Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Optimization Basics, organic search
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Link Farm
Sunday, October 19, 2008
What is Siloing & Its Importance
The solution for diluted or unfocused linking is siloing. Siloing resolves this problem by allowing you to achieve high search engine placement both for general and targeted keyword phrases through themed vertical page linking and/or construction. One of the ways to achieve this goal is to incorporate silos into your site structure. There are two types of silos. One is directory based silos and other one is virtual silos. Both silos create theme through linking but in different ways. Virtual silos create content and subject relationships through cross-linking to create theme while directory based siloing creates relationships by utilizing directories to group like-content.
In a directory silo, relationships between pages are created by grouping like- content pages under a single directory. The names of the pages help to focus the subject matter of the directory. The theme of the directory is tied into the directory structure itself.
Directory structures require at least five pages of text which support whatever topic the directory is addressing. Directory silos must be very structured and highly organized.
To correctly implement a directory silo, you would group like-content into separate directories. Let's use butter and jelly, for example. You would create a directory for each theme, one for peanut butter and one for jelly. Contained within these directories, you would have subsequent content-rich pages to support the overall theme of the directories. For example, let's say that there are two types of butter-fat free and with fat. These would fall underneath the butter page. Then let's say that there is further information about both these butter, all of the information regarding each butter type would fall underneath that respective directory.
Now, suppose that you want to link between the butter directory and the jelly directory. As an example, let's say that you have a page underneath the butter directory which discusses a jelly that goes hand-in-hand with a specific butter type and you want to link to this type of jelly. Rather than linking from that butter type to the jelly type which complements it, you would only link from the butter page to the jelly landing page. The reason for this is that if you have multiple links linking different butter manufacturers and jelly with butter, you are diluting your theme which makes it difficult for your keywords to stand out and tell the search engines what your pages are about. If you have two distinct categories or silos, "butter" and "jelly", it is much easier for your keywords to stand out and consequently, be ranked by the search engines.
In a virtual silo, theme is created through linking. The names of each page are not important because the pages in the relationship are not necessarily in the same silo. The silo is defined by the pages that it links to. Thus, you are creating theme based on links rather than directory structure.
So, what is a virtual silo exactly? A silo is a vertical page linking design. You have your landing page, or your main page, at the top of the silo and underneath this page you have pages which support your main landing page theme.
To use the above butter and jelly example, the butter page would be one of your landing pages. Let's also say that you have additional pages which discuss the specific manufacturers who make butter but they are not in the same directory. These pages would all link separately to your main landing page and they would link horizontally to each other, thus helping to build the theme of that silo. The side note to this is based on what you want to be ranked for: if you want to be ranked for butter as a general keyword or if you want to be ranked for specific types of butter. Siloing too tightly would mean that you would not be supporting your general term with your specific terms. In this respect, cross-linking within a silo would be okay to do. It all depends on which keywords you want to be ranked for and whether they are general in nature or more targeted. Keep in mind, though, that cross-linking between subjects dilutes your theme. The point of linking is to group similar subjects in order to tell the search engine what this section is about.
Now, let's also suppose that you want to discuss jelly as well as butter. The jelly page would have its own silo design. The landing page would be the jelly page and as in the above butter example, any pages which discuss varieties of jelly, would be the subsequent pages which would all link to the jelly landing page but not to each other.
Suppose that you want to link between pages in this virtual structure, you would follow the same rules that applied for the directory structure example. So, let's say that in your butter page, which discusses a particular manufacturer of butter, you also want to discuss a jelly made by same manufacturer. Rather than directly linking from the "brand A butter" page to the "brand A jelly" page, you would link from the brand A butter page to the jelly landing page. As with the directory structure linking example, the reason for this is that if you have multiple links linking different butter manufacturers and jelly with butter, you are diluting your theme which makes it difficult for your keywords to stand out and tell the search engines what your pages are about.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Pay Per Lead
The Pay per Lead (PPL) system, together with Pay Per Click, is another important part of Internet Marketing and a way to expose your products and services to targeted clients.
Pay per Lead (PPL) allows you to ONLY pay for those visitors that actually fill out a form, indicating their interest in your products and/or services. The aim is to acquire new customers even if this doesn't result in an immediate sell at this point in time.
The real advantage of PPL program lies in the fact that you will have the potential clients' name and e-mail address (as a minimum) which will allow you to stay in touch/communicate with these prospects. The challenge will be to filter "those that have a serious interest" from those that "always love to get some more information out of natural curiosity".
The challenge lies in requesting enough information to be provided by the potential customer, without asking too much. When you ask too little information, you will lack clues as to the specific interest of the potential client and you will find it more difficult to establish the extent of the interest. When you ask too many questions, people will get tired of answering them and simply drop out.
How does Pay per Lead (PPL) work?
Your advertisement is placed on all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.), and websites, your advertisement only appears when user searches for your products and services.
When targeted user clicks on that advertisement he visits your website's-landing page.
These targeted users are then converted into qualified leads by prompting them to fill a very simple form on the landing page.
These qualified leads can then be closed via your Business Development team thereby ensuring companies sales target are met.
USP of this service is, you don't pay per click but you only pay for lead information (name, e-mail, phone, etc.)
Benefits of a Pay per Lead (PPL) program
With a Pay per Lead (PPL) program you only pay for those visitors that fill in a form which allows you to keep track of potential customers and identify their profile.
With Pay per Lead (PPL) program you can easily control the money spent in the campaign and measure the conversion ratios.
Pay per Lead (PPL) is usually cheaper than Pay per Click (PPC).
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Its Benefits
other websites that choose to display Google AdWords content in return for income.
Google Adwords are advertisements which are placed on the right or on top of your Google search results page. You can also specify the search terms for which your ad should appear.
Difference Between SEO & SEM
Search Engine Marketing describes any marketing efforts done to promote site in search engines. (PPC) advertising could also be considered a part of search engine marketing. Many marketers use the term SEM to specifically refer to PPC advertising as a way to differentiate between organic SEO and paid SEM.
Search Engine Marketing
- Press Releases
- Article Writing
- Blogs
- Engaging in a link campaign
- Directory Submission
- Purchasing Text Links
- PPC Campaigns
- Banner Advertising
- RSS/XML Feeds
Monday, September 8, 2008
Long Tail Keywords & Its Importance
Long Tail Keywords are the keyword phrases which are 2-6 words in length that people search to find some information related to some product or any service. These keywords (and keyword phrases) have less numbers of searches on the search engines.
The main idea behind the long term keywords is that while most of the traffic will surely come from a few main/primary keywords, some traffic will definitely come from less but highly targeted keywords and phrases. If you consider the combined traffic that comes from the less searched terms you will find that it adds up to quite a nice number of visitors. When you’re creating content for your website, focus each page for a different set of lesser searched keywords and keyword phrases. While these keywords won’t bring in huge traffic individually, but having multiple pages each with its own set of keywords can bring add to good amount of traffic.
The extra advantage of long tail keywords is that they usually are quite relevant to your site and you don’t need to seperately optimize for them. Another good thing is that the visitors who come using long tail keywords are more likely to convert on the site. The reason being that the more detailed a search query is, the more serious the visitors are.
If you target the keywords in the long-tail there is much less competition, so its easy for you to dominate the search engines for these terms. And if you rank well for enough of the long-tail keywords, you can produce the same amounts of traffic that you could see if you were to rank well for the more popular keywords.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Importance of Proper Navigation Structure In Website
- Navigation system helps users to move around the web site from one page to another. A good navigation system can help promote the right pages to the users. It is extremely difficult to guess where relevant content might be located without the help of proper navigation structure.
- A good navigation system also helps in placing web sites prominently on search engines. This is important since online marketing is one of the key ways to bring traffic to your web site.
- Text based links are preferred for navigation structure rather than graphical links. Not only do they display well, they are easy for the search engines to look up.
- A Multi-tier navigation structure is recommended for complex web site. This provides excellent level of ease of use. It also allows the users to jump from one link to another without going through various unrelated pages.
- Effective navigation structures are the ones which are left hand oriented or top down.
- Navigation structure should remain uniform through out the website.
- There should not be too many navigations systems within a web site.
How to Get Quality Backlinks to Your Website?
Even if you have made a good site with good content, good navigation everything, unless and until people know about it is of no use . To make it popular it has to have good ranking in serp as people generally go till 2-3 page, your site appear within top 20 . For this having good quality backlinks is one of the major criteria. More the no. of back links, more is its PR and more frequently the chances that your site will be crawled and hence help in getting better position in SERP's.
The backlink or inbound link is the link of your website placed in another site. Getting quality backlinks to your website is very important because it helps to increase page rank of your website which helps in boosting its ranking in search engines for particular keyword.
The quality backlinks are the links that come from the websites related to the topic of your website. The higher page rank of the site will help your website in ranking better.
There are ways of getting quality backlinks from high page rank websites. One is free method through which you can get one way links and other is paid. Some sites will ask you for some fee to keep link of your site in their site. This amount may be sometimes too much to afford.So you can always go for alternate free yet effective ways to get quality back links. Those are:
1. Forum posting
Forums are the online communities where you can share your ideas and views about any topic you are interested but before giving any comments you need to have proper knowledge about it.For this you can first of all start with answering any problem posted on the forum. Once you get an idea of how to answer and other members also gain interest in you you can go ahead and start a topic. The idea is to share valuable information with other participants. Also you have an option to advertise your website. At the bottom of every post there is a option where you can place links to your websites. The more topics you post or answer, the more backlinks to your website you get.You are building trust to other forum members and at the same time building traffic to your site. Search engines index even message boards. So if you are posting a lot in forums, you may achieve a great rank and you will be able to drive more traffic to your site.
2. Articles distribution
Writing articles is a great way to brand your business, giving people valuable information and earn their trust. These articles are also a great source of good quality backlinks to your website. Normally at the bottom of every article you publish, there is a resource box in which you can include a short biography about yourself and links to your website. This way you can get good quality backlink to your website because article directories usually have high PR.
3. Directory submission
There are lots of free directories available that will accept your listing. You can choose the proper category for your website and submit your website for consideration. The more directories you submit your site, the more backlinks your website will receive.
4. Blogs and websites comments
Posting comments on blogs is great idea not only to express your opinion about the post you're commenting but also to get backlink to your website. Many blog owners lets you put the link of your website whenever you write some comment. This way you can get backlinks from high ranked blogs.
In a similar way you can post your comments on websites related to your topic. Many of them include guest book where you can put your comments together with a link to your website.
The above ways to get quality back links are really effective and will cost you nothing.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Link Popularity & Link Building
Link Popularity means popularizing a particular link of the website for it to get top search engine rankings. Nowadays Link Popularity is being considered to be the most important process for the search engine optimization. Link popularity is determined by the quantity and quality of relevant backlinks the site has.
Backlink is the incoming link to the website from other site.
Good ranks are completely impossible without the effective Link Popularity Plan.
There are some Link Popularity methods:
Link popularity can be done through different methods like:
- Reciprocal Link Exchange among websites
- Write articles and put links in the articles to your website.
- You can also post in blogs or in niche forums and put link to your site as well
To have link popularity it is necessary to go for Link Exchange.
• For this look out for the sites that are relatively same to that of your site. This means exchange the links with the sites which have the same area of work.
• Try to exchange links with the sites with Google Page Rank of atleast 4(PR 4).
• Check the details of the site with which exchange process are going on.
• Create an HTML page in which the details of the link partners should be mentioned.
• Most importantly try to get more inbound links than outbound links for your site.
• Lastly submit these Link Pages to the Search Engines- Google.
By going through these steps one can easily increase the Link Popularity of the site.
Link exchange is one of the most popular techniques in internet marketing among webmasters to increase the page rank of the website and link popularity. Good linking strategies are useful to increase the page rank and link popularity score of a website.Google:
Google considers Link as a vote of trust. But that does not mean links from unrelated sites, irrelevent sites. Google ranks your site based on the relationship between your site's content and the content of the sites that link to your's. One way links from sites with content similar to yours ranks higher than one way links from totally unrelated sites. So you have to be actually choosy while selecting quality links. Links from .org, .gov, .edu, editorial sites are mostly preferred but its very difficult to get one way links from them. So you can try out links from other relevant sites. Links that are bought through any kind of network like link firms or Paid Links and automated link generators can give you immediate good results but in the long run they will harm your site and your site can also get banned by google.
The purpose of link farm is to link to other sites with the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity.
Google implemented the concept of Page rank in its Search Algorithm long back. High page rank is important for a website because the chances of being crawled by search engines tend to be higher. The website with a good page rank receives more web visitors from search engines and other directories.This was incorporated by google since concepts like link farms and bad neighbourhood came into being.Webmasters all over the world started misusing them for their own benefit. Google does not like link farms. They analyze page content of the website and also analyze the content of neighboring websites to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query. Once Google discover a website links to unrelated sites with irrelevant information, it labels the link they generate as spam and the site will be penalized.
Yahoo and MSN
Yahoo and MSN ranks pages on different factors. If you have proper page structure with great navigation, content and on-page optimization, then you have good chance to rank for fairly competitive keywords.
Important Point to remember while Link Building
1. Do not link out to bad neighborhood site
2. Always check the link provided to you.
3. Before giving a link out to any site think how it would help your site visitors.
4. Getting a link from related site is much more appreciated.
5. Check the Anchor Text of the link pointing out to the site linking to you.
6. Prefer directories for best one way links
7. Editorial links are preferred ahead of other links.
Link Building Through Directory Submission
Submission to the directories helps in 2 ways:
1)Helps to drive traffic to your site from these directories.
2)Quality one way links improves your site's ranking in various search engines.
3)Increases the visibility of site in various search engines.
Other factors to be taken into account before going for directory submissions are:
1)You should submit your site in the most appropriate category based on the theme of your site.
2)See the page rank, back links etc of the directory to which you are submitting. If it is a new directory see whether it is cached or not and see the date when it was cached.
3)The different categories in the directory should have sites present in them.
4)Check the quality of the sites that are present in the directory.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Search Engine Optimization Through Press Releases
An SEO press release is a way to deliver news of new events taking place within your company. It is written in such a way that it will rank well in the search engines for your keywords and provide your website with important backlinks that will also help improve the position of your website in the search engine results page.
Advantages of SEO Press Releases:
There are many benefits of SEO press releases if done properly:
1)Backlinks from good news sites increases the ranking of your website or blog for your keywords
2)Increases sites visibility in various search engines.
3)Ranking in Google News and Yahoo News for your keywords.
4)Potential media coverage.
5)Helps new website escape quickly from the “Google Sandbox”.
Steps For Writing Press Release:
Before writing press release, you must keep in hand which keywords you are optimizing for. For that do little bit of research work through google adwords or wordtracker.
There are different sections of Press Release:
a)Title Of press release
b)Summary
c)Body
d)About the Company
e)Press Contact
Title: Include the keyword phrase in the title. The title should not exceed 100 characters.
Summary: Give a synopsis of the press release . Should not exceed 250 characters.
Body: Write the content in the third person, giving the details of your news. Length of the content should be at least 300 words and include 1-2 quotes and 3-4 keyword phrases.
About the Company: Give some information about your company in 2-3 lines. Include a link to your homepage in the summary (preferably in anchor text.)
Press Contact: Provide the name of contact person for the company. It can be anyone in the company. Mention the name, address, phone, email and website of the press.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Social Bookmarking
For example, if i have a blog on search engine optimization, social bookmarking would allow me to display my link for my content on many of social bookmarking sites available.I am giving you the example of one of the most popular social bookmarking sites i.e Digg.
Since i already have a blog on search engine optimization in hand, I would go to Digg.com and register there through sign up link. I would then provide the URL of my blog in the box asked. Digg allows to create a bookmark including the URL I just copied, the title of the blog post which I'm bookmarking, and a brief description of the content of the blog post.
Now let me tell you how this will help me to bring more traffic
It helps you get more traffic in more ways than one. First of all, these social bookmarking sites are highly ranked in Google. So if you have a new website that hasn't been ranked by Google yet, having your link on these high rank social bookmarking sites will help to increase visibility to your site. You can sign up in as many bookmarking sites as possible.
These bookmarking sites are highly traffic websites with lots of members. Members not only add their own bookmarks, but they can also view other user's bookmarks and add those bookmarks to their account if they found it interesting enough. In other words it allows other users of the social bookmarking website to bookmark your content for you. So your link will be displayed in the web allowing people to click on your web link. Social bookmarking is a must use internet marketing technique.
Other examples of bookmarking sites include:
Yahoo! BuzzTechnorati.com
del.icio.us
Propeller.com
StumbleUpon.com
blinklist.com
Furl.net
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization basically means search engine optimization that are done off the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the page content. Examples of off-page optimization include linking, and placing keywords within link anchor text. There are many methods of obtaining links which also fall under the category of off-page optimization. These include:
1)Press Releases- Primary function of a press release is to increase publicity and awareness among people. Back links acquired from this process can help newer sites with faster indexing. Established sites can also benefit from the increase in the amount of link flowing to their domain. Before submitting a press release remember to check the content again and insert your SEO keywords where appropriate; title, first paragraph etc. Also include a link back to your site where allowed .
2)Article Submission- Submit your article in one article site like ezinearticles.com and if your article gets published then go for the submission in as many as article portals.If you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website.
3)Social Bookmarking via sites like Digg
4)Link campaigns, such as asking complementary businesses to provide links
5)Directory Submissions - This is used by most websites as submitting a website to a directory is the most reliable way of optimizing your site.
6)One-way linking - One Way Linking is a type of link building technique where a site links to another site without getting a link back.
For e.g Site A links to Site B
One of the best ways of getting One Way Links is through Directory Submissions.
You can submit your site in different free directories like Dmoz, Yahoo Directory and many others.
7)Reciprocal Link Exchanges- A reciprocal link is the act of exchanging links with another website. To be more clear this means they would place your link on their website in exchange for you placing their link on yours. Link exchange helps to increase the popularity of your website. One thing that most every search engine looks for while determining ranking of your site in serp, is its link popularity i.e no. of inbound links your site has.
8)Three Way Linking- This process involves both One-Way and Reciprocal Linking.For example: Site A Links to Site B, But Site B Links A on Site C
9)Blogging- You can create the blogs with unique content and provide the link to required website.
10)Forum Posting- Nowadays you will find many forums online, where people can discuss various topics & issues, all you need to do is to participate in related forums and put link of your site in your signature.
Keep Content Up-To-Date
Header Tags & Text Decoration
Headlines of the page not only structures the page content but makes it makes it easy to read. But along with that it should be properly used for SEO reasons also. Search engines tend to give headlines given in between header tags h1,h2,h3,h4 and h5 more relevancy. h1 is the most relevant headline.
Just like the headlines also other text decorations can help search engines identify the most important party of your website. Use strong and em to mark some text where its necessary and also try to create some lists with ul or ol.
TITLE And ALT Attributes
Meta Tags
The description-tag is probably the most important META-Tag. It is displayed in the SERPs and you should be careful while selecting it as you will do while you will be preparing the title tag.
Important aspects to be kept in mind while selecting the description-tag:
1) a separate description for every page of your website its own description and do not use same description for the whole website.
2) description -tag is one of the few meta-tags that still positively influences your website ranking, so use your most important keywords in it.
3) should contain not exceed 25-30 words.
The robots-tag is used to tell the search engines (e.g. spiders or robots) what they shall do with your website. Possible entries are index, follow, noindex and nofollow whereas index/noindex tells the search engine whether to index the page or not. follow/nofollow tells them to follow the links or not.
Title Tags: Most Important On Page Element
1)Exact keyword phrase should appear in title tag
2)Phrase for which the page is targetted should appear first in title.
3)Phrases should be used with some variation.
One thing you should keep in mind that each page of your website should have its own title. Secondly it should be kept short and precise and should not exceed 10-12 words.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
iPhone vs Blackberry: The Titanic Struggle for Supremacy
read more | digg story
Thursday, February 21, 2008
On-Page Optimization
Targetted Keywords: Keywords or set of keywords which are used to promote a website in search engines based on content of site.
2)Meta Description – Meta description is the descriptive text that appears in search engine results page along with a title and url.It should also be unique for each page.It should be kept short and relevant to content of page and unnecesaary stuffing of keywords should be avoided.
3)Meta Keywords – This should contain the targeted keywords and the keywords to the page. Should not unncessarily stuff keywords.
4)Heading Tag – They are important aspect of search engine optimization.
5)Alt Text– As search engines cannot crawl the images.So alt text should be provided for each of the image used in the site. This should be relevant to image.
Types Of Optimization
1)On-Page optimization
2)Off-Page optimization
Need Of Search Engines
Need Of Search Engine Optimization
But as you know,most of us don't have the tendency to visit beyond the top 10 results that appears in the first page.So there is competition among websites to be in top ten.
So there comes the need of Search engine Optimization.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
How Search Engines Work?
When a user searches a query in the search box,then the database is searched for relevant results which are then collected and are displayed as links.
What is a Directory?
What is Search Engine Optimization?
What is a Spider?
Spiders are also known as crawlers or robots.