Online Marketing Blog » Search Engine Optimization

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.

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.

10 Important Onpage Optimization Factors

George — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 05:57:09 +0000

As we all know that SEO is mainly divided onpage and offpage activities. Usually the websites starts with a strong and well planned onpage campaign, and this plays a great role in determining the fate of a website in search results. So onpage SEO activities needs to be done with utter care and if you have done onpage optimization in the best way, then half of your SEO work is done.

Onpage activities includes a variety of things and this also varies depending upon the nature of the website. But still there are certain common things that we should not avoid while doing serious onpage SEO for any website. Here I would like to list 10 important onpage optimization factors that should be done without any miss, if you are really serious about your website’s onpage optimization campaign.

1) Title Tags
Title tags are the most important factor in an Onpage SEO activity and has a major role in determining the search engine ranking for a particular keyword. The title tag would also be responsible for getting better search engine traffic.

2) Meta Description
Meta description is used to provide a brief description that is relevant to a particular website and this description is used by the search engines during various search operations. A well written meta description would also result in better keyword ranking and improved organic traffic.

3) Meta Keywords
Meta keywords are having little importance these days as far as the major search engines are considered. But there are some small search engines which still take data from the meta keywords section and hence the practice of putting meta keywords still needs to persisted with for the time being.

4) ALT Tags
Search engines might crawl the images in a website, but the content present on an image would not be crawled and recognized by the search engine. Hence it is better to tag the images with ALT tags, so that search engines would be able to recognize them and improve the overall search visibility of the website.

5) Internal linking
Linking different pages of your website internally would be very much beneficial in your SEO activities. While doing internal linking, make sure that you are optimizing the anchor text used for linking and also the links are going to the most relevant pages.

6) Keyword Density
The keyword density should be maintained in various sections of your websites and without enough keyword density you might not be getting the expected results. Keep in mind that never end up spamming your website while maintaining your keyword density. The keyword density should look natural and should not make disturbance for anyone going through the content of the various sections of a website.

7) Proper Implementation of Latent Semantic Indexing
Latent Semantic Indexing is a major thing that should be kept in mind while doing SEO for a website. Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is a method of understanding keywords in the context of the words on an entire web page. LSI helps to find out the words in a document which are used in the same context.

8) Content Optimization
Content optimization should be strictly watched upon and your content should relevant to a particular section of a website. The content should have relevant keywords within it in the right proportion and this would be done by maintaining the right keyword density. Make sure that the headings are given in H1 tags, important keywords are marked in bold (not multiple times), bullets are used properly etc.

9) Sitemaps
Sitemaps helps the search engines and users to understand and know about the number of pages in a website. Sitemaps helps to get your site indexed by the search engines without any issues and hence it is always better to include both regular and an XML sitemap in your website.

10) robots.txt
Most of the website might be using different types of software for website designing and development. As a results there might be certain section which contain duplicate contents, sensitive details etc. In this case you might not want the search engine to crawl the data and here you can seek the help of a robots.txt file where you can grand permission to search engine spiders as on which section to crawl and which section not to crawl.

Some Advantages of SEO Over the Traditional Marketing Strategies

George — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 05:41:02 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most heard words these days on the internet and is used by a large number of companies and individuals who have a website of their own. SEO is one of the cheapest, affordable and reliable ways of marketing on the internet. This amazing online marketing technique has changed the way the companies look for marketing their services or products. Unlike 10 years back, today we can see a lot of agencies and freelancers providing specialized SEO packages to help the companies market their products and services online.

Before talking about the advantages of SEO over the traditional way of marketing, let us have a brief idea about the various common traditional marketing strategies that companies used to implement. In the traditional marketing strategies giving advertisements in a newspaper or a magazine was the most common way. This was costly as the rate varied depending upon the area upon which the advertisements should be displayed. Despite spending a large amount on this type of advertisement, one could not track the complete results of the advertising campaign as it was impossible to view sensitive data such as how many people viewed it, how many purchased the product upon seeing the ads etc.

The second common traditional way of advertising is the direct mailing method which involves sending our sending out letters to a large number of addresses which may includes audiences who are not at all interested in the services offered by the mailing party. This is a kind of disturbing marketing strategy and also involves a large amount of time and money spend.

The third type of traditional advertising was pushing advertisements on media channels such as radio and TV. But this was the most expensive way of marketing as one had to pay a huge amount for a few seconds of ads. Also the creation of the advertisements were also too expensive. This will reach more audience than the previous too methods but when we calculate the cost of the advertisements, the overall marketing cost would always be high.

When we take these 3 types of traditional advertising methods, the overall cost for advertising was always high and the results of the marketing activities were not always great. This was mainly due to the fact that even if the company got some increase in sales, the amount that they spend for the advertisements would always be high.

But when we come to SEO, which is one of the online marketing technique there is always a huge ROI when compared with the traditional advertising methods. The main reason behind this is that like every online marketing activities, SEO is also very much affordable and even if you have a small business, you can go for an SEO campaign for your website. The other fact is that if SEO is done in the proper way you would be getting a steady traffic to your websites for a much long time.

Another advantage of SEO is that the traffic coming to your website would be more targeted and relevant as SEO helps in making your website visible in the search engines to the keywords that are related to your website. This means that the traffic coming to your website from the search engines are potential customers who searched on the net for the products and services that your company is offering.

Measurability is another major advantage of online marketing and hence the results of the SEO activities can clearly be measured using various tools available. By measuring the effectiveness and other stats of the website traffic we can make adjustments necessary adjustments in our SEO campaign to get more targeted visitors.

Even though SEO may not get you traffic instantly, once you have done the proper SEO, the traffic would be coming to your site in a gradual and steady manner. Once you start getting the traffic you just need to capitalize on those traffic with the various online marketing tools available. The above mentioned things are just the basic advantages of SEO over the traditional marketing activities and there are still other advantages SEO have over the traditional marketing methods. So if you are serious about doing online marketing for your products and services, then SEO is the best way to start with.

Expect Quality Google Search Results with the New Chrome Extension

George — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:53:51 +0000

Google Chrome has recently launched a new extension named Personal Blocklist extension, which helps to people block sites from their search results. This new Chrome extension is in an experimental phase and is sure to bring out some positive results. Usually in our search results we come face to face with a lot of irrelevant results coming out as a result of content farm or other bad means of promotion.

Google has been trying hard to block these content farm sites and other low quality site from appearing in the search results, in order to increases the quality of its search results. With its latest introduction of the Google Chrome extension, it has set the tone for filtering out the low quality sites from the search results. The new Chrome extension to block websites from Google’s search results can be downloaded from here.

When we install this Chrome extension, along with the search results you will see an extra link to block a particular website from appearing in the search results. Once You click that link, that particular website would not be displayed in your search results. If you have blocked a particular site by mistake, you can also revoke the blocked sites, by clicking at a link that is provided at the bottom of the search results. After clicking on that link, you can undo your block. You can also undo your block by clicking the extension icon which is provided on the top of the Chrome window. Once you click that icon, you will get a list of sites that you have blocked and you can undo your block from there.

Google officials have made it clear that once we block a website from the Chrome browser, the details of the blocked sites are then passed on to Google and Google makes use of this data to further improve the quality of their searches. Google has recently developed a new algorithm to increase the quality of the search results and it would use the data from the Chrome extension to enhance its algorithm and make it more effective and trust worthy. In short, the Personal Blocklist extension by Google is sure to improve the quality of the search results and many of the low quality sites may lose its rankings and search engine traffic. Only sites with original, relevant and informative contents would be able to make its progress in the search engine results. This would be a great challenge for all the SEO/ search engine optimization experts, but ultimately the users would be able to get the right results from the search engine.

6 Things That Are Usually Missed Out While Doing SEO

George — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:10:30 +0000

Usually we all do SEO for websites in order to optimize the site as much as possible for better search engine placements. We all follow various steps and techniques in order to achieve this. We do both on-page and offpage optimization as precise as possible to get more returns on our SEO efforts. Different SEOs implement different SEO tactics and technique to get better search engine rankings. But there are some simple things that we generally forget to include in our SEO activities and these simple things can really create difference in our overall SEO activities. Here I have listed few points which are usually missed in our search engine optimization activities and these things needs to be addressed for better SEO results.

1) URL Canonization Issues
This is one of the most general thing that one misses out while doing SEO. Usually when a new website is launched the website would be having both www and non www versions. If a website have both these version, then search engines generally tend to see these two versions as 2 different URLs. So it is better to redirect the non www version to the www version for better search engine rankings. But generally this thing is ignored in most cases.

2) Customized 404 Error Page
A customized 404 error page makes sure that you do not lose majority of your visitors once they land on a broken link or wrongly typed URL. So it is mandatory to create and configure a 404 error page in your website and this is one simple thing that is missed in the general SEO activities.

3) Backlink Quality
Backlink is an essential part for getting better search engine ranking and acts as a great support for our SEO activities. SEOs tries hard to get as many backlinks possible to their site, but in most cases they end up in getting low quality and irrelevant backlinks. Make sure that backlinks are of high quality so that the website does not suffer in the long run

4) Internal Linking
Internal link is the link of different pages of the website from the same website either through link navigation or from the content. Most SEOs give little importance for this but internal linking cannot be ignored as they are capable of improving the search engine rankings for your website.

5) Anchor Text Optimization
While getting backlinks or internal links to your site make sure that you have used the right and best anchor text. Mostly in an SEO campaign we can see that despite getting backlinks, the anchor texts are not properly optimized. Try to optimize your anchor text by putting the important and relevant keywords.

6) Website Speed
Website speed plays an important role in getting better search engine rankings in the major search engines and Google has clearly stated this fact sometime before. Most of the SEOs and webmaster miss out on this factor. Make sure that your website have a decent speed so that your site does not miss out on better search engine rankings.

10 Web Page Elements That Influence Your Search Engine Rankings

George — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:12:28 +0000

There are many web page elements that are monitored by search engines and have an influence on our websites search engine rankings. For a long time it has been known that changes on your website can bring changes in your search engine rankings but it was not clear how the search engines reacted to the website changes and bring about changes in the search engine rankings. Google have published a patent regarding this few years back and recently Microsoft has also been granted another patent which discusses the same issue.

According the to the new patent by Microsoft, the following following web page elements are responsible for your website’s search engine ranking.

1) Keywords included in a web page.
The keywords included in a web page obviously has a major role in determining the search engine rankings of a website. The search engine rankings is deeply related to the keyword density and relevancy of a web page.

2) Keywords associated with a web page
The keywords that are related to a web page also influences its search engine ranking. The keywords associated may come from an external link, internal link, tagging etc.

3) The anchor texts used in links on the web page.
The anchor text that are used in the links on the web page also influence the search engine ranking of that web page. The anchor text clearly states that the web page is related to that text in one way or other.

4) The size and colors of images on the page.
As per the patent, the size and colors of the images on the web page can also determine the search engine ranking of that page.

5) The position of text or images used on the web page.
The position of text or images can also create influence on the web page. If the text or images are placed in a position which is not easily crawled by the search engine spiders, then it may not help in getting better rankings. On the other hand if they are placed in the appropriate places, it may boost up your search engine rankings.

6) The frequency of document changes over time.
The search engines takes into consideration, the frequency at which the documents on a website changes and this really plays its part in its search engine performance.

8) The amount of the content on the web page that has been changed.
This is another main factor that would determine the search engine ranking of a web page. If the content of a web page changes on a regular interval, it is considered as a healthy sign and search engines would be giving higher priorities for such web pages.

9) Tags that are assigned to the page.
Tags play a crucial role towards attaining better search engine ranking and while tagging a site, we need to do it in the right way.

10)Search queries that are used to find the page.
The search queries that are used by online users to find a particular page also determines the success of that web page in the search engines. If a particular query fetches more visits to a site, then that query would be given higher priority by the search engines.

Tips for an Healthy SEO Title Tag

George — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:35:49 +0000

The title tags are the most important ingredient of a website and plays a major role in determining its search engine rankings. So while optimizing a website make sure that you have created and SEO friendly title tag for better ranking. Many of the webmasters fails to recognize the importance of Title tag and they end up getting lower rankings in SERPs. In order to gain better rankings it is always good to optimize your Title tag with your relevant keywords.

Often most of the sites does not perform well even after optimizing the Title tag, or initially they perform but underperforms at a later stage. This is due to many factors but the major being improper optimization of title tags. Many of them land up using wrong and unethical methods for optimizing the title tags of their websites. As a result after the initial bubbles they are seen nowhere in the SERPs.

Here I would like to mention some of the basics things to take care while optimizing your title tags, and are listed below.

1) Stick to 1 or 2 Keywords
Always create your keywords based on 1 or 2 keywords which are most relevant to the pages. You might not be getting better rankings by including a large number of keywords in your title tag.

2) Keyword Relevancy
The keywords present in the title should be relevant to the content of the page.

3) Title Should be Specific
Try to make the Title tags more specific and Short. The Title should shed light on what is included or offered in the page.

4) Include a Sales Pitch
For ecommerce and shopping websites, try to write the Title which has a sales pitch included that prompts a potential buyer to visit the page.

Apart from the above mentioned points there are some things which should be avoided while creating a SEO friendly title tag.

1) Irrelevant Keyword and Title
Avoid using Keywords and title which has no relevancy with the page.

2) Pages with no Title
Make sure that title tags are created for all the pages, whether it be a contact page, privacy policy page etc. But don’t try to stuff your keywords into the titles for contact and privacy policy page. They should contain keywords such as “Contact Us” or “Privacy”. Never allow pages to have titles such as “Untitled” or “New Page”.

3) Duplicate Titles
Never allow duplicate titles to happen in your website as it would harm your ranking very much. All the pages should have unique title tags.

4) Lengthy Titles
Never use too much lengthy titles for your website as most of the search engines reads and displays only upto a particular length of the titles in SERPs.

5) Keyword Spamming
Never try to spam your title by stuffing unwanted keywords in your title as mentioned in the 1st point.

These are some of the points that comes to my mind for creating a good and healthy title tags. If I have missed some point you can post it via comment box, so that I can update it later. Thanks!!

The Effects of Over Optimizing a Website.

George — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:26:03 +0000

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 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.

Organic Traffic Vs Paid Traffic. Which is better?

George — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:04:19 +0000

Organic Traffic and Paid Traffic are the two factors that helps in bringing traffic to your site. These things are one of the main factors that webmasters and website owners are more concerned of these days. Before going into the details let me first introduce you to the terms Organic and Paid traffic.

Organic Traffic : Organic Traffic is the traffic that our site gets through the natural searches through search engines. This is very cheap in terms of cost and also takes a bit of time for your site to be visible in the search engines get traffic from them. An example of organic traffic is given below.

For example, consider you are a shoe manufacturer in California and you own a website. When people search for “shoe manufacturer” in the search engine, consider that your site is coming in the top 10 list. When someone click on your link on the search engine and enters your site, you are indeed getting an Organic Traffic. In order to get you website on the top page of the search engine for a particular keyword, your website has to be well optimized for various search engines. Once you site get neatly optimized you are bound to get organic traffic for a long period of time, i.e 6 months to one year. You don’t have any additional extra costs rather than the initial optimization phase. Organic traffic is the best way to drive traffic to your site and is widely adopted by website owners all over the world.

Paid Traffic : Paid Traffic is the other type of traffic that come to your site, by paying for every traffic that comes. Paid traffic is recommended for those who needs instant traffic for their site and does not have the time for organic traffic to happen. Paid traffic is the major essence of Search Engine Marketing and it requires proper planning and strategy to execute the paid traffic technique. There are many forms of paid traffic like paying for search engines to get listed, banner advertisement and other forms of advertisement where you need to pay for getting traffic.

For Example, consider you have a new business site and you don’t have the time to wait for the organic For Example, consider you have a new business site and you don’t have the time to wait for the organic traffic. Here you need instant traffic from the search engines, say Google. So you have to go for the Google Adwords PPC, which is the most popular form of paid traffic. Here you pay for Google to get listed on the sponsored links in the Google search engine results page (SERP). When somebody clicks on your link you have to pay Google a certain amount and as a result you would be gaining instant traffic, but you have to maintain your monthly budget so as to continue getting the paid traffic.