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How to Use SEO to Make Money

Have you ever tried to check out one of their websites? How many are not on the first page for at least one of their keywords? I can answer that question – none that I know of! These guys know how to do it, and they started off by themselves. OK, perhaps now they can afford to pay others to do it, but you can be pretty sure that you won’t get the service that they get!

If you were paying for a service, would you like the guy you were paying to get you on the first page to offer the same service to your competition? Of course you wouldn’t. SO what chance carpet cleaning business think you have of employing a SEO consultant and getting a top 10 position? I can answer that on no fingers!

Come on! Are you rally so naďve as to believe all these claims to get you in the top 10, let alone Number 1 as some claim? OK, Number 1 for the keyword ‘whajotys’: anybody can do that (I shut my eyes and typed upholstery cleaners new york What you want is a Number 1 position for a good keyword in your niche, and nobody except Google can guarantee you that. The same applies with a top 10 position.

The only person capable of earning you a top 10 position for any page in your website is you. You have to optimize your page to make it appear attractive to the search engines. ‘Attractive’ allen stone memorial that your web page (Google lists pages, not sites) best meets the needs of a Google search for the information that your web page provides according to the calculations of the statistical mathematical analytical system that is loosely termed the Google algorithm, applied by so-called spiders that analyze the content of each of your web pages.

If you want to use SEO to make money, you should learn how it works. Learn how to make your website attractive to the Google algorithm. Learn what semantics are and how to use them to fool the spiders. How to maximise the power of the links between the various pages in your website. How cheap upholstery cleaning the complete latent power that is charged in each of your web pages, and how to use the content on these pages to drive an unlimited amount of traffic to your site.

That information is available to anybody who wants to seek it online, if they know what they are looking for or where to look for it. That information is available, and it can make a massive difference to your online success. Anybody upholstery clean any form of online business needs to know this information and it is available for you free of charge online if your know what to look for.

The problem with many, however, is that they don’t know what to look for or where to get it. They take the advice they find, only carpet cleaning business too late that what they have learned is wrong. Stop being obdurate (look it up) and get it right for a change. That can make all the difference between failure and success.

Sourse: http://www.corsavoo.com/seo/0,2577,424282,00.html

Posted in Seo Tips | No Comments »

Social Media and Internal Issues

My dad used to tell me the main reason most relationships don’t work out is that one or both of the people involved is looking for the other person as the solution to their problems. His notion was that if you were happy by yourself, you’d likely be be happy with who you are partnered with. It seems all too simple, but I liked to believe it.

I can’t help but to think of this same concept when companies are trying to introduce themselves to social media marketing. Often times they are looking to hire a consultant or a social media agency to help them formulate or implement a social media campaign. And with this hiring, comes the aspiration for a campaign to launch and become viral, for the company to feel sales skyrocket, and for the story to end happily ever after.

Like love, social media marketing isn’t that simple. For it to be effective, there are internal issues that a company must face, otherwise the effort will never leave the ground. So if you are a company diving into social media marketing, I encourage you to take a look at the magical mirror on the wall and ask yourself:

1. Do I have a decent product or service? When I say “decent”, I mean ethical, valuable to the end-user, and up-standing. If your main purpose is to let people know about products that don’t hold their weight, social media is the wrong route. Not only will these customers point out the faults, but they will publicize them.

2. Am I willing to cross boundaries? Social media marketing can be a little edgier than traditional marketing, and in its essence is is not be as polished or buttoned up as a press release. Therefore, you must be ready to take chances and cross boundaries that have never been crossed before. This means that you must be willing to bypass an internal review or approval from time in order to develop content that will better resonate with your audience. If you aren’t willing to get your hand slapped time to time, you may risk watering-down an otherwise successful campaign.

3. Am I willing to champion internal change? Probably some of the most effective social media marketing (in my opinion) is when a company uses social media to meet the needs of its customers. The challenge in this is that these tactics often demand internal change and are met with resistance, thus requiring an internal champion to tear down the cubical walls separating the marketing team from the product development and customer service teams. This is exciting and challenging at the same time.

4. Am I willing to talk about something other than my product? Are you willing to give more than you take? Are you willing to see interactions that are around but not about your product? If your answer is no, you may want to put more money into advertising. If your answer is yes, and you are willing to take the leap into valuable discussions with your customers, then you are on the right track.

Since we nearing the completion of our book, “Social Media is a Cocktail Party” (and I have analogies on my brain) I will encourage every marketer before entering social media marketing to take a good look at themselves in the mirror. Just like a cocktail party, you don’t want to be the girl with the toilet paper on her shoe, or the one with her skirt tucked in her pantyhose. Not only will you look ridiculous, but you will make a fool of yourself no matter how hard you try.

Have any more questions you think should be added? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

Sourse: http://www.smallbusinessnewz.com/blogtalk/2008/08/07/social-media-and-internal-issues

Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

Link Building Tips

Two of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.

On this website I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.

Before we get started, it’s important to understand the fundamentals…

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. An ‘internal link’ is a link within the same website. An ‘external link’ takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The term ‘backlink’ means when another website links to yours.

There are 4 different types of links:

• URL Link – This is simply a website url that is a link.

http://www.affordable-seoservices.com

• Text Links (aka static links) – This is the most common type of link and looks
like this: text link

The html code for a standard text link:

<a href=”http://www.website-url-here.com”>text you want your visitor to see here</a>

• Image Links – An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

The html code for a standard image link:

<a href=”http://www.webpage-destination-url.com”><img src=”http://www.any-website.com/image-name.jpg”></a>

(in the above code notice the “.jpg”, this is the type of image, that could also be “.gif”, “.bmp”, etc.)

• Dynamic Links – These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have ‘extra codes’ to perform special functions.

Examples of basic ‘dynamic links’:

<span onclick=”window.location=‘http://www.website-url-here.com’ “>text you want your visitor to see here</span>

<a href=“javascript:window.location=‘http://www.website-url-here.com’ “>text you want your visitor to see here</a>

(these types of links can appear in many different forms)

It is important to be able to recognize these types of links, even if you are not familiar with web design and programming. You don’t have to memorize the codes, just learn to identify each type of link.

Links provide navigation for human visitors and for ‘spiders’ (aka: crawlers, robots, bots). Simply put, a spider is a computer program that goes to websites and gathers information. Search engines use spiders to visit and ‘index’ your website. This means that they gather information about your site in order to list it in their search results.

When the search engine spiders index your website, they follow the links to get from one webpage to another. It’s important to know that search engines cannot follow ‘dynamic links’ and do not follow html links that have a special code in them that says ‘no follow’.

Example:

<a href=http://www.website-url-here.com rel=”nofollow”>text you want your visitor to see here</a>

The place where ‘no follow’ is commonly found is in the “meta tags” section of the website. Simply put, meta tags are information that is for the spiders only and is not seen by human visitors. You can see the code for any website in your browser by choosing ‘view source’. (From Internet Explorer, choose Page » View Source. From Firefox choose View » Page Source)

Example of ‘no follow’ in the meta tags:

<META NAME=”Robots” CONTENT=”No Follow”>

If a search engine spider cannot follow a link from another website to yours, you can still receive visitors but the link will not have any value from a search engine optimization perspective.

What types of links should you get?

There are 2 types of links that you can get:

• One-way links - A one-way link is when another website links to you and you don’t link back to them.

• Reciprocal links - A reciprocal link is when a website links to you and you link back to them.

One-way links are more valuable in the eyes of the search engines. However, each link has its own individual value based on: how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, how much authority the website that links to you has, etc.

Also, it’s important to know that you can get links that have ‘no value’ in the eyes of the search engines, but they bring you hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors…

Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you the better. However, building links takes time and energy and if you focus on getting ‘high-quality links’, you will get a bigger return on your investment. 50 high quality links can be much more valuable from a search engine optimization perspective than 1000 ‘low quality links’.

What’s a high quality link? - Links that brings you Page Reputation (which shows the search engines that other related websites consider you to be important), and links that give you PageRank. Sometimes both at once, sometimes not…

To get high rankings on your website, you want to obtain links for targeted keywords. For this reason it’s necessary to start with Keyword Research.

If your website is about “bird watching”, the first step is to ‘do keyword research’ and find out which keyword you should aim for. While you could just start getting text links for the keyword phrase “bird watching”, if no one is searching for that - you won’t get any visitors. There’s no sense in ranking on the first page for a keyword that no one is looking for.

Or, if there is a lot of competition for that keyword, you might want to pick a “lower hanging fruit”.

Here is a great free keywords tool. (The numbers you see are searches/day.)

Another important part is making sure your page is optimized for the keyword you are targeting. If you are focussed on building one way links to your site but the links have anchor text which doesn’t even appear on your page, you will likely be wasting your time. (I say likely assuming that you have some competition for your targeted keywords, if there is no competition then it doesn’t matter).

In this case a site that has fewer one way links but much better on-page optimization is likely to rank higher. Or maybe you are building one way links to your site but they are just url links and not anchor-text links. Another site that has less links than you but better quality (anchor-text) will be likely to rank higher.

Ideally, you want to build a lot of one way links that have anchor text which includes the primary and secondary keywords that your page is optimized for. Google also uses Latent Semantic Indexing which (in a nutshell) means that they study the synonyms of the keywords on your page. This is to prevent spammers from just loading every second word with their keywords. Their algorithm looks at all the words on your page and how they relate to each other.

So, there’s no sense in building one way links if your content is not worthwhile. You want to optimize your pages for your visitors first. Then, you can go through and “sprinkle” your keywords. Then, go out and get one way links with the anchor-text of your targeted keywords, ideally getting most of these links from websites that are related to yours.

Yes, Google also looks at the relationship between your website’s content and the websites that links to you’s content. Fewer links to your business site from other business sites will be more valuable link-wise than more links coming to you from a site about video games..

Don’t make these link building mistakes:

• Don’t spend all your time getting one way links from sites with no Page Rank. One or two links from related Page Rank 5+ sites can be worth more than 100 links from sites with no PR. Get more information on **Page Rank.**
• Be careful about buying links or you can get banned. Especially be careful about Site Wide links. If your website only has a few backlinks one day and the next day you have hundreds Google will see this and penalize you.
• Don’t spend all your time building one way links that are url-links, you want to get anchor-text links.
• Make sure the links you get are worth something, don’t get “No-Follow” links.

Happy Link Building!

Source - http://onewaylinkbuilding.org/info/link-building-101/

Posted in Google, Seo Tips, Web design | 1 Comment »

Ways to Increase Link Density and Popularity

In today’s race to the top of the Google SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages), there are a number of factors that can help you achieve those coveted spots. While certain techniques may weigh better than others based on your industry and level of competition, there is no questioning the power of links.

There are several methods, some common and some yet to be discovered, you can try out to help boost your link density and search rankings. While it would be near impossible to go into great detail on all methods (that would require a book) below I have outlined some of the more common techniques a web site owner can use to increase their site’s popularity.

1. Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links used to be a huge asset and played a significant role. Today, fewer sites are employing this technique as it is thought by many to have no role in the eyes of Google. This is simply not true. While the overall value of reciprocal links has declined over the years, they can and will still help your rankings if done correctly.

The key with reciprocal links is very simple - relevance. If you trade links only with highly relevant sites, you will get value from this. There are some things to watch out for: ensure that the links returning to you are spider friendly, that they reside on pages with as few links as possible, and are contextualized, meaning the content on the page, and preferably the site as a whole, is related to the content of your link and site.

If you contact a relevant site to request a link exchange, keep the email personal to help grab the attention of the webmaster. Most link exchange emails are spammy automated submissions and are deleted without being read. Write the subject and entire email in such a way as to entice the user to read on, but keep it short. Offer to put their link up first, or even better yet, put it up before you contact them.

2. Purchasing Links
Google has been devaluing links, and in extreme cases, even penalizing sites for selling links, but there is no denying that this technique still works as many sites have skyrocketed to the top of the SERP’s through the art of buying links.

Many high profile sites such as major and local newspaper publications sell text links, yet nobody seems to be penalized for it as the publications rank well with high PR and the site they link to ranks well as a result.

If you choose to take the gamble and purchase links back to your site, check out how they are linking back, how relevant they are, and try to get a sense of how their site is treated by Google. If you see other sites that appear to have purchased links from them, check their back links and see if the linking site appears (although it may not be displayed as Google displays very little of this information to the public these days).

It is thought that if penalties will arise from the sale of links, that only the selling site will be penalized. Even if this is the case, Google’s policy could change at any moment, so be warned that this could potentially come back to bite you.

3. Industry Contacts
Get in touch with your industry contacts and ask them if they will link to your site. You just never know, and the worst they can say is no. This is usually best requested in person or by phone if it is someone you have a good relationship with. It may include manufacturers or retailers of your products, or various business partners and companies you have a relationship with.

4. Good Old Fashion Content
Believe it or not it works. If your site is loaded with original, valuable content, you will get some people linking to your site on their own. While you can not base your entire linking strategy around this concept, as it could take forever to get enough links, rest assured knowing that if you build it, some will link.

5. Build a Blog
Everyone and their dog seem to have a blog these days, and for good reason - they work. Blogs help you create a never ending stream of content, and if updated regularly, written well, and interesting, you will find people will link to it. Not only that, others may pick up your blog through your RSS feed - this can result in an increase in both links and site traffic. Be sure to utilize your Digg and other social media accounts within your blog to help gain a little extra attention.

6. Social Media
Promote your site and your blog using various social media tools. When someone “Diggs” or “Stumbles” your article you can not only get a link back to your site from the media platform, but you can also see traffic generated by this. The more people that flag your article, the more traffic you can get, and the higher the value of the link.

Creating company profile pages on platforms such as Squidoo, Facebook, MySpace, and even uploading photos and videos to Flickr and YouTube, can all count as back links to your site, so be sure to utilize these platforms to the fullest extent. Do not use these networks to spam them full of links, but rather to inform. Build unique relevant content and become a member of the community, and you will find your links will work much harder for you.

7. Article Syndication
When you write worthwhile articles, submit them to any known article aggregation websites in your industry or great general portals such as ezinearticles.com. When submitted to the right places you can drive traffic and increase your links. Again, be sure to include a link or two within your article that links back to your site when possible.

8. Press Releases
Press releases are still doing wonders. When your business hits a milestone, releases a new product, or has anything worthy of a press release, issue one through the services of PRWeb. You will get a link back to your site, and you may also get some targeted traffic from those interested when reading your release.

If your press release is of significant news, you may also find bloggers and other writers referencing it and linking to it from their articles, providing even more value. Ensure that with any press release you include deep links back into your site. Links from within the bio are helpful, but those integrated into paragraphs of the release are worth much more.

9. Comments
I know I am going to get a hard time for this one, but if used wisely, it can help. When reading relevant blog posts, if you have something useful, constructive, and worthwhile to say, leave a comment and include your link if they provide the option. A comment like: “nice post” is inappropriate, but if you have something to add or contribute that others will find of interest then go for it. These links can add up, and they do add some value. Don’t stuff your comment or name with keywords, keep it natural, and use your real name.

10. Form Posts and Signatures
This is an area where you may be able to grab a few links, but it is also one you need to be careful about as it can backfire. I do NOT recommend going out and wildly posting in random forums and including your link.

Where this area can be useful is if you establish yourself as a solid contributor to a particular forum directly related to your industry. Once you are established, and people know and trust your name, and understand that you are not there as a spammer, then you can consider adding your link to your signature file, and including the odd link in your forum posts when it is fully in context. This will allow you to get the odd relevant, inbound link. Check with the terms of the specific forum though before you start. Some do not allow links of any kind.

11. Testimonials
You see them on many sites offering products or services, and quite often they include a link back to the submitter’s website. If you have used a product or service, don’t be afraid to write a testimonial for the company. In many cases online businesses will post your testimonial along with a link. The testimonial helps that business instill confidence in their customers, and you get the valuable link back.

12. Directory Submissions
Yes, do still submit your site to the major directories. While DMOZ can be very difficult to get into, once you are there, it is like gold and will play a part in your top rankings. Yahoo directory has a high price $299US, but can also provide you with a valuable inbound link. Consider submitting to the major directories, as well as any industry specific directories. These links add up and will contribute to your site’s well being.

13. Link Bait
We have heard this phrase thrown around for a while now, but the technique has worked long before the phrase “link bait” was coined. Why all the hype? Because it works.

Take a look at your web site, your business and your industry. See if you can think of some way to attract people to link to your site. Perhaps sponsor a contest, add an elaborate and unique tool, write a controversial article, provide something useful for free - whatever you do, do it well, and promote the heck out of it, and people will naturally link to you.

A Few General Rules:
Before you actively seek out a link from a specific site do some investigating to ensure that the site is not spamming or using any black hat techniques. If they are, run.

If the link you are seeking is merely for you to try and boost your link density, then also check out how they are linking to other third party sites.

Does the site use the rel=nofollow attribute? Are the pages your link would reside on blocked by the search engines, or do they use the robots Meta nofollow? Are they using other techniques that would not allow a spider to follow them (such as JavaScript, Flash, or frames)? If so, you may want to move on.

And a note on Google PR (Page Rank) - the PR you see on your toolbar is outdated. While it can give you some insight, just because it says 0, doesn’t mean it is. Also what has a 0 or 1 today, could be a 4 or 5 tomorrow. Don’t use PR as your sole means of deciding if you should obtain a link or not.

Summary
Using any or all of these linking methods will help you to increase your link density. There is power in diversification. Use variations on anchor text and descriptions, use inline text links within articles, and gain links in as many different venues as possible. By being diverse your site will stand the best chance of being around well into the future.

Today, blogs are huge and can be a strong asset, but what would happen if tomorrow Google decided to ban blogs? Highly unlikely, but it could happen, and if it did, would your site survive? By being diverse, your site has the best chance to survive change.

Refer http://www.seo-news.com/

Posted in Google, Seo Tips | 1 Comment »

Competitor Analysis and Search Engine Optimization

What is a Competitor Analysis?

Have you ever wondered how a particular competitor always does so much better than you do in the search engines or online overall? A competitor analysis is one very effective method of deconstructing their online marketing strategy to discover how they are doing so well.

What Exactly Can a Competitor Analysis Reveal?

This is a very common question because many site owners don’t know the lengths that a competitor may have gone to obtain top rankings. The following examples are some of the discoveries I have uncovered in a typical competitor analysis:

• By examining a competitor’s link structure I have found that many of the links with the most credibility came from websites the competitor actually owned. (Determining the ownership of the domain names required some sleuthing because the whois information was ‘private’ but ultimately the info became available.) In a couple of cases several of these domains had legitimate websites and this prompted some great ideas for my client to attain more traffic.
• While researching a competitor I noticed that although the competitor’s website was very similar to my client’s, there was one major difference; the competitor’s website structure was far better optimized. By outlining the structure the competitor used and improving on it with my own expertise our client had the information he needed to apply changes to his own site.
• In another instance I provided a client the list of all the pay per click keywords and organic keywords that each competitor was currently using. The client was flabbergasted when she realized just how many keywords she had missed promoting for her own comparable services.

The Basics of Conducting Your Own Competitor Analysis

Now that you have seen some examples of what can be gleaned from a competitor analysis you might want to conduct one of your own. For the purpose of this tutorial I am assuming that you are fairly new to SEO so I created a basic plan that works for most users; but even this will require a little preparative reading.

Many more free SEO tutorials are available if you find yourself needing more information. The following is an outline of the most revealing steps with the least amount of technical expertise required. Please keep in mind that the objective of this competitor analysis is to compare what you find to your own website later on. What you find may not seem earth shattering (or it might) but this analysis is meant to show you what you might be missing:

Competitor Walkthrough
Grab a piece of paper and a pen and while you walk through your competitor’s website look for any particularly obvious search engine optimization techniques. Here are some elements you should check:

• Does the title tag appear well written and if so is there a common syntax used throughout the website?
• Look at the source code of the home page and search for “H1″, “H2″ or “H3″. Do any of these tags show up? If so that means the competitor is using heading tags within the page. Now try identifying the text they used in the heading. Likely you will find the competitor’s Keyphrase is found within the tag.
• Check if the navigation is search engine friendly. Sometimes the navigation is a drop-down menu; make sure it is a type that is search engine friendly. If not, check the footer of the page and see if a text menu is placed there.
• Keep an eye out for a pattern of keywords being used in text links. Certain words are likely to appear more often and these are likely some of the target phrases your competitor has decided to focus on.
• Look for nofollow tags. No follow tags are often used to channel Page Rank efficiently throughout a website. This is called a themed structure and it can have incredible ranking benefits. If you see a pattern of nofollow tag use then you can be relatively certain your competitor has/had a well-informed SEO firm on hire.
• While you roam through the site look for pages that have particularly high Google PageRank and try to identify why. In most cases these pages have information that visitors decided to link to. Perhaps this will give you some ideas for creating similar quality content for your website.
• Check the site for the presence of an XML sitemap. Usually it will reside at the root of the website so try typing in the basic URL of the competitor’s website and add (minus the quotes) “\sitemap.xml” on the end. The details within the sitemap might be a little confusing to you but just acknowledging that the competitor has one is noteworthy.
• Have you found any incidences of spam throughout the site? Take note, I have lost count how many competitors succeeded using shady tactics. This doesn’t mean you copy them, however, but it may at least give you yet another indication of what helped the competitor attain rankings. Believe me, in most cases these sites will get caught with their hands in the cookie jar at which point you won’t want to be associated with the same tactics.

I can’t possibly list everything you need to keep an eye out for when walking through a competitor’s website; at least not in an article format. Just keep an eye out for anything that looks particularly purposeful in the site and linking structure as well as the content of the website. If you find something you can’t be sure is worth noting, then try researching it online; chances are someone has written about the topic/concept or can provide you advice in a forum.

Backlink Analysis
This portion of the analysis will require that you use one of the following link analysis tools: OptiLink (not free but my first choice) or Backlink Analyzer from SEO Book (free). In each case these tools have excellent help files that I suggest reading in order to get the best results from the data they generate.

In this particular stage you are going to use your new tool to analyze the first 1000 backlinks of your competitor’s domain.

Program Setup Note: Be certain to set up the software to acquire Google Rank and Alexa Rank information for each backlink and filter out any rel=nofollow links. The setting is easily found on the front of both applications with the exception of the rel=nofollow which is an option in Optilink but automatically checked in Backlink Analyzer.

When the report is completed sort the backlinks by both PageRank and then Alexa Rank; examine each sorting separately.

Why Are Both PageRank and Alexa Rank Used?
The reason both are used is because they each have notable disadvantages and advantages. PageRank is notoriously unreliable especially lately since Google now penalizes the PageRank of any site with any relation to link buying. As a result, sites with low PR could be missed as a quality site. Furthermore Alexa Rank is a decent indicator of a site’s popularity but I can’t rely on it since it is not an established indicator of how well a site is regarded in Google. Between the two stats, however, we can glean a good indication of the sites that have the best reputation for link building.

Creating a List of Authority Competitor Backlinks

Using Excel or another spreadsheet application copy and paste the data you received from OptiLink or Backlink Analyzer into a worksheet. Then create a copy of the sheet so that you have an exact copy of all the data on a single sheet. Now follow these steps:

1. On the first worksheet sort the data by Google PageRank (PR) from highest numbers to lowest. Now remove all of the pages that had less than a PageRank of 4 so you are left with the best sites according to this data. OR just separate the lower PageRanked sites so they don’t get in the way.
2. On the second worksheet sort the data first by Alexa Ranking (sort lowest to highest numbers) and then do a secondary sort by the Google PageRank (highest to lowest numbers). Delete or remove all sites that have a negative Alexa Ranking (”nm” is how it shows in OptiLink) or otherwise partition them from your other more valuable data.

Now you have two excellent worksheets that provide lists of authority pages that have links pointing to your competitor.

How to Use the Backlink Data

Take some time now to filter the links by domain and you will see just how many links per domain each competitor has. If you see a website that appears to be linking to a website a lot it is usually because either the competitor owns the website or has purchased a link on the website. To find out if your competitor owns the website try running a Whois on the domain.

Also check the content of the link data for how many pages listed are from the competitors own website. If you see a great deal from their own website then you can be relatively assured they have good content which is important to note; perhaps you need to focus on better content on your own website OR how to get others to notice your good content.

Now the most logical step is to figure out which links are worth getting for yourself. Chances are a decent number of the links you found are from pages that would be willing to link to you as well.

Don’t Lose Focus on Your Own Website

So now you have a few tools to conduct a cursory competitor analysis. You will likely find some very useful data that you can act on but is this all you need to do? Is a competitor analysis going to be the golden key to increased profits? No. I have a great deal of faith in competitor analysis because I know determining what a competitor is doing successfully can improve a marketing plan dramatically. That said, you also have to pay close attention to your own website and the quality information that can be gained from using free tools like Google Analytics or handy paid tools like ClickTracks Professional.

Using a quality analytics program will allow you to get as granular as monitoring the success of each page in your website with details such as: where did visitors come from (somewhere in your site or from another?), how long on average visitors stayed at a particular page, what keywords led visitors to the page (if any), and much more.

With proper analytics you can actually compare and contrast the effects of minor edits to a page’s content; this is called multivariate testing. For example you can run tests to see if you can improve the retention of visitors by adding a better image or a better tag line because you noticed that many visitors were entering at a page deep within your site that was not originally designed as an entry page.

Truly, the sky is the limit with analytics and it would be irresponsible for me to state that competitor analysis is more important than making your own website run smoothly. Do yourself a favour, if you haven’t already got an analytics program running on your site, get it done now or learn how to use the one you have; it will pay off in the long run. Especially when you want to monitor the success of the tactics you applied to your site from your competitor analysis findings.

Refer http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/2008/02/07/seo-step-two-of-ten-competitor-analysis

Posted in Google, Seo Tips | 1 Comment »

10 SEO Rules for Designers

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a vital component of any website. As a web designer or blogger, it’s important you understand how SEO works. Here are ten easy rules that will immediately improve the SEO on all of your web sites.

This is a guest article written by Joshua Jeffrey’s who describes himself as a “busybody in the local and national design/web world” - you can read more about him on his blog.
Rule Zero: Do Not Cheat. Period.

If you walked into a room full of genius scientists with PHDs, do you think you could outsmart them all? No. Google has hundreds of rooms full of genius scientists with PHDs, and their job is to work 60 hours a week to make sure you can’t fool Google. You can’t outsmart them. Ever. Ignore any advice on trying to cheat the system and focus on making great web sites with great content, and your sites will show up fine in searches.
Rule One: Stick to Your Keywords

Pick a few keywords or phrases that describe your site. Use them, and words related to them, whenever it’s natural to do so. Repeating them uselessly is no good (rule Zero), use them in sentences, headlines, and links.
Rule Two: Content is King

Users don’t search for design, they search for content. If your site doesn’t have content people want, no one will look at it.

Every page on your site should follow the Inverted Pyramid. Each page should lead with a relevant H1 tag with one of your keywords, and the first paragraph of text should be a summary of the rest of the page.
Rule Three: Clean Code is Searchable Code

Build your sites in a text editor, and write clean, human-readable HTML. The HTML should follow the conceptual structure of the page, navigation first, followed by the H1 tag, then the first paragraph, etc. Try to use descriptive tags when possible. Use UL for lists, P for paragraphs, H tags for heads and subheads, and STRONG for bolded text. Don’t overuse Divs.

Your site can still be artistic and cool, that’s what CSS is for.
Rule Four: The Home Page is the Most Important Page

Your home page is the key to your site being found by search engines. It should summarize the rest of the site, and give a clear, compelling reason for a user to look at the other pages in the site.
Rule Five: Links Have Meaning

Links

Search engines pay a lot of attention to the links on your site, and the words used in those links. Never use “click here” or “see more” for a link. The link text should describe where the link will take the user, such as “more examples of CSS web design” or “learn how we can improve your SEO.”

The more relevant the links on a page, the more findable the page becomes. Don’t go overboard, and don’t link to anything irrelevant. If your page is focused on minimalist web design, a link to the Design MeltDown page on minimalism will boost your SEO. A link to a hilarious picture of a cat will not.
Rule Six: Title Tags for the Win

Every page in your site should have a title with the site name and a short description of the page. About 60 letters total. Include a keyword. Remember that the page title is what appears in search results, it should give users a clear reason to click on it.

Your navigation links should have title attributes that match the titles of your pages. This looks like <a title=”name of page” href=”link”>. It’s a small thing, but it will give you a significant SEO improvement.
Rule Seven: Alt Tags Matter

Every image on your site should have an alt tag. Especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on CSS tricks, labelling a screenshot “example of rounded CSS corners” will improve your page’s findability. Labelling it “screenshot” or “image” will do the opposite.
Rule Eight: Ignore Most Meta Tags

A long time ago meta tags were the secret to SEO. Those days are gone. The only meta tag that really matters now is the description tag. Search engines may use it to provide the text under the link to your page in their results. Make sure it describes the page in a way that explains why a user searching for your content would want to look at your page.
Rule Nine: Have a Site Map

Make sure you have a site map. This is an xml file that describes the structure of your page. Make one, and give it to Google.
Rule Ten: Design for Humans

Search engines are designed to find what humans want. That means the best way to make your site findable is to design it for humans. Your job as a designer is to solve a problem, not make art, prove a point, serve your ego or break a boundry. In this case, your problem is to provide your users with a site that is easy to use and full of what they’re looking for. If you can do that, the search engines will find you.

For knowing more i refer Web designer Wall

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Blogging To Increase Your Rank

An online diary or journal, which is regularly updated, is termed as a blog. An acronym of weblog, a blog is used to narrate experiences or share information online with like minded people. It is basically done to interact with people or share the information relating to a product or service that a company or individual offers. But, lately, a blog has been identified as one of the primary tools in search engine optimization.

Any website has to be optimized to get indexed in search engine result pages. It has to be infused with keywords apart from offering fresh and original content. Websites satisfying these conditions are ranked high by search engines. Blogs offer exactly the same and hence get a high ranking by major search engines.

Why are blogs ranked high by search engines?

A search engine highly ranks websites with original content. A good blog rich in fresh and original content can, hence, augment the chances of improving a website’s ranking.

Another criterion that a search engine relies upon for ranking a website is the number of genuine back links that it receives. If the blog on a website is made interesting enough for fellow bloggers, regular readers and popular websites alike, there is no reason for the blog not to receive back links from all of them. Fervently sticking to a particular topic on the blog also makes it easy to get links from related websites and blogs. Inbound links can also be generated by getting your blog registered in one of the many blog directories. Thus your blog will get syndicated through the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, and notify regular readers of new postings and updates. It is a known fact that updated and edited sites are spidered more often by search engines thereby helping them in getting indexed almost instantly. Blogs can be used to point spiders and bots in the direction of your website.

Also, links from trusted sources are more valuable than links from new or unknown websites. Search rankings can be particularly boosted with links from .edu and .gov extensions. Blogs or forums with these extensions can be found. One can participate in the discussions of these blogs and the forum signatures and blog comments can fetch you back links. But be mindful of the content of your own blog or be ready to face the no follow attribute to your links.

The structure of a blog, which is devoid of flash, java script, or messy table structures, makes it easy for the search engine spiders to crawl through it. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) based blogs are trouble free to crawl through and HTML text rich. Frequent updates – be it five times a week or on a daily basis – makes the search engine spiders visit the website more frequently for fresh quality content. One or more entry a day can ensure frequent spidering of your websites in comparison to other sites that do not use blogs.

Another reason for blogs being ranked high by search engines is that some blog host applications such as the movable type create a new page for each entry made. With search engines preferring larger sites over smaller ones, this feature is particularly helpful in increasing the number of pages of the blog, in turn, ranking it among the top most in a search engine index.

Due to the above-mentioned reasons, a blog, or a website that includes a blog, for that matter, generally ranks high in the search engine result pages. It is, then, quite understandable that webmasters are using blogs to improve their rankings in search engines. Moreover, most of the search engines including Google have specific blog searches addressed to finding information available only on blogs. Webmasters do not afford to be left out of these searches. Hence, it has been found that almost all websites use blogs for the search engine optimization needs of their websites.

A well done blog on a content thin website can do wonders to the traffic inflow and the overall ranking of the website in a search engine index, by gathering coveted links and allowing the benefits of these links flow through to the rest of the site. There are copious instances of targeted blogs having strengthened the websites no end, as far as search engine traffic is concerned.

Other side of the story

The popularity of blogs with search engines made it a weak-target for spammers. Spammers filled blogs with useless comment spam and the real purpose behind creating blogs got lost, with blogs being created only to receive precious link backs to undeserving websites or as a tool to invite spiders to crawl through them more often. Splogging or spam blogging has thus become rampant among webmasters trying to gain an improved ranking in search engine result pages.

To counter this spamming, Google and other search engines have started supporting a no follow attribute that is applied to the links in a blog. It is a way of telling the search engines that the web site owner, does not, in any way, associate with or support the link.

Blogs are one of the best ways to add to the point content to your website. At the same time, it is necessary not to allow the blog to be spammed. A meticulous working on the blog can render it an effective tool in search engine optimization. Keywords can be spoken of in a more meaningful way, while new content, too, can be regularly added without hassesls.

Refrence

http://www.itsallaboutlinks.com/article/701/showdescription.htm

http://www.blueappleonline.com/

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SEO Tips: You have 3 seconds to capture and hold your visitors attention

Let’s start by saying the first 3 seconds is the most important for capturing your visitors attention. I refer to it as the golden moment.

Okay let’s get right to it, someone from somewhere has just entered your website, you have just seconds (or some would argue milliseconds) to capture their attention and give them a reason to stay. This is where every client in the past has turned to me and asked; How can we accomplish this, and is there a method?

Well there’s a three point checklist that every visitor mentally goes through, even you.

• First, Do I continue viewing this page or not?
• Second, Do I like the page or not?
• Third, Do I believe the information or not?

And as you know from your own experience, just one No to any of the questions above, and quick as a click they are gone.

Now if you really think about it there’s a lot going on in the mind of the visitor, so let’s break it down to a 10 second timeline to help you better understand what’s going on.

• First, What happens in the first 3 seconds?
• Second, What happens between 4-7 seconds?
• Third, What happens between 7-10 seconds?

It’s important to note that these time periods can overlap.

Studies conducted by NextStage and others have demonstrated that (in general) people respond to daily, non-critical information within 10-15 seconds of first receiving that information.

First, Attraction
The first 3 to 5 seconds is the period where you have to affect or influence the viewer so they’ll stay. Your visitor is using this time to decide if the information is something there interested in. (Some studies indicate this interval is actually at the millisecond level). In any case, this is the attraction phase of information interaction. The clock is ticking so don’t waste their time, put your most interesting information and/or most eye catching graphics prominently up front.

Remember at this point people are not evaluating the usefulness of the information. They,re just quickly scanning the page and considering if they want to continue exploring the information in order to learn whether or not the material has value to them. To put it another way, they are considering how much time they want to invest and if the investment is warranted.

When you were quickly scanning this information on this website prior to slowing down in reading it, you were in the Attraction phase.

Second, Engagement
OK, lets assume the visitor past thru the initial 3-5 seconds stage and is still with you. Now the next stage is where your visitor is determining if they can understand the material well enough to justify the effort and time to comprehend the information. This normally takes approximately 4-7 seconds.

This is the engagement phase of interaction. This is a pivotal moment, your information has to go from “being pretty” to “being useful”.

If you’re still reading this, at this point you’ve stopped scanning and have slowed down and started reviewing this information, you’re trying to quickly determine if the information makes sense and is useful or fills your needs. Even though you haven’t determined its usefulness yet, you are most definitely mentally engaged with the material. Literally, this material has engaged your attention.

Third: Actionability
Once again let’s assume your visitor has made it to the actionability stage of this process.

This stage occurs around 6-8 seconds into the engagement.  This is when your visitors are coming to their own conclusions on how to respond to the information being presented.

This is the actionability phase of interaction, information containing specific actions (save the material for later, reread immediately to clarify, et cetera).  You can actually stretch this time out to 10 or even 15 seconds before the decision centers of the brain determine the best action to be taken for the viewers’ individual needs. At this point your visitor is engaged and beginning to become consciously informed of what action to take.

They have slowed down and have already read sections of your material and are actively looking for key concepts and ideas which they can use.

Now in your case, maybe you’ve decided that this article is worth a read, but not now, so you’ll probably bookmark it to read later.

In either case, you are acting on or taking action on the information in this article.
Therefore your materials must affect or influence and than engage and cause the visitor to take action within a 3-10 second time period. Today in our time-crunched world most people will barely give you those 10 seconds unless they’re certain they’re going to find some value in the information presented.
………………………………………………..

Let’s dig a little deeper.
We’ve taken our 10 second timeline and broken it down into three distinct periods of time. We’ve discussed what happens in each period of time.
Now we’ll discuss the differences between subjective experience and objective experience and how they play in to our visitors’ engagement of your web site.
Now most people are more familiar with objective experience, so we’ll start there.

Objective experience is simply those experiences that we all have and everyone can agree to. We all saw something happen and we can all agree on what we all saw happen. Objective experience is what our judicial system of law is concerned with: we all saw that lady slap that cop; we all saw that motorcycle run into that car.

Our objective experience is good for society, however it is not very good for us as individuals, because we all exist and survive in our own private world of subjective experience.

Subjective experience is our own very personal, private, internal understanding of things.
We were born into our own private subjective experience and will die in our own subjective experience. And everything that happens to us in between those two events is our personal subjective experience.  We think and love, laugh, cry, and grow old in subjective experience. We eat in subjective experience, we sleep in subjective experience.

It’s unique it doesn’t rely on the beliefs and ideas of others. If you like it or not, the majority of your day is spent in your own subjective experience (the cars we drive, the people we associate with, our tastes in food and clothing, mates and partners, and so on).

In fact we are the sum total of our subjective experiences.

These differences are very important because we humans respond to information subjectively and on a non-conscious level before our conscious mind responds to that same information.
In conclusion, what this means to anyone making money from or responsible for website marketing is that you have at most three seconds to get and keep your visitor’s interest and attention, and you have to figure out how to do this without the visitor knowing you’re doing it.

Because as soon as they figure out you’re watching them, their experience goes from totally subjective to mostly objective, and they’re no longer engaged in what you want them to do (probably make a purchase or otherwise convert while they’re on your website).

These 1-3 second, 4-7 second and 7-10 second intervals, action, engagement and actionability, are the science behind building super-sticky web pages and marketing materials.

Today’s science provides tools which can measure such behaviors which we can use to optimize our marketing materials such as our website and/or printed materials. One such company is NextStage’s and their TargetTrack tool. I only mention this because I have suggested them to my clients in the past and had good results.

Refrence: http://www.franklynsbay.com/The_first_3_seconds.html

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How To Build Backlinks via Google Alerts

Building backlinks is an essential, yet tedious job for most webmasters. Here are a few tools and tips to make that job just a little bit easier…
I am a member of many online forums. Most of these forums have to do with online marketing and site promotion. Recently, I came across a post on Ken Evoy’s SBI forum that truly caught my attention.

It basically described how to use Google Alerts to build your backlinks. Now for those not familiar with Google Alerts a little explanation is probably needed.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free program run by Google that allows you to keep track of any topic on the web. You select your “keywords” or “urls” and Google will alert you via email whenever links/ content containing your selected topics appear anywhere on the web.

It is an excellent way to keep informed about your domain or name. It is also perfect for keeping up-to-date on the latest information in your market niche or niches. It’s also a great way to find out what other people are saying about you or your site.

For example: if you have a site on “antique cars” then you would create a Google Alert for those keywords. Google will alert you by email whenever a new link/content related to those keywords appears on the web.

This is a great way to stay informed in your niche, but it is also a valuable source of potential linking partners. Many of those links are blogs that will allow comments with a link back to your site.

Google Alerts will probably send you 10-20 links each day, depending on the popularity of your chosen keywords. Just go to these blogs/links and see if you can leave a comment with some valuable additional information on what’s been discussed.

Don’t Spam

Please Note: Don’t spam; there are intelligent people behind most of these blogs, and they will recognize keyword spam when they see it. Your main goal should be getting targeted traffíc back to your site and any link PR should be secondary. Always put the reader or viewer first, especially if it’s on someone else’s site. Don’t talk about your site or your marketing - just join the conversation and add your comments/opinions/suggestions…

Enhance their site and they will reward you with traffic and a link. But you still have to keep your interests in the equation! You have to make sure you get your targeted keywords in the anchor text.

Keyword Market

First, if you’ve done your homework, your main keywords should already be in your domain name or url. Another way is to add your “keywords” + “guide” to your sig or signature. Such as: Name, Your Antique Cars Guide. If you’re an expert in your particular niche, many webmasters will kindly welcome your comments and links.

Since your main goal is the traffic, many webmasters don’t worry if there is a “no follow” attribute attached to the link. But if you are concerned about this - one way is to look at the source code to see if it has the “no follow” tag. I usually copy the whole source code of the page to my text editor and then do a simple “no follow” search.

No Follow

There is also a great little free comment tool called “Comment Kahuna” co-created by Jason Potash which will search blogs and tell you if they have the “no-follow” attribute or not, it will also give you the PageRank of each blog post. If you’re going to use blogs as a source of your backlinks, I suggest you try Comment Kahuna - it will make the task much easier and it’s free.

Actually, while the “no-follow” issue may be a concern for some webmasters, the savvy ones will realize these are links/sites Google is actively indexing and spidering, otherwise you wouldn’t get the alert in the first place. You must get your links into this whole mix of related, relevant sites to help raise your rankings. Also remember the other search engines may not even consider the “no-follow” tag.

Trackbacks
Likewise, creating trackbacks are another way of linking relevant content. Keep in mind, a trackback is simply an acknowledgement via a ping signal that is sent from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor). Then the receptor often places a link back to Site A showing its worthiness

Again, I am mainly concerned with the quality of the blog or link, rather than the linking structure. I want the targeted traffíc, and it doesn’t really matter whether the link has “no follow” because interested visitors only see a link they can click for other helpful information.

Other Linking Options

Since we are on the topic of link building, another useful way to build backlinks is to use Google Search or Google Blog search. Now if you’re looking for niche-related blogs just type in:

“(Keywords)” “powered by (blog scripts)”

For example, if you’re looking for some “antique cars” related links on WordPress blogs, you would search for:

“antique cars” “powered by wordpress”

And Google would give you a whole líst of sites on antique cars.

Now if you want to find the links that will allow comments, just repeat the Google search with:

“antique cars” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment” -”no comments”

Remember the “-” means posts that have no comments will not be displayed.

If you’re concerned with PageRank, Number of Backlinks, Alexa Ranking… of particular posts you can download and install the SEOQuake plugin. This handy SEO plugin can be attached to your browser and will give you helpful SEO information on the link or links you’re viewing.

Used in conjunction with Google, it can sort thru all these blog posts and give you the ones with the highest PR? Highest traffic? Highest number of backlinks? The more knowledge you have, the easier and more effective your link building will become.

Just remember, finding quality backlinks is probably the most tedious job for most webmasters. It takes time and it takes patience. By using Google Alerts you can have relevant keyword related links emailed to you each day. Use this information to help build your backlinks in relevant related niches. Do this consistently over a period of time and your site will get noticed and ranked higher.

About The Author
The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Marketing Tools. Everyone is profiting from Google, find out how you can too! Google Cash File

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Google Now In Indian Language

We have come a long way from our first Indic transliteration release to our current support for transliteration in 5 languages — Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu — for a broader set of Google products. We are also happy to release our very first English to Hindi translation service. Read on to understand how you can use these services to create, communicate and search in your language, and more.

• Type in your language easily on our Indic Transliteration Labs page.
• Add the transliteration gadget to your iGoogle page.

• Express your views and create more content: Blogger.

• Scrap your friends in your language: orkut.

• Find information: Google Suggest in your language.

You can now also try out our brand new English to Hindi translation service, and the translated search feature that lets you query in Hindi, obtain search results for the translated query in English, and then see the Hindi translations of these results.

For Read more please refer official google blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/building-indic-web.html

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