Online marketing and advertising is on the rise and more and more companies turn towards the internet to promote its products or services. Online marketing includes services such as SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing etc. All of these services have their own benefits such as speed, accuracy, reach, conversion rate etc.
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Hosting is an area where people gives little importance as far as SEO is concerned. There are different opinions among a large number of webmasters which makes it uncertain for webmasters whether to invest more in their hosting plans or not. But in my experience I would like to give importance to website hosting quality when it comes to adopting a good SEO strategy.
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Solving Duplicate File Issue with Search Engines
Oct 13 2009
Posted by George as Google, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo
Duplicate content have always been an obstacles for webmasters while going for search engine optimization. Many of the webmasters got their site penalized by the search engines for using duplicate content in their website. The main case of duplicate content arises when multiple URLs on the same domain pointed to the same content. This issue mainly arises in dynamic and CMS driven sites and the webmasters really live with the fear of being penalized by the search engines. The case arises when more than a single URL on the same website points to the same content under certain conditions. Consider pages in a CMS driven web site http://www.yoursite.com/products.php?item=woodchairs&category=chairs and http://www.yoursite.com/product.php?item=woodchairs&trackingid=3254&sessionid=7184 which points to the same content at http://www.yoursite.com/products.php?item=woodchairs
Link Exchange and Things to Take Care
Sep 24 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, link exchange, reciprocal linking, search engine marketing, seo
Reciprocal linking is practiced by a vast number of SEO / webmasters around the globe for a long time. This helped to get better ranking and backlinks for the websites in the initial stages, but as time progress reciprocal linking was started being used in the most unethical way and gradually search engine (especially Google) started cutting down on many sites which offered reciprocal linking services in an aggressive way. Many of the link exchange sites got penalized by Google in a really bad way. As per my experience, since then the link exchange stuff does not seem to work and many webmasters stopped wasting their valuable time on link exchange. But that doesn’t mean that reciprocal links have lost all its value. + READ MORE
Control the Search Engine Spiders with Robots.txt
Jul 26 2009
Posted by George as Google, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, seo
Search Engine Spiders are simple programs which crawl the content of your website, and helps in the indexing of websites. The search engine spiders and its activities have a major role in determining your search engine rankings. The main tool for controlling the search engine spider activities on your site is Robot.txt file. This is a simple .txt file which contains certain codes and just needs to be uploaded to the root of your website.
With the robots.txt file you will find it easier to direct the spiders to the most important pages on your website, so that you can improve your rankings for your website. You can also prevent the search engine spiders from crawling unwanted folders or least important files. For example, a website may contain less important pages such as privacy policy, terms and conditions, about us etc. These pages would not help in improving your search engine ranking and it is of no use for the search engine spiders in crawling these pages. In this case you can write special code on the robots.txt file, through which you can prevent the spiders from crawling them.
You can control the search engine spiders with a properly written robots.txt file, which is uploaded to the root of your website. In case if you have sub domains for you website, you need to create separate robots.txt for those sub domains. It is also better to have separate robots.txt for secure (https) and non secure (http) web pages.
To create a robots.txt file you just need to save your text file as robots.txt. The basic code for robots.txt is simple and is given below.
User-agent: *
User-agent is the name of the search engine spider that is allowed to crawl the website. The symbol * means, all the search engine spiders are allowed to crawl the site. If you want only particular search engine spiders such as Googlebot (Google), Slurp (Yahoo) msnbot (Microsoft) to crawl your website, then you can mention those names, instead of the symbol *. If you want to prevent a particular folder named “personal” of your website you can rewrite the code as below.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /personal/
The code “Disallow” specifies the folder or page on your website that you don’t want the spiders to crawl. If you want to prevent spiders from crawling more than one folder, you have to create multiple Disallow line to the robots.txt file. For example apart from “personal” folder, you want to prevent the spiders from the crawling your folders such as “archive”, “temp”, “clients”, then you can rewrite the code as below.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /personal/
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /clients/
In case you want all the spiders to ignore your above mentioned folders, except the Google spider to crawl your folder named “personal”, the code can be rewritten as follows.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /personal/
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /clients/
User-agent: googlebot
Allow: /personal/
These are just some of the simple robots.txt codes, that I would like to share with you. You can know more about robots.txt file and its codes from here. Hope it would be useful for all the readers.
Why My Website is Not Ranking Higher in Search Engines?
Jul 19 2009
Posted by George as Google, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, seo
Recently I met with a client for SEO consultation, who was already doing SEO for his site with some other Vendor. Since we knew each other personally, he asked me for free SEO consultation and I did the same. The main complaint of that guy was that despite a doing various offpage optimization he was not ranking for his major keywords and was much disappointed over his vendor’s performance. I just went through the site and after a day I got the reason why the site was not ranking for the major keywords. These reasons are very much applicable to majority of the website owners and as a result they lag back in the SERP and miss our important traffic to the site. Some of the reasons that I found out, which may be the reason for the non performance of the site are given below.
1) The site was not properly optimized for the major keywords
The major issue with its onpage optimization was that none of the pages were optimized for the major keywords. It is always advisable to optimize one of your pages for a particular keyword and it would be better not to optimize any other page for the same keywords. This would help in listing this page on Search Engine Results Page for that particular keyword.
2) No Sitemap
The site didn’t have the XML sitemap as well as the regular sitemap, which have made it difficult for the search engine spiders to easily crawl all the pages of the website. It is always advisable to upload an updated XML file to the root of the website, and also include the link to the regular sitemap on all the pages (preferably on the footer). The sitemaps should be updated whenever you make changes to the website structure.
3) Bad Navigational Structure
The website had poor navigational structure with unwanted functions, java scripts etc at the inappropriate places, which made it difficult for the search engine spiders to crawl through the pages. It is better to make your site navigation as simple as possible, to make it spider friendly.
4) Poorly Written Robots.txt file
The site had a poorly written robots.txt file which made the crawling of the search engine spiders more miserable. Make sure that your site contains a well written robots.txt file which allows the major search engine spiders to easily crawl through and block private pages from being crawled by the spiders.
5) Less Content
The Site had less content on his keywords, which deprived the major keywords from appearing in the content. A good and unique content based on the major keywords is essential for getting better SERPs and forms the back bone of the website.
6) Weak Backlinks
The site had a weak backlinks, which gave the search engine ranking a big blow. Even though the site was having a few backlink, it was of less quality, ie links from poor, irrelevant and spammy sites.
After the client paid importance to these factors, the site really showed tremendous improvement in SERPs. This can be applicable to all webmasters and take care that these points are not missed while going for SEO for your website.
Does Just Getting Backlinks Guarantee Better Results on Google?
Jul 19 2009
Posted by George as Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo
We all know that getting backlinks to our site plays a major role in getting better search engine placements. Most webmasters try to get as many inbound links as possible to ensure better search engine ranking for their site. This is a good ploy, but at times a website with more back links than its competitor may be ranking lower for the same keyword when compared with its competitor. This is a general scenario most webmaster faces and this issue should be deeply looked into. There are various reasons why a website with more inbound links than its competitor is losing the battle in the search engine rankings with its competitor for the same keywords. Just getting many backlinks alone does not aumatically make your site keywords rank highly.
As we all know that Google determines the ranking of websites in search results based on various metrics such as onpage and offpage factors.
On page factors are those which are visible on your website by making changes in the HTML code. On the other hand offpage factors are those factors that are not visible on your website but are done by working on external sites. So both offpage and onpage factors plays an important role in your search engine results. Offpage factors inlcudes link building activities such as article submissions, directory submissions, promoting the site through forums, blogs, social media sites etc. There are are certain parameters to keep in mind while getting backlinks for your site.
1) Try to get better backlinks, i.e quality backlinks from sites which are relevant to your site content.
2) Avoids links from link farms, low grade directories and other spammy sites.
3) Try to get links from pages with better page ranks, ie, 3 and above.
4) Add compelling content on your site and prompt other webmasters to link back to you.
5) Try to get your major keywords included in the anchor text of your inbound links.
These are the basic offpage factors needed for you to have an edge over your competitors in search engine results. Try these things and I am pretty sure that the results would be there at the doorstep for you.
I mainly use the URL shortener tools for using it through Twitter. Since Twitter allows only 140 characters per post, it is difficult to Tweet posts with longer URLs. The URL shortener tool shortens the long URL and makes it suitable to post via Twitter. When a visitor clicks on this shortened URL the visitor get redirected to the original URL. The two main tools that I use for this purpose are BudUrl and Bit.ly.
Initially I used BudUrl for shortening my URLs and posting them in Twitter. This tool gives the number of clicks occured on that shortened URL along with the IP address and IP Host name. The tools also offers advanced features and graph if we upgrade our account, but since I am not interesting in upgrading I didn’t go for that. The main drawback that I noticed with BudUrl is that there was a huge difference in the number of clicks shown in BudUrl and Google Analytics. For example if BudUrl shows 20 clicks, only 2 or 3 clicks would be displayed in Google Analytics and that too in the direct traffic section. I am still not able to find why this difference occurs.
Then I started using another URL shortener known as Bit.ly, which I found bit more interesting. This Then I started using another URL shortener known as Bit.ly, which I found bit more interesting. This tool showed features such as the number of clicks, referrers, locations etc. There was no option for upgrading, but the main thing that I was interested was that the difference in the number of clicks shown by Bit.ly and Google Analytics was not too high when compared to BudUrl. For example if the number of clicks in Bit.ly was 20, then Google Analytics showed 16-18 and that also in the direct traffic section.
Last few weeks has seen som many changes in the search engine world. These includes the announcement of Google Wave, the replacement of Microsoft’s Live with Bing, the end of Yahoo’s Geocities and Yahoo 360. These all things sends a feeling that the search engine optimization field is changing somehow.
The search engines has been there for almost last 10 years and we have seen a lot of changes since then. In the early years we were new to the search engines and were amazed at the results that the search engine produced. But over the times, search engine have evolved to a higher level, with Google leading the way and remaining at the helm for over a decade. Whenever anyone things of searching something on the net, the first name that comes into the mind is ‘Google’.
In the earlier days people used search engines to search something on the net, or search for some informations. But now it has changed rapidly and apart from searching stuffs on the net, people are using search engine for even taking decisions and other calculations. The search engine efficiency and its algorithms has become more complex and major search engines are trying too harder to stay in the top search engine brackets. Till some time back no search engine were comfortably able to read and crawl the text on the flash files and certain Javasripts. But Google has somewhat broken that jinx and has thrown more challenges to its competitors.
These all facts have brought the Search Engine (SEO) Professionals to work harder and stay up to date with the changing algorithms and tools. But in my opnion even with these advancements of the Search Engine algorithms the basics of SEO has not changed. The basic of the search engine optimization still remains the same, but the style of doing it has changed. So every SEO professional should be well equipped to adapt to these technological advancements.
The basic of SEO is to build a search engine friendly website structure and a good keyword research, so that the website does not perform badly in the search engine results page (SERP). The process of link building is also the same and does not have changed too much. The main thing that differentiates the SEO of today form the SEO techniques that was implemented a few years back is the introduction of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Social Media Optimization includes the process of getting traffic from certain social media sites which works purely on Web 2.0 platform. SMO mainly focuses includes user participation and loyality, and is also a major source of link building.
So in a nutshell if you stick to your SEO basics and get updated with the latest techniques, you would not find too much changes in the process of SEO.
