Thursday, March 28, 2013

What is Over Optimization in SEO?

Try to think about how 'natural' links would look if link building didn't exist.

Webmasters would like to sites using a variety of anchor texts such as;


·         www.domainname.com
·         http://www.domainname.com
·         click here
·         read more
·         dog training
·         dog training info
·         dog training site
·         mike at dog training.com
Google know if you have all of these possibilities then it is a diverse anchor text profile. I don't think there are hard and fast rules in terms of keyword % to use as the anchor text, however I am for;


·         10% Exact Match (dog training)
·         15% Variation Keyword (best place for dog training)
·         35% Related Keywords (dog collars, dog info)
·         20% Random Non Related (click here, more info, read more)
·         20% URL Variations ("dogtraining.com",
·         www.dogtraining.com, http://www.dogtraining.com)

hope that help you to define over optimizations?

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Keyword Effectiveness Index: A Good Indicator For Useful Keywords


KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index): A Good Indicator For Useful Keywords?

What is the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)?

Is KEI A Good Indicator For Useful Keywords?

What Does This Mean To Your Web Site?


Good Techniques Through Which You Can Achieve Natural Links


There are lots of Good techniques through which you can achieve natural links.

1. Great Content
Always write unique and great content for your website/blog. People often visit those blogs where they find something new and interesting.Google loves unique content. Other bloggers will automatically link to your blog if they find nice content. Getting one way links from other blogs appear natural to Google and it will also help to increase PR of your blog. You need a little bit promotion of your content via social bookmarking, so that users could find it.

Another advantage of posting great content is that the user might share that content via social bookmarking on Facebook or Twitter which will fetch you additional traffic for your blog.

2. Guest Posting
Guest posting has become very common post penguin update. This allows you to write a blog post for some other blog and post your blog link at the bottom. If you need to find out for whom you can write blog post, then just open Google and type “inurl:<Your Keyword> write-for-us“. This will list down the sites that support guest posting. It is therefore recommended to choose blog which have high PR(Page Rank) to get the most benefit.

3. Forum Posting
There are numerous forums out there on internet which can give you quality backlink. You need to be a member of such forums to reply to various threads. Once you become member, you can put your blog name in your signature. Before targeting any particular niche, be sure that forums gives you dofollow link for the link in your signature and that forum has high PR. Warrior forum is one such forums. Don’t bombard these forums with junk comments as you may face the risk of being banned by that forum and also from Google.

4. Blog Commenting
When it comes to blog, it is always good to subscribe to other people’s blog. And then it is not harmful to add some positive comments. This will help anyone who reads these comments to come back to your blog and read the content. Each of these posts increases popularity. So comment more.

5. Social Media Promotion
Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and social bookmarking sites like Stumble upon, Digg, Reddit play a huge role in getting organic traffic as well as giving quality backlinks for your blog. Social networking sites generally have high PR and are most frequently visited by people. social media has much wider reach than any other platform. You can sign up for some online services that can post your newly published blog post or article to high PR social bookmarking sites. Not only they would give quality backlinks but also gives good amount of organic traffic.

6. Article Posting
Article sites like hubpages.com, squid.com, goarticles.com offer quality backlinks in exchange of some unique content. These article directories possess high PR and trusted by Google. This is also known as article marketing. Few things that you need to keep in mind are that you should only target high PR article directories, offer unique content and use diversification in anchor text.

Apart from that, make sure that the article directory will give your blog a dofollow backlink, since search engines look for do follow links.

7. Press Release
Press release is another effective way to get quality backlinks from press release websites. Press release sites are often in news are picked by news sites more often. They supply decent traffic to blogs and websites having great content. Before giving out press release, make sure you catchy title and good description which makes people curious about your website. Also, insert the link to your blog with in body of your content.

8. 
Mutual Link Exchange
This is one the most traditional way to build backlinks for your blog/site. You can contact the author or webmaster of the other blog and tell him that are you interested in exchanging link with their blog. If you blog is fairly new, then you can use it to get some backlinks for your blog.
Although, this doesn’t work anymore post penguin era, but still there are bunch of bloggers who still use this technique to get backlinks.

9. Document Sharing Sites
Another great way to increase backlinks is to create an eBook related to your blog niche and upload it on to some document sharing websites. You can leave a backlink back to your blog. Document sharing sites such as Scribd.com have high PR and can give you quality backlinks.

You can even upload one of your blog post as PDF and share it on some file sharing sites.

10. Reviews
You could also write reviews for other people’s products and services. If they find your review useful they will automatically link it from their blog. Most of the bloggers in technology niche write review for hosting companies, latest mobiles, SEO services and many more. Its better to review newly launched products, so that product owners gives quality backlink from their home page.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

What is PageRank and should you care


This topic is often debated however I still wanted to briefly discuss it because I still see so much confusion about what PageRank (PR) is.

Firstly, PageRank is actually named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google Inc. So the “page” part of PageRank doesn’t refer to a web page but its creator. I think this is where most people get confused – PageRank is not actually an indication of a pages ranking, it is just a small part of it.

PageRank is essentially a score assigned to a web page based on the links to it. It is used by Google as one of more than 200 considerations when ranking search results.

The idea behind PageRank is that a link to a page is a vote for the page’s credibility. The more links a page has the more credible the page is likely to be. It doesn’t stop there – if a highly credible page links to a page then its natural that it’s vote should be worth more than a less credible page.

The PageRank calculation doesn’t take in to consideration any other factors other than a page’s links – it doesn’t look at your code, your title tag, or anything else. It’s based solely on links. Your code, your title tag, your page’s name and so forth are some of the other 200+ considerations used by Google when ranking the results.

It’s because of all those other factors that PageRank shouldn’t be your sole focus and is the reason why Google have now removed it from the Google Webmaster tools and continues to recommend webmasters don’t fixate on it.

It’s completely normal for a page from a PR0 site to appear higher in a search result then a much high PR site because of those other factors. Thank goodness!

Google’s argument is that you should concentrate on your site’s content and attract links because people like your content – which makes sense.

The issue I feel is that because Google is so secretive about its algorithms, people fixate on PageRank because it is one of the rare ways you get an indication of what Google thinks of your site.

It is important to have a PageRank however remember that it’s only 1 of 200+ considerations and spend your efforts accordingly.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Promoting your eCommerce site step-by-step!


The following guide is more intended for people who are in that stage of launching their site for the first time or who haven't tried much in the way of promoting it so far. Many of these things you should have already done or thought about as part of building your website.

As always try the bits and pieces you like, skip the bits you don't or have already got in place or done or just aren't relevant to your business.

These headings will eventually be linked to detailed posts with instructions on what to do for each one.

Please note this is VERY much in a draft format at this stage

1. Install a webstats tool. Google Analytics is probably the industry choice.
2. Learn to look at view source for your web page.
3. Work out what niche you want to dominate.
4. Write down a list of keywords and keyword phrases relating to this niche that you want to dominate. Think like a customer.
5. Research these keywords and phrases on Googles Keyword Tool.
6. Think laterally. Experiment. Look at competitors sites and see what keywords they use via view source.
7. Refine and pick 3 or 4 two word phrases you want to dominate.
8. Run a link checker tool across your site - see how much a search engine robot could find.
9. Check / add .htaccess
10. Check / add robots.txt
11. Make sure your site has RSS feeds.
12. Make sure your site has a good site map.
13. Try and use text wherever you can instead of images
14. Try and use text links rather than image-based links for navigation.
15. If you use images make sure that the image is named after one of your keywords or phrases
16. Make sure your images have alt tags
17. Make sure your site passes as many web compatibility checks as possible.
18. Link a common element (eg logo) on ALL pages to site map
19. See if you can improve your base template to move body copy up source code. Go view source and see where your important information appears
20. For dynamic sites implement URL flattening code (worth looking into and easy to add) to make all dynamic URLS look like a html file. Often called Mod rewrite.
21. For any frames pages (if you decide to use any) add a site map and relevant content to the <noframes> tag. You might need some javascript to force the page back into frames if a user stumbles upon it via a direct link from a search engine.
22. Move fonts / positioning / style sheet code to external .css file
23. Style sheet name should reflect keywords targeted
24. Move any JavaScript code to external .js file
25. Create unique meta page titles for all pages targeting your keywords from.
26. Create unique meta keywords for all pages targeting your keywords from. This is now of low value.
27. Create unique meta description for all pages targeting your keywords from.
28. If your site is database driven get your developers to change it so it can generate unique page titles and metadata
29. Increase text content on major site sections - you want to be as text rich as possible
30. Use straight text (html) headings where possible rather than images
31. When you have text as a heading use <h1> tags rather than font size=2 tags
32. Add ALT tags targeting your keywords from 1. to all images
33. Change image names to reflect keywords for site section i.e. name your images after your keywords. eg balloons.jpg to fun_corporate_gifts.jpg
34. Create links from the site map to relevant DMOZ and Yahoo categories
35. Encourage other sites to link to yours where possible
36. Add a robots.txt file to the root directory of your site with allow all robots tag
37. Create a glossary of terms page that contains info about the business and its products and commonly used search terms
38. Create outbound links to major search engines
39. Once you have optimised your site, then submit it to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
40. Create Facebook site
41. Create Twitter site
42. Create Pinterest site
43. Link your RSS feed to Twitter
44. Post selection of products to Facebook site
45. Post selection of products to Twitter
46. Post selection of products to Pinterest
47. Create Google Adwords account
48. Set up Google Adwords campaign
49. Add your products and pricing to comparison shopping engines
50. When you have a little traffic and momentum run a heat-map tracking tool.