Building a site’s popularity organically

Very often it is seen that the webmasters are either perplexed or always showcase their rejection about how to achieve site’s popularity. Most of the times remain fidgety always wanting to be in the top 5, 10, top page for organic listings. But may I please tell them once again building a great website optimized to score high popularity in the SERPs is only half the battle won. To lead in the organic results or the free listings, there are some organic methods which can help you promote your site. Partly a web site's search engine rankings are determined by the popularity of your site. Promoting doesn’t always necessarily mean advertising; it is more compound and call foe finding ways to get your visitors involved. As such there is not any shortcut to achieve the status of influential site. The unethical SEO which requires money will only raise the status of your site ephemerally, but tomorrow it will ensure the crash down in the rankings as the result of being declared spam. As a matter of fact organic growth is a slow process and generally takes a year or more to display real results.

You have created a web site that has premium content that is relevant to your targeted visitors, it is ranking high on the search engine results pages (SERPs), you have totally avoided spamming and other unethical SEO tactics that are liable to get you banned. But…. Do you think you are done?

For a rational explanation, you need to deeply understand the exclusivity of the search engines because the other half of the battle depends on the time to time manipulations of the search engine algorithms. To set off a good start, simply overlook the mirage created by the link spamming. An organic link building process includes the links that search engines love to index and crawl. An organic approach towards link building will attract more visitors not only from the search engines but also from other sources. Web surfers find their way to popular sites via bookmarks, links to the site from articles or blogs, and directly typing in the URL at the address bar.

How to generate buzz and get web surfers interested in what your site has to offer them

Building a community online is easier said than done. Yes it goes against the age old click, “It is always easy said than done.” Looking at your Web marketing plan as a long term effort, a wise first step of consideration would be thinking of your website not as a commercial information sales sheet, but as a prospect for you to interact with your customers. Although at the niche you work for organic listings, at the front simultaneously you ought to offer anything unique and of quality or value; or should I say viral marketing is the best way!!!!!!!!!

To build a strong community try to evaluate, why your site exists. Keep in mind: what benefit do users get from participating in your community? What are you offering them that they won’t find on your competitive site or anywhere else? Once your goals are apparent, adhere to them, but at the same time be flexible. In any case you have to meet the needs of the community.

Have a proper strategic planning for your actions to be carried out. And if you display incapability somewhere, your users or potential buyers might start a hunt for their own programs that probably won’t fit in well with yours.

Just set up a blog, forum, wiki, or other interactive system to receive feedback from multiple users. Provide authentic testimonials to the people so that they may be able to make up their mind judiciously. You can also attract interested web surfers through search engines, and submitting links to other sites. If you’ve ever been a participant in other online communities, your experience will help you know your objectives better. Luckily if your list of visitors is healthy and sociable the trick is getting the good ones to stay will take care of itself.

An errant but intellectual behavior of your visitor does not necessarily mean that they uphold any negative stance for your site. For instance, your blog, wiki or whatever has attracted the comments from the participants only for the sake of comments, on the contrary the voice brought into play may take an excited interest in discussing ideas you never thought were important or didn’t even know existed.

When a reliable community is set up, some community members act as moderators for your web site. They may make the discussions smooth, and even act as peacemakers between other community members engaged in serious disagreements with each other. At the same time you need to pay attention to honest criticisms, because might is not always right. One of the best things you can do to ensure no disparagement is to post a code of conduct to the community members. Once a healthy community is established its members will link to it from their own blogs or websites. Maintaining cordial Public Relations via press releases is news equivalent of search engine optimization. If your press release is well written and newsworthy, it stands the chances of being picked and linked up by the mainstream press. Press releases are a sure shot gun method to gain popularity overnight. But be sure to present the factual information. There is no place for gossip or feathery promises in PR.

Website credibility and SEO

Web credibility is its usability, the quest for designs that are easy to corporate, makes our lives easier and simultaneously becomes important to Search Engines. The credibility of the website depends on the functionality and simplicity of navigation, how the interpretation of colors, font size and design rally to enhance a user experience without distracting the user. But navigation has an unswerving effect on how search engines crawl a website, and index it consequently.

Navigation is often overlooked but it plays a crucial role in getting site visitors to view more than just the home page from the moment the visitor enters the site to the moment they leave. If navigation choices are ambiguous, visitors may prefer to hit the "Back" button. Maintaining an easy navigation for a web site is not an easy task. Once the visitor enters, the real challenge begins, as it an uphill chore to let first-time visitors to get take maximum advantage of a site. Navigation is such a tedious task make functional for everybody who will use your web site. The best navigation system is one that contains text links, anchor text, breadcrumb trail (derived from the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel and offers shortcut links for users without using “Back” button). Text links and Anchor text should not be cloaked using JavaScript or other undecipherable code because cloaking won’t allow a search engine to follow your navigation system. From the SEO standpoint they provide another opportunity for you to include your keywords. The titles also help a search engine to determine the credibility of a site and hence they should not be misled either a search engine or a visitor.

Web metrics has made it apparent that web users like to visit sites that are easy to access and are not far away from the home page. Also the search engine are not liberated enough to crawl more than a couple directory levels deep. Here not even a great navigation structure and breadcrumbs would help you out.

The legibility of text, its size and color is another aspect of maintaining the site’s credibility. Also search engines give weight to text that is bigger. For both structural, navigational, and organization purposes, both for the site visitor and the search engines organizing web pages into sections is a good idea. Clean, sophisticated and uncluttered design web sites are usually visited and crawled the most.

Website Usability and SEO also relies on content positioning, site maps, and stats. A search engine scans the text left to right, top to bottom. Hence, the content at the top and left of the page is more imperative than the content positioned to the right and at the bottom of the page. A properly structured sitemap allows users find what they are looking for and it helps the search engines better index your entire site. If your website is having more than 50 links on a single page, it would be wise to break your sitemap into several pages, grouped under their specific category. Web metrics is an innovative way to identify where your visitors are going, or tend to go, and then you can streamline your site accordingly. You can get to know the preferences of your visitors and alter your navigation of those pages to make it easy for your visitors to get back to where they want to be.

Fine tune your marketing efforts with web metrics

In this era of perpetually changing technology, marketing strategies, consumer demographics and industry trends; keeping a track of who is coming to your website, which direction are they following, how long they stayed there, from where they got redirected to your website, whether they are interested in buying your products/services have become incredibly essential. In the face of this, still large numbers of website owners are leaving everything to conjecture, with no curiosity to learn what parts of their website halts the target audience, and which don't. The webmasters are just concerned to focus on increasing their traffic and sales, marketing their sites, improving their content, attracting a community of loyal visitors, and other subjective goals. In the rush to be online, they often overlook scrutinizing where their businesses are statistically. They are not even concerned how users are targeted towards their site and what those users do once they get there. Not knowing where a business is heading towards could be perilous, particularly on the World Wide Web where things change without giving any prior intimation.

It is very important for a webmaster to understand the statistical positioning of a site everyday. Every other site promotional technique depends on the statistical approach, because it provides the vital dimensions of site’s performance and its market competitiveness. Evaluating the daily progress could provide the owner a direction to review audience activity and the related revenue-generating potential. A proper appraisal will provide a wealth of information that will directly attract and serve the customers.

For improving your site traffic and conversion:

• Screening a site’s escalation on the whole: Traffic & sales are the two measures to analyze the overall intensification of site and hits and page views are the long-established methods to assess site's growth and its demographic reach. A rise in page view is a consequence of the cordiality among the increase in traffic, increase in the number of the site's pages or a blend of both.
• Screening site’s marketing campaigns: Maintaining proper statistics of the visitors coming from banners placed in other sites help to determine the effectiveness of a site's marketing campaigns. Considering from where your visitors are coming can easily capitulate answers to your marketing efforts.
• Gauging the interests of visitors: A webmaster can determine the interests of its visitors in a number of ways. Statistics to measure the popularity of page include the consideration of the most requested pages, track of time spent on pages, time spent on site, depth of visit etc. Knowing the pages that people frequently visit will help a webmaster identify the sort of information that his or her visitors want.
• A site's metrics can help locate where the desired visitors are coming from and the quality of traffic.
• Site metrics can provide a deep look of how a site is experienced by a user. An all-purpose site facilitated for use by different versions of browsers has a possibility of reaching a wider spectrum of audience.
• Assembling a picture of site's traffic and improving customer service and technical support will provide surplus information and an idea of how the site is doing and how it can be further improved.

Traffic is money online

It can’t be denied that traffic is the lifeline of any website. If a site fails to generate traffic, it is impossible to reach the summit of turnovers. Due to the new algorithms introduced by Google, of lately many sites have suffered in desperation the loss of traffic. Even though these sites have tried to generate traffic to some extent, but still they are finding it difficult to understand what's holding them back. The situation is whole-heartedly getting availed by the unscrupulous individuals who have decided to take full undue, unethical advantage of these desperate webmasters. You've probably come across their modest offers stating, “pay $200 and get back 10,000 guaranteed visitors to your web site” or “spend $50 and get 2,000 visitors overnight." These unprincipled, crooked promoters change their pitch with each new offer made, but always end up showing the same result. They deceitfully steal the traffic of other sites and divert it to yours, and as expected the targeted visitors won’t ever buy anything from your site. These visitors will visit your site without putting up any query. They won’t subscribe to free email offers. They will visit your site giving you some goose bumps and nightmares. Here their mission gets accomplished, but what about the bucks that you have spent…..?
To avoid getting cheated upon try to follow other SEO tactics that will work for your site including

• ezine advertising
• pay-per-click search engines
• article submissions
• publicity
• affiliate programs
• networking
• viral marketing
• buying other web sites

These tactics are worth spending your money and time to drive traffic to your web site.

Poor Configuration of Firewall Kills Search Engine Rankings

Many of you might have gone through the horrifying experience of finding your websites being removed from the search engines one fine morning. This must have left you with a question mark on your faces as to why it happened when you had done nothing to offend or displease the search engine spiders. This is exactly what happened with some webmasters whose websites were hosted by a compay that used SonicWALL Inc.'s special firewall software.

As a result of using this software, search engine spiders couldn't access their websites because the Firewall software didn't allow them to do so. The standard security settings of this software state that:

"An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver using this interface.The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise and control of the web server." (reference)

In simple and un-technical terms, it means that the search engines will not spider your website if this software is used without customizing it. In case the firewall has these settings, the connection to anyone asking for the robots.txt file will not be given so that it appears as if the site is offline.

The bad news is that this is not good from SEO point of view because the robots.txt file is the one which all search engines request and ask for before they index your website. So, the bottom line is that if you too are finding your site being removed from the search engines, regardless of good incoming links and well optimized web pages , you need to talk to your web host whether their firewall is the culprit, blocking search engines to request for robots.txt file. Chances are that your web host is not aware of this problem.