Beware of These SEO Mistakes

To err is human. We all know that. But it is also important to learn from your mistakes. In SEO too, there are some mistakes that are very commonly made and ignored by webmasters. If taken care of, avoiding these very mistakes can boost your rankings manifold.

Incomplete keyword Research

If you have not studied the ingredients and the recipe of a dish carefully, you will make a fool of yourself in front of your guests with a dish that doesn't taste or look like the way you or your guests had expected it to. Similarly, there is no idea making an amazing looking website that doesn't target your visitors in the right way. Your keyword research has to be fool-proof and very detailed. This might be little cumbersome and time consuming, but in the long run, this also means better visibility for your site.

Sites that take ages to load and open up

The internet is one of the fastest means of receiving or transfering information. In fact the net talks in terms of a fraction of seconds, not even minutes. Considering this, think of a website that is taking more than 2-3 minutes just to open up. Do you think the visitor will have the patience, time, or excitement left to wait for such a website to open up? I don't think so. Do away with all the marathonian graphics that maybe the culprits for this slow loading. Graphics are good only as long as they are very important and inevitable to the purpose of the site, otherwise all they do is to frustrate visitors.

Insufficient Linking

Are you not linking well with other related sites? If your are not, then God save your site. Because linking plays a very significant role in getting your site noticed and read. If you have quality relevant content in your site and are enterprising enough to search for links, you are in the race.

SEO is not just about buying some online visibility tricks and then rest is assured. It's a lot of sweat and blood work that needs to be done to reach those first ten or twenty pages in major search engines. Being cautious of the above mentioned mistakes can make a gulf of a difference to your rankings, visitor frequency, and sales.

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Non-Reciprocal Links Vs. Reciprocal Links

Exchanging links with other websites that are related to your website can definitely help boost your position and ranking in the search engines. There are two types of link exchange programs available-reciprocal and non-reciprocal linking. Those people who are not aware of non-reciprocal linking will be surprised to know that non-reciprocal linking is much more beneficial than reciprocal linking in improving the ranking of your website in the search engines. Firstly, the non-reciprocal links don't need to be monitored for any unethical practices employed by some unscrupulous webmaster to hide your links pages from the search engines, as happens in reciprocal linking. Secondly, the non-reciprocal links are valued more as they are not reciprocated.

You must be wondering why would anyone link to your site without expecting anything in return? Well, the answer is people would still like to link to your site, provided your site offers the following things to them:

Quality Content- people still clamour for sites that offer them a wealth of valuable, updated content and information. Even today, the web is considered as an important and trustworthy channel of relevant and updated information, and if people find quality content in your site, they would still want to link to you without expecting anything in return.

Listing your site with a directory-This is one of the easiest ways to get non-reciprocal links. If you find directories like yahoo! and DMOZ to be too expensive or time consuming, you may opt for secondary or topic-specific directories that provide valuable and quality targeted traffic generating listings.

Submitting Articles for building non-reciprocal links-Though little time consuming, writing articles relevant to your site with the title and the content of the article adding weight to your targeted keywords, can act as major contributers to non-reciprocal link building. When you build such links, they are relevant to the topic of your site which means driving more targeted traffic home.

Though these are some of the ways in which you can build non-reciprocal links, yet, to begin with, they should be able to provide you with enough fodder to kick start your non-reciprocal linking program.

http://www.segnant.com/

Email Marketing: A Powerful Business Enhancement Tool

In the world today that is overpowerd by the forces of IT, emailing has become an indispensable and inevitable part of our lives. And the business world is no exception to this. Today most of the business enterprises-small or large- bank upon emails for communicating not only with their work force, but also their customers and clients. There is no denying the fact that with increase in cut throat competition among business rivals, and advanced technology, every one wants to top the race of profit making and increased sales. Email marketing comes up as a simple yet magical tool for the business people to build a regular, ongoing relationship and dialogue with their prospects and clients. It performs the important function of building strong and long term customer realtionship through regular but respectful communication. It is easy, affordable, effective, direct and least complicated method of advertising online. If done properly, email marketing can turn your lukewarm business into a gold mine. What is required is a smart strategy to create loyal customers and enhance relationships by driving the interest of people in your services and products. And email marketing can achieve this goal very easily if you entertain your target audience by addressing various topics and developing a long lasting relationship with them. If you dream and aspire to expand your business and see more customers buy your products and services, start communicating with your target audience through newsletters, greetings, promotional news, event invitations, announcements and other notifications through emails. Emails should inform as well as educate at the same time and not look like just cheap advertisements. The idea is to convert your first time or one time visitors into repeat visitors, and better yet, customers. Email marketing is a powerful medium through which you can solidify existing customer relationships, start new ones, develop trust and encite them to share their views with you. The best part about email marketing is that you can comfortably measure the number of emails sent, opened, unsubscribed, and click through rates. In fact, you can also keep track of people who opened your email, and which links in your email were responsible for attracting visitors to open you website, and who clicked on these links. Well, with all these feature,and that too at no major expense, what more can you ask for. Emails really are a boon for the business people to market their products and services to the people all over the world, if you strike the right cord with the help of the email marketing.

Tracking Visitor Behavior: Essential for Managing and Improving Business Online

When you go out to eat in a hotel or restaurant, many good eating joints request you to fill a simple form or write your comments in their guestbook so that they come to know about your reactions and feelings about the place, food, service and prices. They do it because it gives them some feedback to improve upon their services or enhance those features that people really liked or appreciated and that may be responsible for making their eating joint not only popular but profitable also. Now take the case of websites. Don't you think it would definitely help you improve your online traffic and conversion rates if you track your visitors' behavior? In other words, wouldn't it be very beneficial for you if you know:

1. what people do on your site
2. how often they visit your site
3. how they buy on your site
4. which pages they read
5. why they click on some particular pages on your site
6. which search terms or keywords they use to find your site
7. which links they click on

All this information can tranform your online business as knowledge of the visitors' behavior online can give you enough clues to alter, modify, enhance or completely change your present optimisation strategy to improve sales online. It is as important a tool of web marketing as a thermometer that checks the temperature of human body so that the right medicines can be administered to the patient to improve his/her health and reduce temperature. It has been seen time and again that guaging the behavior of customers can be a very effective predictor of the future behavior also. The reason for this is that our preferences, likes, dislikes, prejudices do not change instantly or overnight. So if some people are looking for a particular key word or search term, this gives you enough indication to know what exactly they want. This information can act as a guide for you to take the right decisions. Regular tracking and reviewing of visitors' behavior can bring about pleasant changes in your web site's popularity and profitability.

Blogging The Right Way

If you can answer the questions given below, you are right on the track as far as blog writing is concerned:

What's the Intention of your blog?

Be clear about the purpose, the rationale behind your blog. A clear purpose will give focus and direction to your blog. You will not divert from your path.

Who's your Audience?

When you are clear about the kind of audience and people you wish to write for, your tone will get decided automatically. This is very important as you cannot have the same tone or way of communication with all the people.

Are you simply blabbering or to the point?

Nothing is more irritating and frustrating for the visitor or reader of your blog than your wasting his/her time giving useless information or information that is not to the point. Remain honest, real, and avoid mistakes.

Are you Updating the blog regularly?

If the answer is in negative, then you need to do something fast about it. It is important to update your blog regularly, if not everyday, at least several times a week. People are looking for fresh, unique, and different news everyday.

Are you linking to your sources?

There is no need to duplicate content of your sources. When you provide a link to any content used or referred by you but composed by somebody else, you provide readers the access to that information so that they can draw their own inferences and judgements.

Are you adhering to a Schedule?

Be passionate enough to be consistent about the blogs that you post. A lapse of a day or two occassionally is okay, but in the longer run, you must stick to your schedule and give readers the promised content well in time.

Is your blog Keyword-rich?

Are you feeding the target audience with the content that they are looking for? In other words, if you aim to achieve better online visibility, you need to make your blog keyword-rich.

Do you proof-read your Blog?

It really leaves a very wrong impression on people if the blog written by you is full of mistakes-spellings or grammatical. Imagine the amount of embarrasment it would cause you if you find people pointing out to the mistakes in your blog. That way you would be putting an end to the life of your blog.

Are you using RSS Feed?

If not, start doing it right away. RSS is a wonderful syndication method that will expand your blog's reach, readership, and distribution.

Blogging the right way can increase your web site's popularity and ranking tremendously. Blogs may not have many takers as yet, but those who have been regular and loyal readers of blogs will always come back out of curiosity to find something new and differnet everytime. So, give your blog the right kind of attention that it deserves.

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Content-Search Engines’ favorite Component in a Website

“Content can make your website the king of all websites”. Yes that's absolutely true! Although the big brothers like Frames, JavaScript, Flash, may disagree with you, but if you take a hard look at it, you will realize that content is really what makes or breaks a website!

If we analyze the top searches for a result in Google, we will conclude that more often than not, top SERPs share one thing in common i.e. “Simple” and “Well” written web pages. Invariably the top SERPs have well written and grammatically error free content to their credit contrary to the common belief of SEO experts that by using different SEO trick and techniques you can rank well.

To know more about it lets see some more features that can help us attain Top SERPs:

a) Avoid Grammatical Errors because that shows your inefficiency and discomfort in writing and also deteriorates your chances of appearing in the top of the search engine results pages.

b) Update and refresh the content of the site as soon as possible. It is like giving oxygen to the Search engines, they will run towards it!

c) Paragraphs shouldn’t be lengthy to read. Same applies to the sentences. So make them short and curt by using bullets and numbered lists.

d) Make sure whatever you are writing has relevant terms that describe the site precisely and also descriptively at places.

e) Make sure that the content written for the site passes through the eyes of an expert. Even if you write the content of your site yourself, there is no harm in getting it checked from an expert.

To conclude, it can be safely said that along with Designing , Development , cosmetic changes, equally important is the content of your site, as that only will attract search engines as well as visitors to your site.

www.segnant.com

Don't Confuse Blogs with RSS

The biggest myth doing the rounds in Internet Marketing world is that RSS as a communication medium is sustained by blogs. Dispel this myth as RSS is not in any ways bound with blogs and it is going to emerge as a corporate communication channel where the cunsumers will have an inherent capacity to select content that they wish to read. And this capacity or ability will act as the driving force for keeping the advertisements to the minimum and content to be more relevant.

No doubt blogs started as something really hot and cool and most happening thing on internet. But that excitement connected with them seems to be fizzling out as the reality of keeping them fresh and updated has dawned on bloggers on webmasters. Maintaining a blog and generating good revenue from it is not a easy task and slowly blogs may dimish in their glory as time passes by.

The reigning king will be RSS that will not only save visitors' time but also allow webmasters to re-package the existing or new content. As an online marketing tool, it is going to thrive as a result of its flexibility as a communication medium and ability of expanding enclosure tags. A business using RSS can bring new visitors, increase search engine rankings , and generate interest in your products and services . After all who wouldn't like to see selected content in one centralized location?

Any technology needs to impress the people or consumers in order to be a success. And looking at the popularity of RSS among businesses shows that this technology is here to stay. It has become a vehicle of creating and disseminating keyword-rich, relevant content to the clients and thus winning the clients' trust, making a reputation and maintaining good relations with clients.

The best thing about RSS is the controlling power in the hands of the consumers who can opt-in to content of their own choice and thus if the quality of content starts deteriorating, they have the ability to remove the feed from their RSS Reader so that they don't recieve any further information from that source. The time is not far when RSS also takes the same importance and becomes a standard as email addresses or websites are today. Businesses can inform customers about specials, discounts,product announcements, news, etc. and create brand loyalty, besides increasing their customer and corporate communication.

http://www.segnant.com/

Optimizing your site through Link Popularity

Improve your page rank with intelligent linking

Linking with other people is an important aspect of our daily life. We come in contact with different people, know them, and establish links with them. These people may not necessarily be from our field or sphere, still we connect with them. This helps us not only increase our network,but also our popularity with others and vice a versa. If you translate this basic fact in online marketing too, you will find that linking your site with other sites has a similar positive impact on your business as well as online visibility and popularity. Linking also improves your website's page rank. In fact, many search engines, like google, ranks pages on the basis of the number of quality links that a web site has with other sites.After all, world wide web is all about linking and the sooner you understand this, the better it is going to be for you. Search engine ranking depends upon the the link popularity of your site. If the search engines don't find many links-internal or external-your site's ranking is surely going to be adversely affected. Links help your targeted audience to locate your products and services within seconds. They act as a very powerful profit making tool as more clicks on your site means more business for you. When you link to other sites that are relevant to your business, you automatically drive more targeted traffic to your site, and also build up a 'brand' effect for your business. The most important benefit of linking is the increase in potential sales of your products and services as a result of more traffic in your site. But remember that page rank is not the only measure of your business' success. It is one of the yardsticks to measure your popularity and visibility online. There are other important factors like content, keywords, and title tags that play a major role in improving not only your popularity online, but also profits in the long run.

What's Happening in SEO Today: Keep yourself Updated about the Latest Trends

Change is a part and parcel of life. Everything changes with changing times, and those who don't, have to pay a heavy price. SEO, too, is not untouched by change. From the time it emerged as an essential part of internet marketing, it has changed, evolved, and grown over the years. With the result that today, SEO has emerged as a very popular and 'must have' department of Web Marketing. All because it changed, modified, and brought in new features to combat the challenges of the ever changing IT and the Web marketing world.

Some Significant changes in SEO practices today

1. Putting the choicest of your keywords and phrases in the metatags number of times and page copy just to rank high is no longer the order of the day. If you do this today, you will be seriously penalized by the search engines.

2. No reciprocal link exchanges today are very keenly accepted by search engines as they have found a potential of abuse in them. The search engines now prefer one way links where the links are from the directories or the body of your articles.

3. The insertion of links in the blog comment fields are no longer counted or considered by search engines today as they are prone to blog comment spam.

4. Depending too much on Link buying and link renting are not so hot and happening today. Search engines have found out a way to detect these; if suddenly, within a day or two of your site's launch, you achieve high pagerank pages, search engines become suspicious and sniff the dirty trick you have employed.

5. Links from pages hosted in the same server are big no-no today. It is always better to have links from pages hosted in a different server as it will make the search engines add value to those links.

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