to actually get the valid information. However, many of them don’t and further, what if the person finds the relevant information even when the keyword is misspelled?! Thus, we can actually come to a conclusion that ‘typo SEO’ actually works!

However, it may not as well work like they promise too. The misspelled keyword may let you lead in the search results but that wouldn’t count for a web visit, given in the placing of the ‘did you mean…’ sentence. So, empirically one can figure out that the actual number of visits due to typo SEO is half (or somewhere around it) of that of the theoretical data of the number of visits.

What to wait for? Get your hands on to the effective typo SEO strategy. But the game isn’t very easy, as by employing the typo SEO one always runs on a risk of being silly or unprofessional. Further, excellent research needs to be done to get the most common typos or one may just end up making a self-mockery.

Here are few tips as to how you can go about with the typo SEO strategy.
1. Unleash the full potential of your blog posts! Blog posts are formally considered to be informal and whatever one writes in blog posts doesn’t actually count to be a typographical mistake, if it’s done intelligently or in a reader-friendly fashion. Placing the typo on the URL of your blog post is another cherry on the cake.
2. Place the typos in the ‘Alt’ tags or the table tags or any other strategically good location. Indeed, by indulging in this technique you are running at a risk of losing out the correctly spelled keyword for the misspelled one. But, you got to take your chances to stay ahead in the competition. Let the placing of the typos be done smartly so that you do not actually lose out on the correctly spelled keywords.
3. Try using your Meta tags for the typos. As far as possible avoid the typos from your content unless it actually fits in the bill.
4. Try placing the misspelled keywords in links from other sites. For this, you may need the permission of the other site, but if the link is from a website that happens to believe in the ‘typo strategy’ then things must get easier for you!
5. Use PPC, as it helps a great deal in keeping your content clean and yet popping up ads for misspelled keywords.
6. Optimize the typos regularly. There are some folks out there who learn from their previous mistakes…and ironically, commit new mistakes!

5 links for internet marketing and SEO

2009-03-17T23:41:00.000-07:00

It’s become quite common on the web to talk about SEO; one can corroborate this by having a look at the umpteen websites and posts on SEO. A common mistake or rather miss-out seen in these posts is the shoving away of internet marketing. Yes, indeed SEO is a major part of internet marketing, but SEO alone isn’t internet marketing! Very less is spoken about other ways that take a broader approach into internet marketing and effectively market a website.

1. Affiliation to good products/services : Affiliation to good products or services may not fetch you great returns on the SEO front but it is bound to give you lifelong income from the product or services, given in you crack up a fair deal with the company/website. All you need to do is to select a product or services related to your website and write an article on it. Yes, you are promoting it, and hence, do not bluff about a product/ service you have no idea about. Let authenticity prevail!

2. In-house email newsletter: Marketingsherpa surveys proclaim that house email gives more return-on-investment than SEO! Is anything left to say? But play the game smartly- Give a sign-up option on every webpage. Further, do not forget to declare that ‘this isn’t spam’ and ‘none of your information will be used publicly’, ‘no products or services will be endorsed i.e. no trade’ etc (promotional mails have become synonymous to headache on the internet). You could even try adding incentives for signup.

3. Subscription of RSS via other ways: Don’t constrain your readers to just RSS. Users today love to be given more flexibility to services, so try out other options to subscribe to your feed like email, twitter etc. This can also be seen as a long term strategy as by doing so, you are providing more channels to promote your website and express yourself online. Techcrunch is one of the exemplary to this method; they have around 4 links to subscribe to their RSS feeds. Their twitter account, which they use for sending out updates on their website, has around 33K keen followers and IE and FF plug-in is another option of theirs that gave them a huge increase in the number of readers.

4. A simple ‘share this’ link: This is undoubtedly one of the most underrated of all the tactics. The logic is simple- if someone likes a page they would love it to share it with their friends, peers, colleagues etc. So, just facilitate them with a simple option!! Don’t suffice yourself with a ‘share this’ word widget, use an additional link in each page with a more convincing title like ‘tell a friend’, ‘let your friend love this page too’ etc. Say, 50K people visit your webpage and 2% of them share the link and it still accounts for 1000 more visits!

5. PPC link and brand recall: PPC is used widely for a variety of purposes in relation with SEO. One of them is brand recall i.e. the usage of PPC when your page is ranking in Google for a short-tail keyword rank. You just need to bid for the top sponsored listing for the high volume keywords you are leading in.

Evaluate your SERP competition to stay ahead in the competition

2009-03-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

Do you evaluate your competition regularly? Perhaps, you don’t do it at all forget doing it regularly! Words of advice here- do find time rather make it self-mandatory to evaluate your SERP competition on a regular basis. Often, we need to know as to how much exactly deep we are and if it’s worth going on deeper further! You may be doing well with your website, but after an SERP competition evaluation you might as well do great!

Here are three simple ways for the job of evaluation!

1. Use a good tool for the evaluation of your SEO competition

• Nichewatch: This is a free tool, in fact one of the best in practice. The tool rates a plus in domain backlinks, page backlinks, and Google PR. However, it falls short in the criteria of domain age. Rankings for allinanchor, rankings for alintitle and rankings for allintext are some of the worthy add-ons of this tool.

• Compete.com: The tool isn’t one of the best in practice but it has some great add-ons that bring it to the top bracket of SEO tools. The tool is a paid one with several free searches to offer. One of the great add-ons of this website is the ‘Site share’.

• Keyword difficulty tool: This tool is available exclusively for the SEOMoz premium members. The tool however, is a gem of a tool and it’s worth it if one becomes a premium member just for the sake of this tool! Its features include domain backlinks, Page backlinks, Google PR, Domain age, Alexa rank, internal link ratio, Delicious links, Wiki links, Technorati links, and DMoz links.

2. Assess the advertisers competition

For this purpose, you may find the Google Adwords external tools to be very useful. A word of fact here- the tool isn’t a good indicator of the organic search difficulty; rather it’s a vital parameter of the commercial potential of the ads. To put the above statement is a better way- the tool’s a good indicator of the popularity of keywords and thus, ads.
A table of analysis is displayed. The table gives the information on the ‘advertiser competition’, ‘the approximate average search volume’ and ‘the approximate average search’ (on a monthly basis) of a keyword and its related terms.

3. Evaluate the organic competition using the Google search

Playing the game by just counting on the popularity charts isn’t called playing smart.
Use SEOquake or SEO for firefox extensions to evaluate the top ten search results for a keyword. Look at some of the vital metrics like the domain age, backlinks, Google PR etc and draw inferences as to how to difficult it might be to get to the top slot.

Once you analyze you’ll be having a fairly good idea as to where you are and where you can be. In fact, if you are smart enough you would might as well figure out how to be there too!

Keyword research: A tool displaying the various relations between words

2009-03-01T22:05:00.000-08:00

Keyword research forms the basis of SEO and thus, it’s in a way one of the essentials for any webmaster. Once you get the right keywords (after a good research obviously!), you have actually done half of your task. Further, you just need to play around these keywords and then its merry time!

For your keyword research, there are many options on the internet. Firstly, there are several websites that provide a great resource of information on SEO and keywords. Further, there are umpteen SEO tools (most of them are nice ones!) that open up an entire world of keywords for you. Some of these tools are very famous while many of them are not so popular, even though they score a very good on usefulness! One such tool is the Lexical-Freenet Connected Thesaurus. This SEO tool has been around for quite some time now and has been used by several webmasters for their benefits (yet, surprisingly not much is talked about it!).

Lexical-Freenet is a free keyword research tool. In fact, it’s a treasure of ideas on how search engines might possibly view the relation between various words. The tool simplifies a hell lot of work of your keyword research. Not just does it displays the results in words but also gives a graphical analysis of sorts for the words and its relations. It’s a compilation of a multitude of words and its relations on various bases.

The results are classified symbolically to ‘ synonymous’, ‘triggers’, ‘generalizes’, ‘sepcializes’, ‘comprises’, ‘part of’, ‘antonyms of’, ‘anagrams’, ‘rhymes’, ‘sounds like’, ‘bio triggers’, ‘also known as’, ‘occupation of’, ‘nationality of’, ‘birth year of’, ‘death year of’!!! Well to make it simple, the classification is done on the basis of the relation between words or possible relations. One could type a single word or two words to find out the various combinations of possible relations between them.

Consider this for an example, you type in the word ‘research’ in the tool. You would be surprised by the results it shows. Let’s just see few of the classifications and their corresponding results for the word- research.

In the category of synonymous words: enquiry, explore, inquiry, search are the word featured.

In the category of triggers (which means what the word would possibly trigger in a search engine query): cancer, researchers, scientists, disease, aids, patients, breast, science, medical, drug, brain, genetic, virus, development, scientific, institute, experiments, drugs, diseases, data, university, genes, cells, Alzheimer’s, vaccine, risk, project, nicotine, human, gene, fetal, embryos, embryo, effects, cure, animals.

One could easily observe the plethora of related words the tool displays. Similarly, the tool displays related words in the other categories too (it would be better not to write them all, as it would make the article quite dull and uninteresting!). Nevertheless, do check out the tool all by yourself for a great source of information. This tool along with the combination of other effective keyword tools can be an excellent recipe for an SEO technique.

URL referrer tracking: Some lesser known facts!

2009-02-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

The conventional method employs the tracking of parameters in the URL; however this is likely to cause certain issues with the search engines over a period of time. Imagine, there are two promotional teams to a single website. Despite the fact that both of them incorporate separate parameters in the URL, they do lead to the same web page (and thus you could track the conversions based on URL’s), over a longer span of time this method may affect the search engine acquisition of the website and lead to low quality data tracking.

There are four major issues that come up here:

Search engines are a little ill-equipped when it comes to determining if multiple URL’s are connected to a same page. This becomes a potential problem to you, especially when the number of URL’s to your home page increases. Search engines will detect all the URL’s and store them (rank them along too) in their content index. This would cause the search engine robots to crawl over the same page many times (as many as the number of URL’s) and thus, other good and unique pages may lose its weight to the infinite indexing of the same page!

For the purpose of determining the authenticity and usefulness of a content, search engines use the number of quality URL’s leading to a page as an indicator. When there are three different URL’s to the same page, the search engine assigns a lower rank to all the variations of the URL! However, this wouldn’t have been a problem if all the URL’s were same but then that would have been a major hindrance to track the referrer!

Popularity too could pose a threat! If Youtube videos that become extremely popular, then the promotional URL’s will surely fetch more links than the URL of the home page. So, the promo link might as well fetch a better rank in the search engine and thus, the video is more likely to replace in the original page in the search results (confusing the users all the way!).

With sharing and social networking becoming popular, imagine a person finds your home page to be excellent and copies the promo link. Then, whomsoever the person shares the link will be using the promo link to land up to your website. Don’t you see a reporting flaw there?

There’s no formulated solution for this, however there are few tricks and tips that might as well work to your benefit!

URL fragmentation: Place a hash mark in the beginning of the tracking parameter, as search engines ignore such links as hah marks are usually used to denote links within a page! E.g. www.example.com/#referall0001. Similarly, one can even use JavaScript for URL fragmentation.

Usage of robots.txt is another solution. This will keep away search engines from indexing certain links.

Trapping the incoming request should do you good too! Find out the point at which your website application’s logic processes the HTTP request for a particular page. Trap that request. Check is it has a tracking parameter there and then; record it in your internal referrer tracking system, if it’s present.

Implement a redirect from the current URL to the same page. By doing so, you trick the search engine to actually discard the promo link from its consideration of ranks. The method’s great but it requires self-management of referrer tracking system.

Global link building: It’s a small world after all!

2009-02-17T03:06:00.000-08:00

The phrase ‘global link building’ sounds like a big venture and can surely make it to the top 10 fancy phrases on the internet. On second thought however, the fact of the matter doesn’t seem to be just all about a fancy name. In the current scenario of the plummeting global economy, global link building can be quite a task to be done practically. Feel lucky if you build links without any extra work than your usual links, but with that so unlikely to happen one’s bound to put some extra effort if he or she desired to come out with positive results in the process of global link building.

Still not clear as to what’s global link building? Well, global link building simply means working with or getting leads/links from clients or webmasters other than that of your country. Many of the SEO agencies in the U.S do generate a major chunk of their lead from outside the U.S. The recent economic crisis has made the world wake up to the fact that the global economy is greatly intertwined. So does the marketing companies and agencies! They do realize that now, their target shouldn’t just be confined to geographical/cultural/ ethnic boundaries.

So, what exactly are the requisites for the sojourn of global link building? The usual basics of SEO do not lose grounds here, but just that won’t suffice in this context either. One needs to consider some extra aspects and build a strategy surrounding it.

Language barrier: Language is the tool for communication and thus, learning the tool becomes essential for communication. Speak to people in their native language. Either learn the language yourself or hire employees who have good linguistic skills. Being flexible with languages, not just personally but even on the internet space (i.e. your website)

Socialize: One needn’t give a lecture on the importance of socializing, especially in the domain of marketing. Traveling to various countries and socializing doesn’t sound pragmatic, but thanks to social networking websites, communities, forums and their guild you can now socialize from your place. Don’t just create an account for namesake and expect people to come your way! Indulge in discussions, activities etc in the social networking websites you join (like myspace, Facebook, etc). Further, identify other communities, forums etc on the internet and make yourself an active member of it. Pass on gifts, wishes on occasions and other warm gesticulations (don’t you love it when you receive? so do they!). By the way, do not forget to use twitter!

Keep learning: Learn their culture, know about their cuisines, music and other indulgences. In a way, understand their lifestyle, their priorities and preferences. This will help you a great deal in your endeavor.

Blogs and directories: Directory submissions are indeed a power house when it comes to traffic building- do not overlook it! Do visit the blogs of other countrymen, leave opinions and comments on the blog and collaborate.

Global link building may push your creative self to untouched shores and you may enjoy this creatively rich and profitable process.

What’s in store on the SEO front, for the year 2009?

2009-02-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

The title here proclaims this article to be the prediction for the year 2009. To actually avoid being at the risk of getting thrashed at the end of the year 2009, here’s a disclaimer to the article: The predictions are subjected to certain terms and condition and may or may not come true depending on it. In fact some of them may take further time to materialize and may actualize only after a couple of years!

Now that necessary precautions have been taken, lets get on to the job! Read and delight yourself with the foreseen year 2009 (in regards to the SEO domain). Frankly, do not expect heavy SEO knowledge out of it or do not actually expect it to come true rather read between the lines and understand the irony being spoken about. Have fun!

The search engine - ‘Altavista’ (yes a search engine exists by that name) after several years of terribly low traffic and being rated as one of the most non-reliable search engine, will get a renovation and be rehashed into a search engine that’ll leave no room for other competitors by dominating over 90% of the market!! Watch out Google!
SEOMoz will come out publicly with an acceptance that ‘linkscape’ was one of their biggest blunders of recent times! Yes! The same linkscape that claimed to have indexed 38 billion pages and if rumors are to be believed, they just indexed some hundred odd pages over a billion times to get to that magic number! Innovative huh?!
On a serious note, IMbroadcast.com, will break all its previous records of success and will become the bible of sorts for internet marketing. Loren and other guys associated with Imbroadcast.com will soon make it to the Forbes list of the richest!
Matt Cutts, the extremely popular SEO guy (yes, the man who is now considered to be the sole face of Google ads and Search engine) will undergo a plastic surgery, much like our own ‘Beat it’ guy Michael Jackson. However, the reason Cutts has is not obsession to fair skin like Mikey! Cutts just want to save his life from the hordes of people bugging him with questions in the SEO related public events!
The success of SMX mobile, SMX local etc will soon make way for conferences, seminars, websites, and video tutorials on what would be known as SMX spam! The tutorials will be titled ‘Be an SMX spam in not more than six hours’ and all wannabe spamsters will get a chance to live their dreams! It wouldn’t take much time for the wannabe’s to realize that this tutorial too was a spam too and it’ll take them nowhere less than six years to actually become a successful spammer!
The promotional plan of a pharmaceutical website would be that each of them who signup would get a Viagra for free and every referral would fetch them steroids and drugs illegal in their countries. The grand prize would be a free annual supply of condoms to the winner’s doorstep! SEO at its stimulated best!

SEO bookmarklets you must visit!

2009-02-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

As an internet junkie rather an SEO junkie (If I can use that term) one would encounter a large number of useful websites and SEO tools on the internet. Many a times, you just forget to bookmark them. As a matter of fact, bookmarking of good SEO tools and sharing it them with fellow SEO enthusiasts can be a great way to help each other out and benefit together with the best of the stuffs on the internet.

SEO is quite wide a topic to actually list website and tools related to every aspect of it. However, here’s an effort to list down some of the bookmarklets that may be of great use for on page SEO research and domain statistics. There isn’t any assurance that the list covers all the good tools in the web, nevertheless it does manage to provide some of the essentials- the ones you must visit (read- you cannot afford to miss!).

Domain information
Here are four websites that are an excellent resource for domain information.
• www.alexa.com: Go through every page of this website and you may find some valuable information. This web information company boasts of a web search, traffic rankings list and thorough analysis on website traffic.
• Robots.txt: The tool assesses a website for the robot.txt web pages!
• whois.domaintools.com/: The website is one of the best resources for domain information. A good number of bloggers and webmasters might suggest you to check out this website, sicne they too had their beginning days spent all over on this website.
• AttentionMeter: The website categorizes into Google trends, Quantcast, compete.com, alexa and technorati. Check out the stats of all the categories for some vital information on domain names.

On Page SEO stats
• Page Headers: It displays all the headers for the current page via yoast.com. Besides that, yoast.com is a great website on ‘website tweaks’. Check it out!
• Is your HTML code validated? : The markup validator in this web page check for the markup validity of your HTML, XHTML, SMIL, web documents. You can upload your document on this tool and get an instant assess of your document.
• HTTP headers: Hang on to the header checker of the website- www.websniffer.com, to check the header of your current page.
• Wayback newest: It’s a tool of its own kind! It shows and takes you back to the latest copy saved in the archive.

There are plenty of other tools out there on the web, like the ‘word frequency’ (it displays the frequency of a word on a page), ‘Show Meta’ (it shows the Meta tags), ‘Page Freshness’ (lets you know the last modified date of a page), highlight headings (highlights the headings and their respective sizes), ‘make a link for this page’ (generates a link for a particular page!) etc.

You can even check out a whole lot of bookmarklets site like the Lifehacker, Stundubl, Jesse’s bookmarklets site, Stephen Ostermiller’s bookmarklets etc

The SEO guide for a non profits website

2009-01-26T21:17:00.000-08:00

While the internet is filled with the business oriented SEO marketing tips, tactics etc there is hardly anything exclusively written about for the non-profits website. Your first stimuli to this thought might be that they do not need SEO as they aren’t in the race for money! But hey! SEO isn’t just about money, it’s about reaching out to people too and non profits website need that the most!

So, here’s an attempt to make an SEO guide for non-profits website. The most important aspects of SEO can be outlined even for this case of non-profits:
1. Keyword research
2. On Page SEO
3. Internal link building
4. external link building

A word of fact here-External link building should be the strongest of all the four aspects, in terms of getting higher ranks in search engines.

If you have a non-profit website than you are quite more likely to get an external link pointing to you. Yes, the web world’s all about the commercialization of links, but many people do support non-profits and lend out links for free (maybe to just disguise the fact that they cannot do something as noble as what you are doing!). So, one of the most important things you need to do is to let people know about your good work. Display it in bold about your non-profit status and encourage people/visitors to join hands in the good cause in the form of donations, gifts, active participation, building links, referring to people etc.

How to make your issue visible?

The power of internet is in its network i.e. the people. So, get as much as people for your cause. Obviously, you need to have a good idea for this, without which people wouldn’t cling on with your website. Once you get the people you need to organize them around the idea, make leaders out of them and then you’ll have a lot of doors open for your cause. The traditional approach of banging doors of the rich is now tweaked. You inspire the people and they’ll bang the doors in unison! Trust me; the sound will be loud enough that it’ll surely compel the rich to donate money!

You may go about using the basics, but as a non-profit you would need much more than just keyword research and stuffs!

Keyword research: This holds a great value in the SEO domain. Get the keywords from various tools around the web. Concentrate on keywords that are associated with your cause and tweak around them to churn out some other related words.

Placing of the keywords: Use the keywords in the title, in the beginning would be better. Come up with ‘rich on keyword density’ articles.

Some other important things needed to be done by a non-profit

1. Tell the stories using images, evidences, videos, documents etc. Let them know the hard reality.
2. Create a brand
3. Encourage sharing and communities.
4. Twitter and socialize in social networking sites
5. link up with both other non-profits and commercial websites
6. Build a platform for people to express their views and opinions.
7. Develop partnership with donors. Involve them in your activities.
8. Tell each donor to refer at least ten friends.
9. Use widgets.
10. Use free services available just for the non-profits!

Extract the maximum from the existing traffic

2009-01-18T20:49:00.000-08:00

The times and the people are changing. Internet is becoming a fast competitive market and the total share from important keywords is an important asset. You can correctly assume that search volume of any keyword is what it appears and what it is going to become in the near future. Keeping aside viral campaigns that can increase questions and traffic, the available search volume is not going to magnify soon at a sustainable rate. The economy is facing a slump right now. Search is not facing the heat of the slump. It is not advisable to buy more traffic as it becomes expensive to maintain PPC engines or quality directories. You need to take maximum advantage of the present traffic to increase your revenue.

Suppose you have been loyal to your website and have optimized your keywords, posted quality content and have been receiving traffic. But the sales are being a major headache. You have actually followed every SEO and SEM rules but is not getting the desired results. You have just overlooked human nature as a factor. Specifically, you have forgotten to optimize your site for conversions.

Traffic is just a fraction of the competition. You are not successful until the user has opted for the landing page. It is absolutely important to decide your offers on landing page and shop for all the things they have dreamt about.

Offline activities regarding conversion optimization is taking place all time. Optimize your conversion rates by making the shopping an easy experience for the visitors. Make it easy for your visitors to buy the expensive products and make it hard for them to buy the inexpensive stuff.

You can actually use your traffic to devise your conversion path. Listen to your visitors and draw valuable feedbacks.

Testing constitutes an interesting part of your conversion rate. You need to go through all the tests to finally zero in on the best. A more slower and thorough test in the context of split testing or A/B is beneficial. Consistent results are obtained from short tests. Short tests also help you to maintain your focus. Multi tests tend to shift your focus from the main issue.

You can start your test with a control page and a dummy page which should reflect a change in the control page. Split both the pages among your traffic showing them 50% of each. Look out for the success of each version. A/B testing will alert you from major mistakes.

Websites with high dollar products like hotel or vacation costs can be beneficial in a short time to reach 100 conversions. You need not measure every test that whether it resulted in a sale or not. You can take the help of applications from firms to carry out the A/B on a larger scale like LiveBall.

Such type of tests is very much possible with the help of Google Website Optimizer. You may need to give invest a fraction of your precious time in designing the test or to get the necessary codes regarding your website. Overall, the test is very simple to perform and you do not require professionals to do your work.

Utilize your existing traffic to the maximum to increase your conversion rate and buy more traffic and thus get higher return on investments.

Disadvantages of SEO Bounce Rates

2009-01-11T20:45:00.000-08:00

There has been lots of debate regarding the incorporation of bounce rates into the algorithm of SEO’s. During late 2007, webmasters were finding a contrasting difference in their ranking of major keywords by altering the bounce rates. Such fluctuations are not convincing proofs of the impact of bounce rates. In the near future bounce rates will be influential in algorithm of SEO’s. Microsoft has been investing their energy on BrowseRank which in turn is dependant on bounce rates.

Some common objections regarding bounce rates are:

There is no formal definition of the term “bounce rates”. This is not a convincing argument. Bounce is a situation when someone abandons a website and returns to their respective source.
The way Google Analytics defines bounce is objectionable to many.
Many sites do not avail the services of Google Analytics and hence Google is not supposed to have authentic data. This is a very confusing objection because Google Analytics has nothing to do with the state of affairs. The issue is how Google or any other company traces their traffic and how do the users report back to their websites.
There is a lingering objection over the threshold duration regarding a bounce. There is no specific threshold time for a bounce. On the other hand various search engines define bounce on different grounds. You will not be informed regarding the lag times. Bounce lag times are not fixed. It changes daily.
There can be cases when people can click on an alien link and abandon the current site. Users may find some external links vary useful and switch to it. This is not at all a case of bounce. If someone presses the back button then it is a case of bounce.
What happens if the user closes the window quickly? This also not a case of bounce unless some search engines considers them. This trait does not go with the definition.
Can a bounce be good at times or does a bounce means that the person has found what they demand? The objection is true for rare cases. A bounce is totally dependant on the actions of the user for which the users need time to react which is provided by lag time.
There can be cases where people look for multiple sources to compare results or products or to seek a second opinion. Many sites will be victimized if such a situation is categorized under bounce. The above argument is illogical. If a person bounces from a site to another then all the websites are affected in the same manner. Since rankings are in the relative sense, hence the rankings will not be disturbed at all.
Can I set up a dummy and visit the sites of the top competitors and leave their site after sometime to make it appear that their sites are bouncy?

This is definitely an option. You can in fact become creative in the field and come up with unique ideas.

The different types of clientele in the SEO domain: 5 favorite picks

2009-01-05T03:36:00.000-08:00

It can only happen in the marketing field, especially in the SEO domain that one gets a chance to involve with a variety of clients from various other domains. Here is a non-offensive list of the different type of clients you and me get to meet (both online and offline) in the SEO domain (meant only for humor…realistic humor!)

The ‘no idea’ client : This type of client hires you to optimize his or her website, you agree and then you end up having no clue of the reason behind the existence of the website! You don’t get the reply as ‘no idea’, but I bet you if you ask the client about the website (say, what’s the website’s purpose or what is it selling?) the client is bound to give some not-s0-related answer that’ll let you know that the client actually has ‘NO IDEA’ about the website! The client will spit out everything known to him or her but that would still not get you any close to the answer of the question- what is the idea behind the website?
Flatter-buts clientele: These type of clients flatter you and then they come up with a hard hitting ‘but! Here are few of the famous flatter-but client lines: ‘The site looks great! But…I needed the entire stuff in interactive flash!’, ‘The articles were excellent! But…I guess I needed it on ‘keys’ not ‘keywords’!
The ‘do it all’ client: No ways! If you are thinking, this kind of client does it all for you (and hence the name ‘do it all’ client, then be disappointed for that isn’t the case! These are clients who expect you to ‘do it all’ for them, irrespective of it being your job or not! They want you to redo the web pages, manage their blog account, and cut deals for them with web designers! Hello! We are just a consulting service!
The ‘inflated bag like’ client: This type of client is inflated initially and slowly loses the air with time. Finally, the client ends up being a deflated bag! None of your advices will be implemented coz by now they fear your plans may boomerang and hit a low. Further, they may doubt your authenticity, end up ties with you and opt for another SEO consultant in an excited fashion again…only to…you know what!
The not-so brainy chatterbug client: This client will throw up some random terms he or she must have heard somewhere and try hard to come across as one of the most intelligent human beings on the earth, while what he or she manages to is exactly the opposite. A simple question to such clients- If you believe you are such an expert in SEO and internet marketing (as you are trying to express from your over-the-top talks then why hire ‘lesser knowledgeable’ guys like us?!

These were just five of them, while the list actually extends to a lot more in number. I wonder if the clients will come up with something called ‘The different types of service providers/SEO consultants’!!!

Black hat vs. White hat

2008-09-10T03:48:00.000-07:00

So, the story kicks off from the early days of online marketing. Search engines saw the light of the day and so began SEO or search engine optimization. The search engines have some algorithms to give rankings to the umpteen websites in the internet. On the basis of these rankings, the web pages are displayed when the relevant keyword is typed by a user. Higher rankings implies the top slots of the search engines, which can be almost accurately assumed to fetch more traffic to the website and that simply means more chances of revenue! Needless to say, all the websites wanted to rate high on the search engines and the trend continues even now. An example of a search engine would be the very famous Google search engine.

White hat and black hat

The techniques employed to get higher rankings by search engines varies widely. While some stuck on to the diligent method of improving the quality, some were lured by some other easier unethical ways. Like every other field, online marketing too had some ‘white’ and ‘black’ techniques used. Yes, this is what we generally categorize as white hat and black hat. ‘White hat’ techniques are the techniques used in online marketing or in SEO that comply with the regulations of the search engine and do not cross the ethical boundaries. As obvious as it is, black hat is just the opposite of white hat. Recent times have seen some other fancy terms pass around, one of them being ‘grey hat’. Everyone has their own take on it- purists feel ‘grey hat’ is just an excuse of some faint hearted netizens and believe everything which isn’t white is ‘black’. Without diverting the discussion to ‘grey’ matters, let’s just ignore this term temporarily. Some of the black hat techniques are- cloaking (where some other websites are displayed in the search engine) and hidden links in websites etc. basically, all of them simply fool the search engine and make their way through.

Black hat techniques are awesome in functionality. What more, it works and it works quickly. It has a potential of procuring more than $100,000 in a quarter of the year! These should be enough reasons for some ‘weak on ethics’ to get into this unethical craft. Moreover, on the internet, somehow such things are called the ‘smart work’ and there are no stringent rules against it. Perhaps a white hatter may tell you more about how frustrating it is to watch unworthy people have thrice the bank balance of a hardworking person like him or her. White hat techniques are slow and yield results only to the deserving ones. Recently, sale of ‘high ranking links’ had to face a lot of rebuke from Google and some of the clients lost their previously high rankings due to this. In future too, stringent measures are expected against ‘black hat’ techniques and soon the ‘black’ websites may be banned!

To conclude, this non-conclusive debate; White hat techniques are undoubtedly the best method, especially in the long run and for a safe, reliable and respectful web journey.

Why Online Advertising is better then Conventional Type of Advertising Methods

2008-08-26T23:18:00.000-07:00

Internet is a medium that has a potential that was unseen before and no prizes for guessing that it has been (and can still be to a much larger extent!) utilized for advertising various products and services

. Online advertisements aren’t completely out of the mould of the conventional advertising methods. The medium gets along its own set of variations to the advertising methods that make it much more effective and profitable.

Why is online advertising better? The simplest answer would be- when online shopping, online banking, online trading etc are better than their conventional counterparts and there is an entire bulk of population in front of TV screens logged on to the internet, how can a minor doubt of online advertising being better be raised in one’s mind?! Nevertheless, here are few straight out examples.

Online advertising is more target audience oriented. Consider for example there is a blog on book reviews. An advertisement of bookstore will surely attract enthusiasts and they obviously will visit the website. So to speak, the products and services are made available to the user where he needs it or rather where the seller can get him.
Online advertising is more personalized. An email in an inbox is the ideal example. Surveys and trackers can keep record of personal interests of a person and send related mails of products and services.
Online advertisement has a global reach and is less expensive.

Online advertisement will surely overshadow the conventional methods in the coming time, with increased bandwidth, internet literacy and availability coming together.

Link Building ‘The Ethical’

2005-04-11T02:49:00.000-07:00

Create a natural incoming link structure; get links from pages with High Page Rank and authoritative sites. If the linking site has lower page rank, content of the page should match. URL format of your referring links should be Identical. Add your keywords in anchor text of your incoming link.

Landing Page Tip

2005-04-02T05:51:00.000-08:00

Humans Love Images attached or extends to the text immediately below them. If you have caption or any content at all immediately below an image, it will almost certainly be read.

This is something print designers have known for decades, but has somehow been neglected to a large extent online. We know of very few landing pages with captions or specific marketing copy positioned under images. Captions are definitely worth adding

SES conference in New York

2005-03-28T16:22:00.000-08:00

Most recent SES conference in New York provided us some important issues about SES which I would like to pass on. As we know Google is working hard to change its algorithm, but in future we must be concerned about what happing with Yahoo! And MSN! According to comScore - http://www.comscore.com/, Google now commands only 36%; Yahoo commands a 29% share and MSN following at 15%. Yahoo amd MSN are gaining market share from Google.

Another Topic from comScore which every one is interested in is that over 80% of the search volume is initiated by 20% of “heavy searchers”. You may want to use this knowledge in keyword selection and go after those niche words. The thought being that if searchers that generate most of the traffic are somewhat heavy searchers, logic would follow that they would tend to be more sophisticated searchers, based on how often they search. Keyword selection will be most important part in future.

Link Spamming and Google

2005-03-28T03:47:00.000-08:00

Google is working against LinkSpamming in a Big way. After introducing of nofollow tag, it looks like Google is adjusting their algorithm to better detect and neutralize several strategies of traditional Linking (LinkSpamming). Most likely are: too many links with identical link anchor text, too many links all originating from same domain, too many links going to home page and few going to other pages or none of them going to other pages, off topic links.

Method Of Hiding Links From Google

2005-03-27T02:19:00.000-08:00

As of 18th January 2005, Google, together with other search engines, is recognising a new attribute to the anchor tag. The attribute is "rel", and it is used as follows:- A href="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html" rel="nofollow" link text /A The attribute tells Google to ignore the link completely. The link won't help the target page's PageRank, and it won't help its rankings. It is as though the link doesn't exist. With this attribute, there is no longer any need for javascript, forms, or any other method of hiding links from Google.

Dangling links

2005-03-27T01:26:00.000-08:00

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet..........Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." -

extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Page Rank

2005-03-27T00:10:00.000-08:00

Equation to calculate PageRank (PR) was published by Google long back when they where developing PR, it’s as follows:-

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A,
'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has,
'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

But now Google uses a variation of it, no one out side Google knows about the variation. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough

Victim of Click Fraud

2005-03-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

While the search engine take this stuff very seriously (At least Google and Overture), They are at mercy of bots and hackers constantly assailing their systems for their own nefarious gains. By now most people out there realise they have to have virus program installed on their computer or they are bound to get burned by a vicious attack. The same thing is true of your web site. If you are a PPC advertiser, eventually your are going to get hit with fraudulent clicks, especially if you are in any of the competitive channels.
Overture and Google catch the majority of them, but your campaign is still going to get hit by at least 5 to 10 percent clicks that are not real. this number is not now, nor has it ever been, 50 percent, by the way. That's another myth that's being touted around the web right now that simple isn't true. I personally know lot of advertisers both large and small, who are getting at least 5 percent conversion rates from their PPC campaigns and that just wouldn't be possible with 50-percent click fraud rates.
This is your campaign and your livelihood. Do yourself a favour: Before you spend a whole bunch of money on PPC advertising, set up Tracking URLs. Take advantage of conversion tracking from overture and google, and buy yourself a good click-tracking solution.
Some Good, inexpensive ones include WhosClickingWho.com, Click Auditor from KeywordMax.com and ClickTracks.com. Not only will these programs inform you about nefarious clicks, but they will also tell you about the real ones so you can determine how much you should actually be paying for clicks.
With your clicking information in hand, you can go to search engines and Question any clicks that you know are bogus. The search engine companies will research on this, and if they find the clicks questionable you will get refund. Partnering with the search engines this way to safeguard your business, and no one benefits when click fraud is allowed to continue.
Another way to safe guard against click fraud is to be very careful when selecting smaller search engines to work with. many of them simply don't have the resource to invest to safeguard their advertisers from fraudulent clicks -----> you all know Them ;)

Trade Mark ---> OFF the Mark

2005-03-25T15:20:00.000-08:00

Bid on Brand Name and Make Money will this work for Long?
Big brands are defending against others that link to their Trade Mark. Gico sued Google and Overture in May 2004, Saying that use of its trade marks when selling advertising in search engines constituted tradmark infringement and raised various state law cause of action. Google filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that it had no legal merit and that the state claims where insufficently pleeded. Google and overture are tied to trademarked brands such as Geico or Nike for there commercially driven searches.