Friday, May 30, 2008

SEO for Blogs

Blogs are the search engines daily small part of records that are updated on a frequent basis and get a lot of preference in the search results. Blogs and blog posts are search engine friendly because they are text-rich, keyword-rich, link-rich, are frequently-updated and have very little irrelevant HTML. The two main uses that have made blogging indispensable are to trick Google Adsense, and to also to gain better search engine rankings. The two major blogging sites that are ruling the internet are WordPress and Blogger. Blogging in blogger yields better results because it is owned by Google, which means quick indexing of your site. The major search directories and search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, Alta-Vista and most of the others sought for fresh and new information that is updated as frequently as possible.

The more search engines find updated content, the more often their search spiders will visit the blog, resulting in high search engine rankings. The supremacy of blog depends on the frequency of blog posting. For that very reason 3 postings per day can make your web blog very active and spiders will quickly index that site. Optimizing a blog is synonymous to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post is synonymous to optimizing a web page. A well optimized blog can rule the search engine results.

The benefits of optimizing a blog are:
  • Fresh information keeps on appearing on search engines in days and not weeks, which means more traffic and higher ranking.
  • Higher search rankings of your website on Google.
  • Free marketing has unlimited ROI.
  • Create visibility and credibility.
  • You can share timely information with your readers/visitors/customers.

Few rules to be set up for the optimization of Blogs are:
  • To be effective, set up a blog with RSS
  • URL should include the primary keyword that you want to optimize your blog for
  • Blog header tags and the title of the posts should contain your main keyword phrase. Keeping the title related to the topic will endow relevancy to the blog. Stylize your blog title in the H1 tags
  • The secondary keyword should be included in the body of the post but should not be overdone
  • Use of keywords in anchor text of links
  • Archive of posts should be accessible from all the pages
  • Create a link for comments
  • Link to other related blogs
  • Submit the blog to blog directories and search engines
  • Update your blog with fresh content frequently
  • Avoid changing domain or blog host because this can cost you your traffic and a fall in page rank
  • The blogs should not convey sales pitches, but should be informative

Thursday, May 22, 2008

How to add reliability to your website

Trust and credibility are the biggest subversion to Internet sales so they need to be properly addressed on your web site. Most of the webmasters are suckers and try using visual tricks and other exaggerated tactics to trick the search engines. Incorporating unethical optimization techniques for only to trick search engines will only yield you any profit, contrary playing games with them will get your site banned. Credibility is crucial to the success of your business and the key factor in influencing the potential customers. Conveying credibility has always been a challenge, be it any medium. That makes conveying credibility through a web site more of a challenge. The credibility of your site should be such that your visitors immediately convert to sales, otherwise there is no fun in pursuing PR and generate traffic for your website. In all likelihood, the webmasters and the visitors won’t ever come face to face, so it becomes all the more very important to win the trust of your visitors. Convincing people of your reliability from a distance is definitely a difficult task, but it can be overcome by providing the site visitors the facts!

Guidelines to prove your credibility:

  • Design your site so it looks professional. It's optimization should be handled by a professional only
  • Appropriate online presentation of your skills, experience, and professionalism
  • A descriptive and authentic presentation of your experience
  • A biography of your company’s progress
  • Highlighting the proficiency in your organization and in the content and services you provide
  • Wrong content on your site may sink it. It should be directed towards target audience
  • Share your goals and sound authentic
  • Update your site's content often
  • Mention some of your achievements
  • Describe any awards or special acknowledgment you've received.
  • Add quotes from satisfied clients
  • Make your site easy to navigate
  • When you're sure that your web pages generate sales, optimize them for high search engine rankings
  • Evaluate your competitors content, back links, keywords
  • Absolute no cloaking, no invisible or tiny text and no keyword stuffing

Thursday, May 15, 2008

An overview of Google’s freshness factor

Google evaluates the relevance of web pages by considering more than hundred factors. To achieve considerable PR have significantly affected the websites that are dependent on Google to generate traffic. This dependence has resulted in increased emphasis on factors such as Google's "value / quality score", its "freshness" factor, and its requirements for site maps. Google seems to be conducting experiments with its algorithms giving its users different search engine results and also the goose bumps. One of the chaoses involved in deciding the freshness of a document indexed in a search engine is that the “last-modified-since” trait isn’t always accurate. At times the date on which Google crawls a page appears just after the size of the page, which tells you the freshness of Google's copy of the page. It is a discriminating fact that old web pages that haven’t been updated in a long time and haven’t fetched any new inbound links not be looked upon as favorable because what Google looks for is actual bespoken magic of words. But of lately, Google has showcased a poor performance in deciding the relevancy of a web site in relation to its content.
By now, I can understand what you all might be thinking. How does the freshness factor help in deciding the relevancy when there are some websites that are not updated but still are ranked higher? It doesn’t matter how fresh a document is to Google, particularly if that document has many inbound links pointing to it. If a stale page continues to fetch incoming links, it will still be considered fresh. The ranking of web page will be still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. But again one more issue has rose up, use of duplicate content that attacks the freshness of a particular document. Google particularly is not very finicky in cutting out the duplicate content.
Google’s criterion in determining the freshness factor:
  • The frequency with which all web pages are modified
  • The actual amount of modification
  • Keyword distribution
  • Exact number of new web pages that link to a web page
  • Changes made to the anchor text
  • Limitations put on the affiliate links on new web pages


Sunday, May 04, 2008

How to turn your visitors into customers

Most of the times it happens that your site generates traffic, but you might not be making as many sales as you would. Turning your reluctant website visitors into enthusiastic customers needs a bit of diplomacy and careful implementation of the strategies. To leverage the sales list out the benefits on your order page or put a small red box just above the order link and highlight two or three of important benefits of your product.

You can take the help of SEO professionals who will not help you in conceptualizing and designing your site but also will help you in marketing your products/services on the internet. Nothing builds reliance with customers and prospects the way good words about you from your patrons does. You can include testimonials from your customers and suppliers. Testimonials not only say you can do the job, but they say how well you can do the job. If possible include testimonials throughout your Web site It is responsibility to explain the unique features of your product and how your product is having an edge over others. The visitors are particularly fond of the demonstration of your product. For that Viral marketing is the easy-to-use web-based element that helps you build a loyal customer base through live demo, free downloads, trial downloads, catalogs, email newsletters and printed postcards. Let your web designer and technical designer help you out in this.

The navigation on a Web site should be easy. Use simple, descriptive headings and subheadings to direct visitors throughout your Web site. Put keywords in the headings and subheadings so that the Search Engines have an accessibility to index your web pages. Try keeping your information organized. The easier you make it for your customers to find information, the more likely you will be able to attract the visitor. And, the longer they stay, the more probable you will gain a customer. Provide your clients Help files, Help desk, Frequently asked questions, Support email, Community forums; and as to their emails as early as possible. Include phone, fax, and your regular mailing address. Your street address adds credibility to your website and offers.

Search engines are the number one way of getting visitors to your site. Let your SEO professional handle all the processing. But to retain you ranking, make sure that your site is updated often. Also include links to other sites like yours and try to get those sites to add your link as well.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Spams that should be avoided

Spams are the unwanted mails that can considerably break the monopoly of a site. These are those tons of mails that you usually see in your bulk folder. Here it should be noted that the email newsletters that have been subscribed to are wanted and would not be considered as spam. In fact the email newsletters to remain updated of what is going on in the website development and what are there recently launched products/services. As we all know Google changes its algorithm give the relevant sites their due credit, but that doesn’t mean that all practices banned are actually spasm. In fact the webmasters try to make fool of Google by using spams in their site to earn higher search engine rankings.

You have full right to advertise your product but not by unauthorized means. Some of the spams that should be avoided are:

Cloaking: In Search Engine terms “cloaking" is a stealth setting when a website returns modified webpages to search engines, crawling the site in order to alter search engine rankings. To preserve the accuracy of search results, Google can permanently ban any site that is engaged in cloaking to mislead the users. .

IP Delivery: It is a simple form of cloaking where search false content is presented to search engine spiders to gain ranking points.

Leader Pages: It is one of the oldest tricking methods where a sequence of similar documents is designed to meet the requirements of different search engine algorithms.

Mini-Site networks: These are more or less like leader pages, but the only difference is that they are bigger. Each mini-site contains its own keyword enriched URL and is designed to meet specific requirements of each major search engine. Here Google is given an impression that the site has link-density and deserves to be credited in the search engine.

Link Farms: Link farms emerged as free-for-all link depositories when webmasters learned how heavily incoming links influenced Google. As a result, Google without any delay plummets the ranking of a site.

Blog and/or Forum Spam: Since blogs and forums have established high PR values due to the freshness of their content, many unethical SEOs targets them for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients.

Keyword Stuffing: Webmasters try to stuff keywords everywhere they possibly could to get higher listing. The most common example of keyword stuffing can be seen in the sites that rank near or at the bottom.

Hidden Text: it is another deceptive form of tricking the search engines and a common component of spam messages. Spammers incorporate hidden text in their HTML emails in order to try to trick spam filters. It can effectively reduce the overall "count" of these spam indicators, so that the message can creep through the filter. There are two types of hidden text. The first is, text that is coloured the same shade as the background and the second is, text that is hidden behind images or under document layers.

Incorporation of Useless Meta Tags: Although the Meta Tags will help improve your position in the search engines, but Keyword stuffing in meta tags is a form of Spam

Misuse of Directories: Search engines traditionally give links from directories a bit of extra weight by considering them links from trusted authorities. A practice of spamming directories emerged as some SEOs and webmasters started hunting for valuable links to improve their PR.

Email Spam: Email spam has actually increased. It involves sending nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Its reliability is doubted because here the spammers often use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers.

Redirect Spam: In other terms it means hijacking of traffic generated for other site, but what may be the process the end result is spam.