How to Make Business Blogs Achieve SEO Success?

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Engine Optimization – Easy to Conduct on a Usable Website

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

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

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

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

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

Disclosure of an SEO Experiment

Matt Ridout had a bundle of surprise for the people related to the world of SEOs. When the generation is battling at the cutthroat competition to conceal the test results, this man had the guts to display the entire testing process and all its relevant observations publically. Though experimentation is a key to success in search engine marketing, this event published on SEOUnique Blog was a bolt from the blue for many. He targeted one of his three months old website, which he used for this SEO experiment. He modified the following things:

• Optimized the current Meta data.
• Included keywords, substitute keywords, and phrases on the page.
• Optimized the images from the page content.
  

These were the measures taken on the issues, which were amongst the basic SEO issues. Now all Matt Ridout had to do was to observe how this practical would help him acknowledge the ups and downs in rankings. He collected the records of the SERP positions of the keywords before this experiment and after that; he recorded them once a week for consecutive six weeks. Out of those results, he mapped neat and smart graphs and on the spot shared with many interested in the realm of search engine marketers.

The experts in the area of search marketing might have an overview of what he would have discovered. So let us see what his six-week long experiment’s summarized results say:

• The first and the second week of the experiment showed a gradual hike in the rankings for most keywords. There were very rare occasions of dropped rankings.
• As the third week arrived, there was a drastic dip in the rankings as they fell for 85% of the total keywords.
• The fourth week brought again the new results. This duration of the experiment had 70% of the keywords, which crossed their original rankings and there were very few drops.
• The fifth and the sixth week of the experiment hardly witnessed any major movement in the rankings.
  

The graphs plotted were very sharp and visually comprehensive. The experts and commentators scrutinized these graphs, which helps to understand them better. When the graph lines were ascending, there was a dip in rankings whereas the rise in ranking showed descends in the graph. The readings during third week of this SEO experiment got troublesome. The plotting of the graph clearly seemed like the life cycle over the period of six weeks. This falls under the superior quality content of case study for the people interested in learning more about SEO experiment. Leaking information in this way provides knowledge and people can gather them from the industrial information outlets.

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

The Trilogy of SEO Strategies for Making You Think

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

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

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

Cover the Opponent without Making Them Succumb
This involves researching on the people competing with you and finding their vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

• Reliance on Few Links’ Sources: This involves researching the sources of your competing website’s links. Find out if it is possible to eliminate their back links. This can be made possible through in-post linking and blogroll.
• Paid Links: This involves buying a review, buying blogs that are bringing maximum value to your competitors and paying bloggers for not following the links that were sold to them by your competitors.
• Improper Anchor Text: Focus on differentiating your website through the usage of greater variety by going for n grams, especially in cases of competitive work, and anchor text algorithms and matrices.
• Content: Find out about their marketing and operational policy deficiencies and after this is done, work really hard for building world-class content for your website.
  

Stay away from becoming desperate just for the sake of outscoring your competitor as this might backfire at you in strange ways, such as your site getting hacked or Google-bowled, meaning banning of a website because of a lot of spams pointing to it. Hence, stay cool, stay intelligent and outwit your competitor.

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

The thought might cross minds of many at the top level of organizations that what is the need to pay for link building services when the interns could be the counted as the source to tackle this job. This could have been feasible some years back but in today’s scenario, it might not be an appropriate option. Different SEO professionals would narrate different stories for link building efforts. Let us see the reasons why the amateurs should not handle this task.

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

The Importance of “Trust” while Outsourcing SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. Leading authorities in your space: Lookout for companies, not necessarily your competitors, but other respectable independent authorities in your space.
2. Backlink competitors: Target the domains with the highest pagerank linked to them.
3. 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!

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!

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!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!
4. 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!).
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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!
8. 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.
9. Affiliating with other websites (useful ones) should be a profitable trade. Similarly affiliate yourself to other upcoming good websites too.
10. 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.
11. Use breadcrumbs- its one of the good internal linking tools that can be used for anchor differentiation and usability.
12. 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).
13. Use a sitemap as it facilitates easier navigation to the users and is found to be useful for search engines.
14. 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.
15. 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

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!

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

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

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!