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.
SEO Client Issues and Solutions
Jul 18 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo
SEO is one of the most difficult profession as far as client handling is concerned. Many of the clients are not aware about what works behind the SEO works and what is needed for a better search engine results. So the sales team or business development team have a tough time tackling some really difficult queries and demands raised by the clients. Even SEO professionals have also go through these tough situations. The pressure mounts over the sales and SEO team for these questions raised by the clients due to their unawareness on SEO.
A large number of clients thinks that SEO is a one time technology works, similar to software development. They think that once SEO is done their site is guaranteed for top search engine results. They are now aware that SEO project needs patience and ongoing maintenance work and is not a guaranteed one. No companies in the world can guarantee search engine ranking in any search engines. The only thing that can be done by the SEO is to make to make the website more SEO friendly, doing good keyword research, implementing keywords onto the site and then waiting for the results. One cannot be sure whether the site is going to get the top search engine ranking. If the website doesn’t perform well in the search engine, the SEO work has to be redone. So it goes on and on and needs ultimate patience and maintenance.
Even if the site starts coming on the top of the search engines, the work is not done. The SEO work should be continued to maintain the rankings, which is one of the most tedious job.
Some of the major issues faced from the client side are
1) They need guaranteed top listings for their keywords.
2) They are not ready to make design changes to their website to make it SEO friendly.
3) When a keyword drops a 1 or 2 positions after a Google update, they start complaining over this.
4) They want only flash files on all the pages and expect better SERP.
5) They are not ready to make the site rich with content related to their main keywords.
6) They have a small site and have 25 keywords. They need top ranking for all the 25 keywords.
The above list contains only few, but there are still more.
After looking at the above list, the one thing that comes to mind is what we can do from our side to sort out these issues. The SEO companies can do various things which helps in removing most of these issues and making the project smooth. Some of the things that I have implemented are listed below.
1) Educate the clients about the basics of SEO.
2) Make them aware of the search engine algorithm.
3) Encourage them to update and add fresh contents.
4) Inform them about the latest search engine updates.
5) Send them monthly reports and explain the reason behind the fall / increase in rankings.
6) Avoid giving information on all the things that we have done in the SEO project.
These things have worked for me to a great extent and I hope that this would work for you also.
Losing Google Site Links Due to Changed URLs
Jul 15 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, seo
This is one of the interesting situations that I faced few months back. I had an SEO client whose website had a good presence on the web with decent and quality traffic. The site had a Google Page rank of 6 and was pretty popular in its industry. The site was also blessed with Google Site Links, which is the mark of the search engine popularity for the site. The client had just started their SEO contract and they had the site links for the last one year.
Just before entering into the SEO contract with us they made changes in all the URL names via their previous vendor and also deleted the old URLs. When they started with us we were happy to see the Google site links. But suddenly after a week the site links disappeared and the client started complaining over that. I was really shocked and really was not able to find the reason. After a thorough research I came to know about the URL changes that the previous vendor has made. Actually the URLs which appeared in the Google Site Links also changed and as a result the site links got disappeared. I knew that we can never create Google site links, but only manage them via Google Webmasters Tool.
I told the client about this and consoled them that we would try our best to bring them back. Fortunately the site maintained its ranking and traffic and after a few months the site again got its Site Links. The client was happy again and continued smoothly with us. There were certain things that I learned from this, and I always followed them going forward. They are listed below.
1) While changing the URLs of a website having Site Link, implement 301 redirect for the old URLs.
2) Don’t delete the old URLs at least for a few months, so that everything becomes stable.
3) It is better not to make any changes on the links appearing as Site Links.
4) Before changing the URL name, first consult with the SEO or webmaster.
Hope this would be applicable to all of you and take care in taking precaution before changing your URL names.
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 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.
5 Google Market Research Tools That I Use.
Jul 08 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, seo
Google is one of the major platform for online marketing as it is the most used search engine worldwide with high efficiency and accuracy. Google is the main stage for all the online marketing and market research activities for online professionals, webmasters, SEOs etc. The main part of Google is that they offer various tools for market research which makes the job much easier and flexible. These market research tools by Google helps you to stay afloat and updated with the ever changing internet trends. So in order to become a successful online marketing professional one must make the habit of using these online research tools in the proper way. So I would like to tell you something about the main 5 market research tools offered by Google, that I use for my online marketing campaigns.
1) Google Suggest
Google Suggest is another tool by Google which is mainly used for keyword research. Earlier it was run as a separate tool by Google, but there days all the functions of Google Suggest is integrated with Google Search. So for this, you just need to go to Google.com and start typing your keywords in the text box. Google will then start to show related and most possible list of Keywords as a drop down. The more specific keywords you type the more specific list it would be showing. This tool has proved very much helpful for me in conducting successful keyword researches.
2) Google Trends
Google Trends is another useful tool which helps us to compare the popularity of keywords or phrases over a particular time and also over a certain geographical area. You can see the results based on a particular Country, City and Language. Google Trends shows the results for the last 5 years, thus enabling you to check the consistency of a particular keyword or phrase. This tool also helps to compare the search volume of multiple keywords by simply separating the keywords with a comma in the search box. Google Trends can also be used to know the seasonal popularity of certain keywords and can also be used to know the seasonal trends of a particular keywords or phrases. The tool also shows the main news stories for a particular keyword in the last 5 years. This tool has helped me a lot in making the marketing research and keyword trending analysis for my clients.
3) Google Alerts
Google Alert tool is a free service offered by the search engine giant Google and is used for getting notified about the latest news, web pages and other market updates related to their keywords, via email. This tool helps you in keeping up to date with the market changes and is very much easy to use. Google provides 6 types of alerts such as News, Blogs, Comprehensive, Web, Video and Groups. To activate the Google alert, just go to Google Alerts and enter the keyword or a group of keywords separated by OR. Then select the alert Type, How often you need to get the alerts and the email address to which these alerts need to be mailed. Then submit the Create button and you have created a Google Alerts for those keywords. This tool also helps to keep an eye on your competitors.
4) Google Insights for Search
The Google Insights for Search is another important tool for doing online market research and helps in getting various facts and figures for our online marketing campaign. It can be used to select the proper advertising message, when we have a few keywords in our hand. Just enter the keywords and select the keyword which shows more interest over the time period. Google Insights for Search can also be used to examine and find the best seasonal keywords. The tool also helps you to make research over various geographical locations, suitable to introducing your product. You would be able to get informative data such as hottest rising keywords, search volume trends, keyword comparison, the Country, State or City where a keyword is popular etc.
5) Google Adwords Keyword Tool
The Adwords Keyword Tool is another important keyword tool offered by Google and is very useful for your SEO and SEM campaigns. Just enter your keyword or phrases into the box provided and you would get information related to that keyword such as its advertiser competition, local search volume, global monthly search volume, estimated average CPC etc. You can enter more than one keyword or phrases at a time. This tool also helps to get you keywords related to your website content by entering your website URL into the box provided. This is the major tool that is used by SEO professionals for doing keyword research for their website.
And there is one major tool that is not included in the list and that is the Google Search Tool. This is nothing but the same tool that we use to search on the net, i.e www.google.com. This is a great tool and can provide insight into many aspect of online marketing. Hope you have enjoyed this post and I would be back with some more in the coming days.
The Effects of Over Optimizing a Website.
Jul 04 2009
Posted by George as Google, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, seo
The optimization of a website has changed very much since 2-4 years back. During those days you might not have enough competition and you came to the tops of the search engine results page without doing much work. A slight SEO on your sight would have made you to the top of the SERPs. But time has changed more and more websites have come to the fore, and hence the competition has also increased for your keywords. So these days when you do SEO you try to optimize it more when compared to the SEO that you used to do 2-3 years back. Certain SEOs try each and everything possible to bring their site on to the top position. But the major thing that I have notices is that the sites which are overly optimized tend to loose the battle and loses its popularity.
So the question is whether over optimization of your site results in any kind of penalty from the search engines? As per Matt Cutts there is nothing like an over optimization penalty in Google, but over optimization can make your site look spammy. Google hasn’t so far penalized any website for over optimization, but websites has losed its popularity among its users for over optimization. For example if your over optimizing your site with keywords, such as using them more than usual in Title tags, Meta tags, Alt Tags, content etc, it would sometime end as an annoying factor to the users. Even though if you rank on the top, the users would not be comfortable with this over optimization and your sites looks junky or scammy to the users.
In my experience over optimization of a site has always lead to some issues and resulted in the site losing its popularity and traffic. If your content is over optimized with keywords, the users find it uncomfortable with going through the content, and content appear spammy to them. So the best thing to do is to come back to the basics, include keywords in a moderate way and make the site more user friendly. If the search enigines your website the most appropriate for certain keyword, no one can stop you from making your site appear on the top of SERP. Relevancy is the key for better search engine rankings and if your site is relevant to your major keywords, you dont have to worry too much.
