Archive

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization (SEO)’ Category

SEO Lessons Learnt from SMX West

March 13th, 2011 Comments off

If you are interested in the latest farmer updates from Google and see how they will affect your site? Check out this article coverage at Searchengineland. There is a summarized coverage of what was said and explained by Google. Some pretty interesting to ponder upon.

Read the Article

Is SEO going to die?

March 13th, 2011 Comments off

Check out this article written by Richard J Tofel, about the sunset on SEO. Personally, I dont think SEO will totally die out but the techniques will surely change especially with the new Google updates.

 

 

 

3 Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories

May 27th, 2010 Comments off

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills back.
With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is why article writing, submissions and publications are also getting popular.

There are already many tools that people can use to make the process of distributing their articles more easily. Though this is invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, which is only half of the story.
Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:
1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.

In article writing, there are three key benefits why you are promoting them; branding, lead generation and promotion, which are all part of your optimization efforts.

But there is only one reason why you write an article, and that is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them.
You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box. You can achieve this by producing better contents.

2. Failing to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.
You may know already that your articles can help you generate additional links back to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from that same articles?
Mention keywords at strategic places. Just be sure not to overdo them. Some are even using anchor texts which is also an effective method. But it is important to know that majority of the directories are not able to support this.

Remember that is not only about the links back to your site. Part of doing well in your article marketing is getting picked up by publishers with a large number of audiences and gaining the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work. Better search engine results also are great benefits.

But these things do not put much money in your pocket. There are other factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity that can boost your earnings. Not just increase the number of visitors to your site.

Start out with a plan and see to it that your article will serve the function that you intended it to have.

3. Publishing content that does not help your readers.
Maybe in the process of writing articles, you are thinking that all that is you wanted is links back to your site. And any visitors it can generate are fine.

Guess what? Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically. Oftentimes, they have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.

You can double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories want to share with other people. All it takes is one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight.

Write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work the most effective way for you. This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf.

In the end, it is all really a matter of choice on your part. You can start getting a little exposure from increased links back but on a very basic level. Or enjoy massive exposure from a little extra time making quality contents.

It will be your choice. You may not be aware of the fact that an article submitted on directories is not meant to have the same level of exposure as highly-targeted content ones geared on a narrow group of people.
Learn the difference between these two and it will surely help you know what kinds of articles to write and to submit.

Learn How WordPress SEO Can Drive the Targeted Visitors You Want To Your Site

May 24th, 2010 Comments off

If you’ve struggled with driving traffic and want an effective way to make it work, you need to look into WordPress SEO. As the leading blogging platform, WordPress is used by many. Why? Usability! WordPress is incredibly simple to use; add to that the great SEO, and you have a winning blogging platform. However, prior to optimizing your WordPress site, it’s important that you know the dynamics involved in the optimization. Used correctly, the optimization WordPress offers can dramatically increase the traffic to your site. The goal of this article is to introduce you to a variety of tips that will show you the best way to get everything you want from your site. Taking the help of certain items can help you to expand yourself in this area, such as by using IM Eye Review

Critical to be set up exactly correct with specific keywords, your post title is the most essential function in your SEO interaction with your WordPress blog. In addition to utilizing keywords in your titles, they should also be worked into the content of the post in a meaningful way. You should use unique titles for each post and try not to duplicate them. Duplicate titles can be detrimental to the way your webpage is indexed by search engines. Keeping a wide variety of appropriate keywords handy to employ in your post title for the different articles on your website is also helpful in developing titles. A post title that’s both fascinating and search engine optimized is the ideal combination for your posts. The search engine listings will carry your title, which will be the first thing that would be visible to a visitor before hitting your site. Make sure that your titles are relatively brief and easy to comprehend. You want to deliver your objectives clearly and simply, so don’t be vague when describing your content.

One of the easiest ways to get indexed by Google is to use a sitemap. Your indexing process will be able go much more quickly if you choose to utilize a plug-in for generating your Google Sitemap listing. This essentially assists Google in finding every single page on your site. In addition to this, whenever you post something new, make sure that you ping it to various websites. When your posts are linked back by another blogger, you get some targeted visitors. The exposure from that is explosive and incredible. Each and every post you make sure be pinged. If you want to do it in the best way possible, make sure you use IM Eye Bonus.

When working with WordPress, your blog’s permalinks should be customized. A critical reason to include your post title in the URL revolves around the standard permalink structure that comes with WordPress, which features many numbers and question marks. You can do this by simply modifying the permalink structure in the internal settings. If you neglect to do this it will affect your search engine rankings. It’s a simple one step process, which will pay on the long run.

Some New Keyword Research Tools That Could be Useful

March 1st, 2010 Comments off

Here’s an article that shows you some new keyword research tools like Google’s wonder wheel and older tools like word tracker. Check out the article -  http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/how-to-find-best-keywords-ideas/

Meta Tags Template used in SEO

February 22nd, 2010 Comments off

Here’s a SEO template that I like to share with my readers. If you are looking to optimize your site, one of the most important elements of SEO would be the title and meta tags. If you are developing a site or have engage someone to do the work for you, you might want to ask them to include this template with the site that is being developed.

This is the normal template that I use for most of my own and clients’ sites.

<title> Title Goes Here…</title>
<meta content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4″ name=”keywords”>
<meta content=”Your description goes here…” name=”description”>
<meta content=”10 days”>
<meta content=”index, follow”>
<meta content=”All”>
<meta content=”index,follow”>
<meta content=”global”>

Basic Link Building Steps used by Link Builders

February 22nd, 2010 Comments off

Link building is a very important portion when it comes to off page search engine optimization. To get rankings for your targeted terms, keyword rich anchor tags from similar themed or authoritative sites is the key. However link building is the hardest SEO activity to date, as the search engines are looking for natural links instead of 100s of useless links from spammer sites. In this article, I like to provide some simple steps that my team and myself use while conducting link building for our clients and own sites.

Step 1: Set your results set to return at least 30 to 50 results. This would help you be able to go through the top 30-50 sites in one go.

Step 2: Conduct a Google search for your target keyword terms.

Step 3: Visit the sites from top to bottom, take note of sites that are of quality and jot down their contact details.

Step 4: Start contacting the sites that you had identified earlier. Be sure to send personalize emails so that your emails stand out from all the spam that is out there.

This should help you find links that would be of value to your sites targeted keyword terms. The hit rate for doing something like is normally 1-5% but getting as many emails out to like minded webmasters is the key.

Checklist to Measuring Inbound Link Quality

February 15th, 2010 1 comment

When you are conducting search engine ranking position reviews has anyone face such a problem, where your competitors are ranking higher with lesser backlinks even though your website is almost similar in size, structure, keywords and Pagerank? If this is you, don’t worry you aren’t alone. Many of us are facing this within our niche. If you are wondering why, we can’t absolutely pin point the cause, but we could try to intelligently turn the tables into our favor.
As a start, I would conduct a SEO review of your competitors and your own site to ensure that you have done all you could for the on page optimization before heading out to off page. But for the purpose of this topic, I would like to assume that all else are equal and only the quality of inbound links to both your competition and your sites are the deciding factor for higher search rankings.
So you will ask how can ensure that the quality of my inbound links are really of quality and they aren’t discounted from providing link juice. The straight answer is you cant sure, but you can use the following checklist to help you determine if the site does add value to link juice.
1 – Check if the site is indexed in Google, no point getting links from a banned site
2 – If the site is indexed, check when the last date of index occurred, the more recent the index it means it does have some value
3 – Does the page have a lot of outbound links, if it has a lot of links you might want to reconsider dropping your link on the page?
4 – Where does the outbound links go to, are the sites considered as good neighborhoods or bad neighborhoods? Again if its linking out to bad sites you might want to move on.
5 – Is the content on the page relevant or complementary to your page? No point getting a link on a page that is totally way out from your site’s topic as it doesn’t help much for SEO or attracting users to click on the link as well
6 – In the past, I would normally advise marketers to pay attention to the PR of the page. But its no hidden secret Google wants to remove PR, so focusing on PR should only be a nice to have instead of a deciding factor for dropping your links on the page.

This is my checklist that I use when I conduct link building, do you have others to add into the mix? Feel free to drop a note below or email us.

Why Does the Number of Pages Indexed in Google Webmaster Tools Drop From Time to Time

February 2nd, 2010 Comments off

One of the metrics used by search marketers is to check out how many pages a site has within the Google index. The reason, having more pages within the index means a higher probability of your site being able to rank for their targeted search term. Recently, I came across someone who asked a question “Why does the number of pages indexed in Google fluctuate from time to time and sometimes a large number of pages are dropped off”.

Well there could be several cause for something like this, here’s are some of them.

1 – Google updates their data center constantly, the drop in number of pages indexed might be temporary.

2 – You recently implemented cannonical tags to lower the number of duplicated pages. This might cause Google to drop duplicated pages from its index.

3 – Pages lack inbound links. Google might index your pages from the initial crawl, but due to resource management they might drop off pages that they deem not important. (This is normally very rare, unless you dont even have a single link to the disappearing pages.)

4 – You did something wrong that might have tripped a filter, so Google might be removing those pages.

What to do in the face of something like this. Well there isnt a 100% absolute answer, but here’s what I recommend. First take a step back, dont panic and see its a Google update or your tech team have recently implemented a canonical change. Next make sure that all your pages have at least an internal link pointing to the page. This would allow Google to constantly crawl the pages in your site so that it doesnt drop into the invisible web. Last a quick tip is to ensure that your webiste doesnt trip any penalties and update your site from time to time to ensure content freshness for the engines to come back.

New Quality Link Building Method For You To Try

November 2nd, 2009 Comments off

Lots of professional link builders like myself spend a lot of time trying out new types and methods of link building to see what works and what doesn”t. You can just produce links on any old site now a days, all links you build must be relevant to your website in one way or another.

Relevant links are probably the hardest type of link to produce as google assigns so much weight to them and to get relevant links you will have to approach other websites in your niche.

I have been link building for around 3 years and have learnt a lot and seen a lot of changes. Google doesn”t assign much weight to irrelevant links and can actually give you negative weight for those links if it believe you have paid for them or your just producing loads of spammy irrelevant links.

Google wants to keep its search results fresh and relevant to what the user searches for and one of the ways google does this is it looks at a website and sees the quality of inbound links to that site, if it has a lot of relevant sites linking to it with relevant terms then google will know the content on that site is of some interest to what the user is searching for.

Good quality links can help your website in more ways than one, the first way that pops to most peoples mind is good quality link help improve search engine position, which they do, but these links have other benefits as well. If your inbound link structure is compiled of google reputable sites then that will help to go towards building your reputation with the search engine as well. Not only that but relevant links are the only types of links than can produce you targeted traffic that would either convert into a sale or spread the word about your business through word of mouth.

The method I want you to focus on now when link building and producing your relevant links is to approach blog owners and offer to write them a top quality unique post with the odd link back to your website. More often than not blog owners will let you write them some content, for example I am in the seo and link building field so I would write content for those types of blogs.

This method isn”t widely known but I have seen people doing for some time now and its a method we have been using for the last 6 months.