Online Marketing Blog

Blogger Redirection to a Country Specific URL and SEO

George — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:33:07 +0000

Blogger is one of the best free blogging tool available and is owned by Google. Few days back Blogger has started redirecting itself to country specific URLs which has created confusion and chaos among SEOs who have been using Blogger platform for link building and content marketing. If you use blogger sites, then you can notice that you would be redirected to a country-code top level domain (ccTLD).

This means that if you are using blogger in United Kingdom, you would be seeing it as yourblog.blogspot.co.uk and on the other hand if you are viewing it in Malaysia, then you can see it as yourblog.blogspot.com.my. As of now this redirection is only for a limited number of countries and in the coming months it would be rolled out for more locations.

The redirection happens mainly due to migration to localized domains, which would help Blogger to publish content effectively and offer more flexibility in its operations. Usually a blog owner does not see any changes in the blog content except for the change in the ccTLD. But on an SEO point of view, the search engine crawlers would be getting multiple domains with the same content, as the crawlers treat same domain name under different ccTLD as entirely different domains. This would result in multiple domains having the same content and end up in getting penalized by the search engines.

This has created a good amount of fear in the minds of SEOs as they fear of getting their blogs and other link building activities getting drowned. This is mainly due to the concern that the blogs would face the issue of duplicate content due to this new redirection which may in turn affect the overall search results. But Blogger officials have promised to make solutions for this so that the bloggers would not face any serious threats to their SEO activities. Moreover Blogger would also specify the blogger.com version as the canonical one by using rel=canonical property which would help the search engines in identifying the right blogger version.

The redirection process has just started and we will just have to wait and see what all problems would arise in real time and what all we can do in order to tackle them. Hope that Blogger official would act wisely so that there would not be any serious consequences.

Quality Content Equals Better Search Engine Visibility

George — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:44:48 +0000

For the last few years, we have seen a lot of articles based on “Content is King” and the situation still continues and more vigorously. Good and quality content still holds a prominent role in the success of your search engine optimization campaigns and it seems that the importance of great content on website has increased in the last few months, and that is mainly after the Google Panda effect. Google Panda effect have clearly defined the need for unique and quality content on the website and had started ignoring websites with poor and duplicate content.

I have come across certain websites, which are performing exception well in the search engine in spite of no SEO activities at all. I had a close look at the website and found out that the back links for those websites were pretty good in numbers. When I was informed that these sites are not at all optimized for the search engines even once, I was really shocked and amazed. I just went through the website and at last I found out the major reason behind the amazing search engine visibility of those website. And it was none other than its content, which made it out.

The content of those sites were exceptionally well written and was purely unique in nature. The websites also had a good amount of content spread around different sections and I noticed that most of the content were amazingly informative and useful. The writing style of the content was such that it was really easy to read and understand. The content was well organize which made it very much easy for the readers to navigate through different sections of the website.

After getting an overall idea about the quality of the website content, I came to know how the good number of backlinks were acquired without any SEO campaign. All the links were obtained naturally and we can understand it by the way the links are placed in different sites. Due to the amazing quality of the website content, a lot of websites linked to these website naturally as they found the content more useful and important. Once these sites were linked by a few quality website through better anchor texts, the search engine visibility of these website improved resulting in an increased organic traffic.

Most of these website themes were of medium competition, but still they showed amazing search engine visibility even without any serious SEO activities. So in the coming days if your website does not have that extra content quality, you would find it really difficult to achieve any search engine success. If you have good and informative content you can see a good number of quality backlinks coming your way and that too quite naturally. Links coming in this way are considered to be more powerful as these links are created by the webmaster who considers the website content more useful to its visitors.

So before going for full fledged SEO campaign, make sure that your website have a unique, compelling and informative content. Once these are in place, half of your work is done. In the year 2012, content would be playing a crucial role and would be a major force to reckon with in search engine optimization success.

SEO Clerks – The SEO Gig Site for Webmasters

George — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:40:15 +0000

If you are a webmaster or an online marketing professional, you might have always come across various micro SEO job requirements for your website. You might also have looked to micro SEO jobs, so that you can earn those extra bucks. There are a lot of micro job sites or gig sites which offers micro jobs, but it would be a difficult to fulfill tour niche requirement as most of the micro jobs are general sites and are flooded with a lot of gigs from various categories. Most of the general micro jobs sites have a fixed rate for both service providers and freelancers which makes these sites least flexible.

Here comes an SEO gig site, which is suited for all type on SEO and online marketing professionals and companies. Unlike other micro job sites, SEO Clerks does not have a fixed price tag and you can vary the price tag as per the intensity of your job and requirement. So if you are looking for any affordable SEO services for your bit and pieces work for your website, then you can really turn towards SEO Clerks as you can see a lot of gigs or micro jobs in the SEO niche. SEO clerks have proved to be an amazing platform that connects webmasters with service providers.

If you are a SEO freelancer who is looking for micro jobs to earn some quick cash in a short span of time, then SEO Clerks could be the best option for you. Unlike other gig site, you will get a wide range of SEO offers which have different price ranges and you can select the best one that satisfies you.

When I had some small SEO job requirements for my clients, I was confused at outsourcing the job as the outsourcing cost was too high when compared with nature and size of the job. I tried other micro job sites, but could not get my requirement fulfilled due to the large array of gigs from different fields. It was at that time I was referred to SEO Clerks by one of my friend and actually I was amazed to see this micro niche gig site and could easily find a large number of jobs by service providers that suited my requirements. Signing up for SEO clerks and ordering gigs was really easy and within few hours of ordering, I got my work done.

So if you are looking for small SEO job requirements for your website, then SEO clerks is the one that should be looked upon. If you are a freelance SEO, then SEO clerks is one of the best way to earn some passive income as you could see a lot of offers that suits your talent and skills. The payments are generally done through Paypal and it is done in regular intervals.

Webmaster Talk Forums – An Ideal Help Center for Upcoming SEOs

George — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:54:24 +0000

Online forums are always a source of acquiring knowledge for all type of professionals. In SEO also there are a lot of forums which helps the SEOs to gather more knowledge and clear their doubts regarding various aspects of search engine optimization. SEO forums are one of the best ways to learn SEO by yourself, as a lot of experts would be available on the forums and they could easily solve your queries and issues related to SEO.

People come to webmaster forums to get an idea about new search engine updates, new way to tackle SEO issues and other information about latest software and tools that aids you in your SEO activities. If you need to get updated about the latest updates and techniques on SEO, then the best way is to get registered with some SEO forums and closely watch and listen the conversation and discussions. You can also put down you own doubts and opinion regarding various search engine optimization methods.

Since there are a lot of webmaster forums coming up these days, people end up joining with many of them and finally realize that most of them are really useless with no real updates. So before joining and participating in SEO forums, you need to find out the best forums or the most reputed SEO forums available which can be easily found out by Googling for the top SEO forums. You can also take suggestions from the top SEO experts and from other friends who are into SEO profession.

I have also got a lot of queries from my junior SEO friends regarding a reliable SEO forum for beginners and I have suggested 2 - 3 forums which are most suited for beginners as well as experienced SEO professionals. And the most popular among them was Webmaster Talk Forums, which contains discussions from beginners to seasoned SEO professionals and most of your queries and doubts were cleared by the SEO professionals in the best way.

The forum is also pretty useful for website designers and developers as a lot of experience designers and programmers are active members of this forum. The site also provides tutorials for web designing, programming, designing etc and hence a lot of professionals can be seen on the forum. So if you are a experienced or an upcoming webmaster, then I would suggest you to try Webmaster Talk Forums and I am pretty sure that it would be worth being part of this wonderful webmaster forum.

7 Useful Keyword Research Checklist

George — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:54:25 +0000

Keyword research is the most integral part of your SEO campaign and the keyword research plays an influential role in determining the SEO success of any website. Websites which have been optimized with a well-researched keyword set is sure to go up in the search engine rankings, where as a website with a poor keyword research would find it difficult to reach anywhere in the search engine rankings. Keyword research comes in the initial phase of an SEO campaign and make sure that keyword research is carried out in the best way for your website’s success.

Since the SEO industry is growing considerably and becoming more competitive, the keyword research has also become tougher when compared with the initial times. A lot of methods and checklists are being implemented to make the keyword research as good as possible. It is very much difficult to follow all the parameters and criteria while doing a keyword research, but there are certain checklists which are simple and form the basis of a good keyword research.

Here are few of the basic keyword research checklists that you need to take follow and which would help you in conducting a decent keyword research for your website.

1) Identifying the Potential Keywords
Before starting your keyword research, you should identify your top potential keywords and start building your keywords based on that. You should not make any false assumptions on your potential keywords and you should be very careful when deciding about your potential keywords, as your keyword research list would be based on the main keywords.

2) Studying the Search Count of Keywords
By having a look at the search count of your keywords, you would be getting a better idea about better you can benefit if you optimize your website based on that particular keyword. So always go for search count that has a pretty good search count and are very much relevant to your products or services mentioned on the website.

3) The Competition for your Keywords
The competition for your keywords would give you an idea about how easily you can optimize the website based on the keywords and while taking keywords make sure it has realistic competition count so that the chances of optimizing your website for that keyword would be high.

4) Finalization of the Keywords
Once the list is complete, go through the list once more, have discussion and remove or add any keywords that might argue well for your website search engine performance. You may go through your keyword list several times, to get it finalized.

5) Your Current Ranking for The Keywords
Once you keywords are finalized, you should take the current search engine ranking for those keywords and use it as a benchmark keyword ranking report for the future. You can use this report as a yardstick to measure the effectiveness of your search engine optimization activities.

6) The Relevant Pages on the Websites for the Finalized Keywords
Next, you should find and identify the relevant pages on the website which can be optimized with the keywords in the list. For this you can make a set out of your keywords that should go with a particular page or section of the website.

7) The Potential Keywords that do not have Content or pages on the website
There might be certain keywords, which you think have high potential, but do not have the relevant content on the website. Identify such keywords, sort it down and send across the content development team to get the relevant content based on those keywords.

Three Major Types of Goals in Google Analytics

George — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:08:46 +0000

In Google Analytics, goals are one of the best features that allow us to go deeper into a website’s traffic performance and fix any possible issues. It helps you to track how users go through various pages or sections of your website. Goals help us to see how users travel once coming on your website or how users are reaching a particular section of your website.

Setting up goals with Google Analytics also helps you to make sure that the visitor has done what you would like them to do on your website. For example if you have a shopping cart then your ultimate aim is to make the users purchase your products. Mostly the last page that a user reaches after purchasing anything online would be a “Thank You” page and by setting a goal for this page, you would be able to understand the amount of successful user visits to your website which have converted into sales. Goals also help you to know more about the user behaviour on your website such as site engagement, user engagement etc.

There are three major types of goals in Google Analytics and you can use it as per your requirement. The three major types of Google Analytics goals are:

1) URL Destination
The URL destination goal type helps you to find out how often users have successfully visited a particular page through various sections on the website. This is mostly a good option in ecommerce sites and other websites whose aim is to get sales or leads through the website. You can also set goal funnels to see how the users come to your goal page and you can set multiple goal funnels for your website.

2) Time on Site
The Time on Site goal helps you to understand how many times a user spends a particular amount of time on your website. This goal clearly gives an idea about the user behaviour once he visit your sites and you would know whether the user spend a particular amount of time on your website or not. This would help you to understand about the potentiality of your website in keeping the users for a longer period of time and you could make necessary changes on your website as per this data.

3) Pages per Visit
This option helps you to know about the depth of user visit on your website. You could know how many pages a user have visited your goal page and you could set a particular number of pages for this which seems good for you. This is also very much effective in calculating the overall user engagement on your website.

It is very much easy to set up a goal for your website using Google Analytics and you can do it from the settings area of your Analytics account. In the settings area of your Google Analytics account, you can see the option to add goals and you can create goals that are most suited to the nature of your website.

Targeting Sections of a Single Website to Multiple Geo Locations

George — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:09:34 +0000

Location based SEO activities are the best way to get targeted traffic from a specific location. There are many types of websites that offers products and services which are availed by people from a particular country or location. In this case rather than targeting the website for a large global area, it is better to concentrate your SEO activities to that particular country.

Google’s Webmasters tools is of a great help in geo targeting the SEO activities as we can specify a location that needs to be targeted. This option is available once we submit and verify our website using Google’s Webmasters tools. While you submit your website to Google Webmasters tool, you can select a single country from where your site needs traffic from. This option is good as long as you have only a single country to target.

But when you need to target your website to multiple geo locations, then this would not be sufficient for you as you can only enter one country for targeting using the Google Webmaster tools. The need for multiple geo location targeting comes when a certain section or parts of your website offers services or products that need to be targeted in different countries. This can be a subfolder, directory or a page of your website and here you are forced to think of how to do multiple geo location targeting.

The fact is that multiple geo location targeting can be done easily and that too by using Google Webmaster tools. The only thing is that you need to submit separately the subfolders, directories or pages that need to be multiple geo targeted, into Google Webmasters tools. By doing this you would be able to target your website to multiple geographical locations.

Consider that your website has a section http://www.website.com/abc which needs to be targeted in Ireland and another section of your website http://www.website.com/123 which needs to be targeted in Brazil. To do this you first need to submit the first section to Google Webmaster tools and select the geo targeting option for Ireland. After this you submit the second section in Webmaster tools separately and select the geo location option as Brazil. Now you have enabled multiple geo location targeting for various parts of your website and that too using a single Google Webmaster account. You can do it for a large number of different parts of a single website and fine tune your geo location targeting to its best.

How to Find Out the Search Terms that Brings Traffic from Adwords

George — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:41:01 +0000

As we all know, Google Adwords is one of the most powerful online marketing tool and is used to generate instant and targeted traffic to a website. Google Adwords helps you to list your website in the sponsored listings of Google search when someone triggers a particular keyword or key phrase. We can create our own sets of Ad Titles and Descriptions that needs to be displayed in the sponsored listings. We can also provide the keywords that need to trigger the ads on the sponsored listing section of Google Search. Apart from Google search, we can also display our ads in other advertising network supported by Google.

Google Adwords account would help you to analyze a lot of facts and figures related to your ads and keywords. You would be able to know a lot of things about the performance of your website. You could analyze the multiple data from Adwords and maintain your advertising budget as per that. One of the major things that you might be keen to know about your Adwords campaign is the set of search terms or keyword phrases that brings clicks to your ads. This data would help you to make your online marketing activities more effective and precise.

The knowledge about the search terms that bring clicks to your ads would give you a better idea on which keywords to maintain and which one to remove from your campaign. You can also add additional related keywords based on the search term data. You can adjust your ad title and its description based on the keywords that are driving more clicks and traffic.

Here are the steps required to find out the search terms that brings clicks or traffic from Adwords.
1) Login to your Adwords Account.
2) Got to any Campaign or AdGroup.
3) Select the tab named “Dimensions“.
4) Click on the drop down menu named “View” on the left hand side of the dashboard of “Dimensions” tab.
5) Select the option “Search Terms” from the drop down list and you are there.

Now you can see a detailed information about the search terms that brings click on your advertisements along with other vital data such as clicks, impressions, match type, CTR, average CPC, cost and average position. You can also see the option to download these reports on to your system.

Outsourcing Your Link Building Activities in a Smarter Way

George — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:29:50 +0000

Link building is the process of getting external links to your website and plays an influential role in the overall SEO activities for your website. External links are the basic pillars of your website and a decisive factors for determining the success of your SEO campaigns. So link building is an activity that cannot be taken lightly and you must try to get the maximum number of backlinks for your website.

There are even link building specialists in various companies who concentrates just on the link building activities and this makes very much easy for the clients to nurture link building campaigns for their sites. These days most SEOs or webmasters do not get enough time for all the SEO activities and as a result they outsource some of the major SEO activities and link building is just one of them. Most of the SEO freelancers and companies try to outsource the link building activities to any of the link building professionals, as there is really a scarcity of quality inhouse link builders.

Personally I did link building activities alone in the past, but the growing demands of clients forced me to outsource the link building activities. I really had a tough time searching for a quality link building service provider, but after a lot of research and investigation I found out a dedicated link building company (Sorezki) to whom I could entrust my link building activities. I had got some previous reviews and suggestions from some of my friends about the link building services offered by this company, which prompted me to outsource my link building activities.

The main thing that I searched about this firm was whether they were implementing any sort of unethical link building platform and didn’t find any issues with the same. They do not do any sort of automated link building activities and all their link building campaigns are done manually. They also possess a varied range of link building campaigns such as press releases, article submissions, blog commenting etc which are of high quality and spam free.

The main things that I liked about their link building services are

1) Experienced Link Builders
2) Ethical Link Building Activities
3) Quality Link Building Activities
4) Effective Link Building Services
5) Timely and Measurable Reports
6) Transparency in their Work
7) More Customer Oriented Approach

Once I got a feel about their backlink building activities, I suggested them to some of my friends since I was sure about the effectiveness of the link building campaign. If anyone can provide a good, quality and ethical backlink services, then there is no harm in outsourcing your backlink building activities as it may save you a lot of time and you can utilize that time for some other good and productive works.

6 Simple Tips for Improving Crawlability of Your Website

George — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 01:36:12 +0000

Crawlability is one of the most important feature for a website that cannot be ignored, if it is to perform better in search engine rankings. Crawlability denotes how easy the search engine spiders are able to crawl the content of the website. A site with good crawlability means that the search engine spiders can easily crawl the website content and hence such sites would show a much better search engine visibility and results. A site with poor crawlability will not have the chances of being highly visible in the search engine result pages and would bring an overall bad search engine performance and a bad SEO output.

Website crawlability factor is mostly ignored while developing a website and it is the prime duty of a SEO specialist to suggest ideas on how the crawlability of the site can be increased. There are a large number of ways by which we can increase the crawlability rate of a website, but it is time consuming to point out all the points.

Here I would like to share some good few points, which I have read from an external source on the net regarding the crawlability of a website. Hope that it would be useful to all.

1) Uploading an XML Sitemap to the Root of the Website
If you have a website, then it is important that you create or generate an XML sitemap and upload it to the root of the website. Uploading an XML file would make it easier for the search engine spiders to crawl the whole part of your website.

2) Clean Navigational Site Structure
While designing a website the SEO must provide suggestions to the web designers and developers to make the site navigational structure as clean as possible. Search engine spiders usually find it easy to crawl a website having a clean and simple navigational site structure.
Ensure navigational structure can be accessed by search crawlers

3) Avoid Excessive Use of Adobe Flash, JavaScript, Ajax etc.
Most of the web site owners makes the serious mistake of including too much Flash, Javascript or Ajax to improve the appearance of their website. By doing this most of the content goes inside the Flash or Javascript and since such file formats are not easily readable by the search engines, your content may get unnoticed by search engines due to the difficulty in crawling them.

4) Use Keyword Rich, Clean and Search Engine Friendly URL Structure
Most of the webmasters uses non SEO friendly URL structure for their website, which decreases their crawlability rate to a great extent. Try using keyword rich, simple, clean and search engine friendly URL structure for your website, so that the search engine spiders can easily crawl the content.

5) Avoid Using Unwanted Scripts in Web Pages
There are a lot of website, which have pages in which a lot of scripts such as CSS codes, Javascript codes etc have been embedded. Avoid doing this and try to call these scripts and functions from an external file as the presence of scripts and functions on a web page prevents the search engine spiders from crawling the content of the website.

6) Upload a Robots.txt File to the Root of the Website
It is always better to upload a well written robots.txt file to the root of the website which has codes that allows the smooth crawling of the website by the search engine spiders.