Google always comes with interesting and useful tools to make the user experience much smoother. Few days before I came across a Google tool, which seems to be very much important for SEO guys. The name of this interesting and simple SEO tool is Google Sets and many of us are not aware of this nice tool. Google sets is another useful and interesting SEO tool which is helpful for keyword research activities. This tool creates set of items from a few examples.
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Forums are learning centers for any professional and are usually open discussion platforms where we can discuss anything about our niche. SEO forums are the real coaching centers for SEO professionals where they can discuss and share information which are useful to them. Forums are used as a medium for clearing doubts and learning new tricks of the trade.
Presently there are a large number of SEO forums available, but it is not possible to participate in all of them. People only participate in the most popular forums and depends on several other factors. I have handpicked and listed 5 of the most important SEO forums, which are useful for all SEOs / Webmasters.
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A 404 error page is a page that is shown to you whenever you type in wrong URLs or click on a broken links on a website. Whenever a user request for a non existing URL, the server would not be able to find out the requested and returns a default 404 error page along with a message.
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
New Way to Run Local Ads in Google Adwords
Jul 31 2009
Posted by George as Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine, search engine marketing
We need to have local business ads as a separate ad unit in Google Adwords in Order to run local Ads. Now Google is ready to come up with the local extension feature which helps the users to create local ads by dynamically attaching your business address to ads. This feature also helps to add the extensions to your existing text ads. Business owners can set up this extension by linking the Adwords campaign with Local Business Center (LBC) and others have to manually enter the address into Adwords. The address along with the ads would be shown based on the relevancy of the search. If there is not relevant address based on the search, then no address would be displayed on the ads.
With the coming of location extensions, the local business ads would no more be a separate ad format. The local extension feature also gives more variety to your audience targeting. The local extension feature helps to reach the local customers in a more effective way and showing them relevant information. In short the feature helps in promoting the business brand, products, services, and associates your business with a specific location of interest to the user. This is applicable whether the ad appears in Google Search, Content Networks, Google Map and Google earth.
The steps for adding or editing the ad’s address extensions are given below.
1) Log into your Adwords account.
2) Select the campaign which you wish to edit.
3) Click on the Settings tab.
4) In the settings area go to Audience – > Locations and select one of the options shown under Show relevant addresses with your ads.”
a) Business Owners
b) Non Business Owners.
5) Then Click Save.
Hope this becomes useful for who needs to adding/editing their address extensions.
10 Blog Directories You Should Submit Your Blog To
Jul 18 2009
Posted by George as Blogging, Online Marketing, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing
When you plan to set up a blog, there would be many factors that come to your mind. First the blog should be neat, the content should be compelling and the most importantly the blog should drive traffic. More traffic means more readers, followers and other extra income. So usually we try to make the blog as Search Engine friendly as possible and add all the available SEO plugins. Also we try to take care while deciding on the keywords, to get more traffic. Apart from this we also try to get links from other sites, which are very much related to our blog in terms of content. Another way to promote your blog is to submit your blog to various blog directories, which contains list of the blogs and are arranged according to the theme of the blogs. These directories make it easier for other to find blogs related to their interest and helps us in getting targeted visitors. There are various blog directories available, but I would like to list 10 of them which I have found useful.
1) Bloggeries – Bloggeries is a good blog directory which accepts blogs and has various sub categories. It also has features such as forums, listing of the most viewed blog, latest blogs etc.
2) Blogged.com – This is a free directory and shows the postings of the blogs as a News feeder format. This has various features such as following others, starting discussion etc.
3) Blog Explosion – Blog Explosion is another free blog directory which helps in getting traffic to your site. Once you submit your site, it would take up to 7 days to get your site approved or rejected.
4) Super Blog Directory – This is another blog directory with useful features such as the latest submitted links and blogs, most popular blogs, top rated blogs etc.
5) Bloggapedia – Bloggapedia is another free blog directory with a good layout and helps to see the most popular searches in the directory.
6) Bloggernity – Another blog directory which is free and worth for blog submission. Offers features such as forums, blog search etc.
7) Blog Universe – Blog Universe is another unique blog directory which is used to submitted video and podcast blogs.
8 ) Blogcatalog – This blog directory serves as a social community for bloggers and helps in searching, connecting with other bloggers, promoting your own blog etc.
9) Blog Hub – Another important blog directory with features such as new blogger list, hot topics etc.
10) Spill Bean – Spill Bean is another attractive and simple blog directory which helps you to submit your blog for free.
There might be other blog directories which I have missed, but these 10 directories seems to be more important to me. Hope you have enjoyed reading this.
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.
