Why Am I Gone Blank??

Where was I for the past few months am I am really interested in Online Marketing? If so why I am working on the job which I am not compteley interested. Why did this happen? How did this happen with knowing to me. How can this happen with the interference of my conscience. These are the questions that are running into my brains for the past few months. What should I do In order to revert back myself to the Online Marketing.

Let me think on it for few more days and decide what should I really do...................................???????

The Best SEO Is The Output of Original Thinking

There are literally thousands of SEO blog posts made every day. Sometimes it is hard to sound original or write something remarkable, particularly if you spend too much time reading too narrowly. It sets in a sort of tunnel vision that makes you think it has all been done. As the web grows richer and deeper more successful ideas will be driven through recycling.

Direct recycling typically does not work too well as most smart people will be able to locate the original source if the idea was successful. What does work well is to take up a related idea and add it to your site. There are recurring themes and stories that will work in any market. Just look at the magazines in the checkout line and notice how little the headlines change from month to month and year to year.

Being remarkable often means grabbing a new spin on a well worn story. Forrest Gump ran across America numerous times. Are you opening a thin classified site for low priced cars? Why not buy a car from your site and drive your beater cross country, while contacting relevant media outlets along the way.

There are a lot of human beat boxes that make weird sounds (to me anyhow). It is not my cup of tea, and yet today a friend sent me a link to a video posted on Facebook where there was a video (from Google) of a human beat box who also played the fluteThe same guy probably would not have been remarkable enough to get millions of viewers if he didn’t add the flute to his repertoire.

There are dozens of formats you can use to publish content and thousands (maybe millions?) of effective marketing strategies. Nothing is going to guarantee success, but each day the web provides more free market research & examples of what has worked in other markets.

If you ever run into the limits of your industry and feel everything has already been done then all you need to do is pick up a book on another topic, read the news (outside your industry), or tie your other hobbies to your industry to find an interesting angle that has not yet been done. Some people might think your analogy or strategy is ridiculous, but you don’t need the approval of everyone to be citation-worthy to some.

Not everyone is able to ride a bicycle across a fence or off a bridge, but it is remarkably viral and when someone does.Push the boundaries of your market, but try to stay out of the hospital! :)

Do You Want To Become A Great Search Engine Optimizer?

Most of us see the same tweets, read the same blogs and know the same case studies. We know to optimize titles and anchor text, fix canonical issues, write compelling meta descriptions and so on. In the age of social media, trade secrets are now few and far between.

If that’s the case, and we all know basically the same things, what differentiates a great SEO?

The answer is, simply, the ability to get things done.

Here are 10 things you can do to be a great SEO.

10. Be humble: Value goals beyond rankings

A great SEO knows that the ultimate success involves checking their ego. Ranking for an ultra cool term is great chest-pounding material, but the contribution to the bottom line is the currency that spends. Whether the goals are sales, or traffic, ranking for the ugly terms may not be as cool to the world, but it will be to your company.

9. Be a realist: Focus on sustainability

What can your company really expect to rank for? Think like a search engine. Are you really the right answer for a particular search term? If not, don’t spend your resources working hard for a ranking that you really don’t belong in. If you’re building a business model based on a changing algorithm, have a fundamentally sound reason for choosing your terms. If you don’t, create one. No one agrees on how bounce rate affects rankings, but long term I think everyone agrees nothing good will come of a poor performing, irrelevant page.

8. Know your product: Keyword research wins

As more and more keyword research tools become available, making sense of them becomes increasingly mundane. Successful keywords come from real world terms that often don’t jump out in tools like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery. You must know what you’re looking for and not just wait for it to be delivered to you. Know how the customers speak, and you’ll know what you’re looking for. Your own internal site search is a great tool for this.

7. Understand your resources: Plan your projects accordingly

Keep in mind, the Paid Search team has a huge advantage here. Their results are relatively predictable. Yours are not. Be certain your project is funded, planned, benchmarked and understood by others. If link building is involved, as it should be, be certain that time is budgeted for a diligent effort. Creating, sharing and following a roadmap will buy you the space to work.

6. Learn your surroundings: Identify potential roadblocks and address them

The worst thing you can do as a SEO is surprise, or ambush, people. You need to assume other departments will already be skeptical of your sorcerer ways. It’s only natural. Identify the people that will block your path. Address them with facts, privately. Do not humiliate someone who doesn’t understand SEO. What seems obvious to you may not be obvious to them. Only if you give respect do you earn the right to command it.

5. Embrace your limitations: Plug the holes

One of the hardest things to do sometimes is admit what you don’t do well. Doing so, however, will earn the respect of others and insure that those holes are plugged by other team members. Work on them as you go, but never hide them. Being great doesn’t mean you need to be great at everything. Asking for help is ok, and very much a sign of greatness.

4. Be a team player: Share the glory

Now we’re getting more into the psychology of a great SEO. It’s easy to want to take credit for a change that reaps huge rewards. Remember the IT guy that implemented it for you? Let him know how rewarding it was for the company and make sure his boss knows it. Not everyone understands how they impact the bottom line. Teach them, and recruit them, and your goals will be that much easier to meet. When people are praised or rewarded, they’ll get on your team.

3. Argue with facts: No mudslinging

Take the high road. Something simple like adding related links to a page may be a no-brainer to you, but may look like spam someone that just doesn’t understand the reason. Stay patient. You probably can’t do their job, either. Explain why your idea is necessary, and use case studies. Show them how the sites they use probably do the same thing, and they just don’t realize it. Show how rankings influence revenue, and how your project influences rankings. People can’t argue with fact-based numbers. At that point, your nemesis will need to justify their reasons with facts, and not opinions. Do this respectfully, and firmly. When it’s done, you’ll win. Or, you’ll realize SEO may be hopeless where you’re at.

2. Choose your battles: There’s more than SEO

Sometimes the decision makers understand SEO, and fly directly against a known best practice. If your company values a project component above SEO, don’t pout or write them off as morons. There’s a bigger picture and sometimes a small SEO sacrifice can reap large gains in other areas. A great SEO lives to fight another day and comes knocking at another door. You see, there’s always more than one answer. It’s your job to figure it out.

1. Understand business models: Contribute effectively

SEO is not just implementation, it’s largely strategy. Sometimes it’s a strategy that may not even be known to your company. Bring a revenue strategy, along with the SEO ability to implement it, and you’ll have gotten out of the box. You see, the key to greatness is being more than just a SEO. Bring ways to contribute to the bottom line, and make them happen, and you will have achieved greatness.

So there you have it. The difference between a great SEO, or almost any other professional, lies in their ability to get things done. Navigating pitfalls, effectively communicating and maintaining superior knowledge all lead to greatness. For future reference, I suggest you bookmark this page. It can serve as a great source for dealing with common SEO issues.

This is what Matt Leonard has said.

Do Microsites Harm Ranking Of Sites?

Publishing many web sites can be a very challenging process. There are times when organizations have a larger main site and decide to operate one or more smaller sites (aka microsites) as well. Other organizations publish a number of microsites without having a larger site at all.

Whether publishing microsites are in violation of the search engine webmaster guidelines depends on the details of the implementation and the reasons for doing it. Let’s look at a few of the reasons why people do it, and map out the likely search engine viewpoint on them:

SERP domination.. As most of our readers know, the search engines do not like to show more than 2 pages in the SERPs for a given web site. The main reason for this is that the search engines want to show their users a diverse set of results. After all, if a particular web site is not what a user is looking for, showing it to them multiple times in search results is not likely to result in a satisfied user.

Some organizations want to obtain more than 2 results and use microsites as a way to dominate the SERPs. This is done by publishing sites that chase the same sets of keywords, and therefore have similar content. As you might guess, this is against the search engine guidelines. If you choose to pursue this path, you need to do so with great care, and be prepared for the consequences if your group of sites are discovered and linked to you.

Reputation management. Related to our first scenario is when an organization is looking to dominate the SERPs for their brand name. Organizations often start to think about reputation management after seeing a website that publishes disparaging comments about them show up in the SERPs for the organization name or brand. This causes management to become very focused on protecting their reputation and seeking out strategies for dominating the SERPs for their brand name.

One strategy for pursuing reputation management is to build up a series of social media profiles and rely on the trust and authority imbued in those sites to start occupying the SERPs (linking to these profiles from the main site to help drive their rankings up), hopefully above the offending site. This type of strategy is OK with the search engines, but some organizations choose to create microsites for this purpose. This is where the game gets dicier, particularly if the content on the microsites are substantially similar to the content on another site owned by the organization.

Bypass internal management restrictions. Some organizations maintain very tight controls over what can and cannot be done on their main site. These types of controls are often put in place for branding reasons. Novel new marketing programs can get squashed in such an environment. One way around these restrictions is to develop a microsite.

An example would be a large brand that decides to create and promote a new video game on the web, even though they are not in the video game business (i.e. the game is being used as a PR tactic). They may not want to promote such a product directly on the main site, but are perfectly OK with promoting it on a new site thematically focused just on the game. Since the content is different, this is a strategy that the search engines will not have any quibble with.

Microsites as “link friendly” representatives. Sometimes moving differentiated content onto its own domain can make it easier for that content to gain links. For example, a publisher of a highly commercial site may want to create a series of articles that they promote on social media sites such as Digg, Reddit and others.

Why? The users of these types of social media sites are not particularly fond of linking to highly commercial sites. Publishing such articles on a different, “less commercial” domain may raise the probability of the success of the campaign. Once again, this is a scenario that the search engines would not be concerned about because the content is likely to be substantially different.

Beware of diluting your link power

The other factor that publishers should consider when deciding whether or not to publish a microsite is the issue of dividing up their link power. Each site you launch represents a new marketing problem. Each site needs links to prosper, and if a set of sites all share the same links that’s a sure clue to the search engines that something is amiss. As a result, the best linking strategy for a group of microsites is to make sure that the number of links they have in common are limited.

On today’s web where trust and authority play a large role in the ranking of a web site, dividing up your content on multiple sites is often not a good idea. For example, if you get 1000 different web sites to link to a set of 4 web sites, each site probably gets links from 250 to 400 domains (allowing for a modest degree of overlap).

This means that the domains have only the trust and authority of the 250 to 400 domains that link to them. Contrast this with a single site with all 1000 domains linking to it (particularly if they are all largely relevant). This site has a much higher level of trust and authority. The result is that this site can rank higher for the related keywords, and this can be critical in highly competitive areas.

As we have outlined above, there are scenarios where one or more microsites does make sense for an organization. Be careful to make sure that the microsites have unique and differentiated content and you will be OK from the search engine point of view. The other factor you should consider is the dividing of your link juice. In scenarios 3 and 4 outlined above, you may be willing to accept this splitting of links because the other reasons for developing a microsite are compelling enough. Weigh these factors when considering a microsite so you can make a fully informed decision.

SEO Changes To Improve The Rankings

You may notice that some of your blog posts are drawing search engine traffic for particular search phrases and keywords (especially if your blog has had some time to establish itself with search engines). Even if you are doing keyword research prior to writing posts, you’ll almost definitely see that some of these phrases that are producing traffic are not something that you had intentionally targeted. While this is a nice surprise, it also means that there is likely more potential if you’re willing to make some small, but significant, tweaks.

If you’re drawing search traffic from a phrase that you’re not targeting, it probably means that you could be ranked even higher, and draw even more traffic as a result, if you make some changes to optimize your post accordingly. Just because a post was published at some point in the past doesn’t mean that it can’t be modified and made to be more effective.

In this post we’ll look at a few simple changes that can be made to improve upon these unintentional rankings. By taking a relatively small amount of time to recognize these opportunities and act on them, you could be setting yourself up for significantly more search engine traffic on an on-going basis.

First of all, you’ll need to find the keywords and phrases that are already driving traffic to your site. These are the search terms that you know are already producing results, so making a small effort to move up in the rankings is well worth your time. If your post is ranked 5th in Google for a particular phrase without even attempting to optimize the page, you may be able to quickly improve to the 1st or 2nd spot and see a noticeable increase in traffic. Repeat this process for a few different posts and the results will add up.

As an example, I have a post on my primary blog that has steadily attracted search traffic for the past six months or so. It’s not a ridiculous amount of traffic each day, but it does come from some fairly competitive search phrases and it is consistent every day, which adds up over the span of a month. I recently spent a few minutes to look into which search phrases were sending traffic to this post and I was surprised to see that I was ranked 4th in Google for a phrase that didn’t seem to be optimized. I made a simple change in just a couple of minutes and within a few days the post had moved to the #1 spot for that same phrase. Since then search traffic has been up consistently for that phrase.

To find these opportunities for your own blog, look at your stats from Google Analytics (or a similar program) and see what search phrases are sending traffic to your site. Most likely these phrases will be leading traffic to a particular post rather than to your homepage, which means you can simply optimize that post to more effectively target the phrases that are already sending traffic. Just look through the phrases that are sending traffic and you’re sure to find some that could be more productive. Personally, I start with the ones that are sending the most traffic since they have potential for the best results.

In addition to looking at Google Analytics, you can also use Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will show you some valuable data under “Statistics” and “Top Search Queries.” This will show you 20 phrases where your site is ranking well, and 20 phrases that are sending the most traffic to you. You may find some items on this list that surprise you a little bit. If they surprise you, it probably means that you weren’t intending to draw traffic from these phrases and there should be some room for improvement.

So now that you have identified a few phrases to work with, what should you do? Here are a few simple suggestions.

1. Page Titles

Page titles are the most significant on-page factor for search engine rankings. If your post is ranking very well for a particular phrase that is not exactly used in your page title, you should be able to see some improvement in the ranking if you change your page title to include this phrase. If you’re using WordPress and the All-In-One SEO Pack Plugin this is very easy. From the example that I used earlier, I didn’t remove anything from the existing title, I simply added a two-word phrase that was already producing the search traffic. As a result, with no other effort, that was enough to jump a few spots in the rankings.

2. Add New Internal Links

By adding more internal links to a particular post you will be indicating to search engines that the post is important. This is a pretty simple process, but one that most of us don’t take the time to do. If you’re blog has been around for a while you have plenty of places where you can add internal links. Go back and find posts on related topics and add a link in the content of the page or at the beginning or end of the post. Also, look for opportunities to link from any significant pages on your blog.

3. Change Anchor Text

Another factor that will influence search engine rankings is the anchor text that is used on links that point to that post. You can obviously control the anchor text used on your internal links, so take a few minutes and see what anchor text you are currently using on these links and see if it could be optimized to match the phrase that you are now targeting.

The anchor text of links from other sites to this page will also be significant, but you may or may not be able to change that. In most cases the best you could do is to contact the other blogger or website owner and ask them if they mind changing the anchor text on a particular link. I know some people do this, but I can’t say that I have ever asked someone to change the anchor text on their site for me.

4. Meta Description

While meta descriptions are not going to make a big difference in terms of rankings, an effective description is capable of improving the click-through-rate from the SERPs. For example, if your page is ranking 3rd in Google for a particular phrase, you could enter a description that will do a better job of attracting clicks from those searchers and you may find a 10% in traffic without moving up in the rankings. Again, this is something that you can easily do with the All-In-One SEO Pack Plugin.

5. Add to the Content of the Post

One of the best ways to help a post draw more traffic on an on-going basis is to make the post more useful. Most of us don’t take the time to improve our old posts, but the time can be a good investment in some cases. By making adding new or updated content you will be making the post more useful and hopefully it will attract more links in the future because it continues to be valuable. And more links mean possible improvement in rankings.

6. Write a Follow Up Post

I rarely write posts to target a specific word or phrase, but I did so about a year ago with a post on my primary blog. After a while the post attracted some links and moved up to the number one spot for the targeted phrase. After that I thought it would be nice if I could get a second post to rank well for that phrase, so I published a follow up. Since my site was already recognized by Google as a good source of information for this phrase it was pretty easy to get a second post to rank for the same phrase. Before long I had the first two spots in Google for the phrase pointing towards my two posts.

If you have a page that is ranked very high, this is a very achievable way to grab an even higher share of the traffic for this phrase. However, most of us (including me) rarely think to do this. Take a look at your posts that are ranking well, most likely you’ll find some opportunities where you could write a follow up post to target the same phrase.

Comment On Blogs For SEO Advantage

Let’s start by acknowledging that this is a controversial topic. If you are a social media purist or a blogger who genuinely believes your material is so spectacular that nobody should ever drop a blog comment except to react to the profundity of your writing, then please close your eyes while you read the rest of this post.

There is a legitimate role for blog commenting in SEO, and this should not be confused with blog comment spam. We all hate spam. But we each person defines spam differently. Hopefully by the end of this post, you’ll know how to use blog commenting for SEO benefits without being a spammer.

SEO Benefits Of Blog Comments

There are a number of SEO benefits from blog commenting.

The most obvious is that the search engines read the links in your comment (normally your anme is hyperlinked to your website) and you build your link popularity directly from the comments. However, most blogs are NoFollow, which at least in theory means that they carry no link value. But there are also a fair number of DoFollow blogs, and some give you a hyperlink both in your name and at the end of the comment to your most recent blog post.

All other things being equal, you might as well search for DoFollow blogs with the CommentLuv plugin; if you spend your time making intelligent comments, you might as well get link value for it. That being said, I never hesitate to leave comments at a blog whether it is DoFollow or not. Link value is something, but it’s not everything….and I’m not so sure the search engines totally ignore NoFollow links, either.

Another SEO benefit from blog comments is that every time you leave a comment, the blog owner takes notice of you. This is especially true for repeat visitors, so it is worth returning to the same blogs over and over. The other bloggers will undoubtedly visit your website. If there is anything of value on your website (remember that content is king) they will link to you in a post or they will invite you as a guest blogger (usually with a link back) or you can offer to be a guest blogger (with a link back). Yes, linking is in fact about building relationships.

It’s not just the blogger who will read your comments and follow the links to your website; other commenters will, as will other readers (another reason it is crucial to leave comments of value). For this reason there are two types of blogs you want to seek out:

• Blogs on the topic of your own website.
• Blogs that your target market read (even if the topic is not totally related to your website).
• Blogs on topics of interest to you.

What’s that? Those are three types of blogs? Well, so they are. I never was good with numbers.

Yes, you should also frequent blogs that interest you, even if they are totally off-topic. I suspect I might be the only SEO consultant making this recommendation, but I think it is worth noting that if you are a hiker, you will have more intelligent comments to offer on a hiking blog – and you will enjoy doing it, so it will be less like work and more like fun. And whether the links are all keyword relevant, they still count and you’ll enjoy it a lot more than trolling for blogs only on your professional topic. So there!

Intelligent SEO

Have you noticed a common thread to all the advice above. Comment intelligently. As long as you are adding to the discussion, the blogger will appreciate your contribution. If you just write “Nice post”, expect to be deleted from any worthwhile blog. If somebody leaves a comment that could just as easily be left on any other of my posts, I mark it spam (see image below for the types of comments I wipe off with a little pesticide every morning).

But that’s just me.

Remember how I said that spam has different meanings to different people? Some bloggers will consider it spam if you drop a keyword into your name. While I do accept comments that come from “SEO Ottawa”, for example, I prefer ones that come from “David Leonhardt SEO” or just “David Leonhardt”. The contribution has to be better for me to approve a comment that doesn’t have a real name in it.

But that’s just me.

Never mind me. Before commenting, take a look at what other comments have been approved and make sure you conform to the convention of the blog (just as you would look around how other people act at a wine and cheese or a church basement gathering). Then make sure you exceed what you see, as a new contributor, both in quality of your comment and in avoiding a spammy signature link that might get your comment deleted if the blogger is having a grumpy day.

It is also worth returning to posts you have commented on. If someone has responded to your comment, it might be worth your while to respond back. The blog owner will love you for it, because you are creating interaction on her blog. Plus, any comment worth debating or discussing attracts more attention.

It’s worthwhile dropping a really relevant and useful link in your comment, if it provides truly useful information to better appreciate the blog post. Otherwise, I recommend against it. Gratuitous link-dropping is considered spamming pretty much anywhere.

If your site is adult-oriented or fits into one of the other red-flag categories, don’t even bother commenting (with a link) on most blogs. The blogger will not appreciate it and your comment will be deleted. You’ll need to find really related blogs that will accept your links.

But David, why shouldn’t I spam? What about a robot that auto-posts comments to save time (and having to use my brain cells)? Well, there is no denying that you can build some links that way. There are some lazy blog owners who don’t moderate their comments and let them publish automatically. There are four reasons why this really is not worth your while:

• Pretty much any non-moderated blog offers only NoFollow links
• Pretty much any non-moderated blog is considered low-quality and low-trust by the search engines
• Some non-moderated blogs do get cleaned out every now and then, and the spammers get reported
• The search engines might even be able to detect a pattern, and if most of your links come from sites known to link to spam websites, your website could be flagged as untrustworthy – guilt by association.

If I was to sum up everything here, it come down to this; when you are on somebody else’s blog, you have a wonderful opportunity to build relationships. In the online world, relationships means links, and SEO is all about building the right kind of links (well, not quite “all” about).

But just like in the real world, when you are on someone else’s space, pay very careful attention to what is accepted and what is not. The real definition of a spammer is somebody who does something that is not accepted. Period.

Commenting on blog posts in a manner accepted by the blog owner can be an effective means of attracting good quality links to your website and help with your overall SEO efforts

Are You Blogging or Doing Social Media for SERPs & Links?

A lot of companies hear a lot about the social media space. Most of what they hear revolves around Blogs, Digg and Facebook and immediately they think “I have to be there!” Whether its because its the newest fad, their competition is doing it or that they’ve been shown that it can get the SERPs or better yet links, a lot of times companies never stop to look beyond the shiny pretty wrapper of social media to look at what’s really involved when heading down the social media path. At the end of their path, generally it ends in thinking social media has failed them. Why? The major reason is entering into the space for the wrong reason, like acquiring links or getting more footholds in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Social Media Requires Resources

Just because a service is free to utilize, as in it costs nothing to sign up for services like WordPress, Blogger, Facebook or Digg, thinking that it is free is a misnomer. Companies need to stop and think about the resources it will cost them in time & effort of their employees to manage a social media strategy. It takes time to grow a powerful account on Digg, if that’s the way you want to go. It takes not only time, but planning, to create a blog that will last. When working on forums, employees need to take time out to respond to messages, threads and pose new questions.

Companies looking to outsource this effort will still have to pay someone to do it, but they could also pay in bigger ways. Having someone, or some company, answer your responses for you, make friends for you, manage your social media profiles for you - can literally turn into a nightmare if it’s found you are not being transparent about it. Anytime you try to automate your social media efforts to be more efficient and less time consuming can also turn you in the direction of facing a Public Relations nightmare with your audience. If an audience feels you aren’t being transparent - upfront about your actions, willing to listen and have a conversation - you’ve lost their trust and its very tough to get it back again.

Social Media Requires Listening

There’s no way around this. In order to understand what your target market wants and how you can provide them value, companies have to take the time, stop and listen to what their audiences are saying and talking about in the social media circles. Coming in and trying to slam marketing or advertising down their throats or just starting to blog about their industry will not get you very much - just a whole lot of crickets chirping. Audiences what to know and feel like they are being heard. That their experiences matter, that what they share with others can some how help even if in a small way. True rewards in the social media spaces aren’t coupons, special discounts or freebies. People feel rewarded when they can help better a product, share a new way to use a service or help create something - feeling like they are part of something is one of the true rewards of social media and in order to give your audience that opportunity, you have to listen to understand what they want to be part of.

Social Media Requires Conversing

Just like with the listening, there’s no way around this either, not if you want to have a successful venture into Social Media. You can’t just lurk in social media. Hiding out in forums, seeing what people are saying about you, then issuing press releases to “correct the wrongs” or launching some other program to “fix what’s misunderstood about our company/product/brand” doesn’t work. A lot of times by just lurking and not getting involved in the conversation, companies can totally misinterpret what the audience is really saying.

By taking the time to speak to the audience and become part of the group, you build a trust that no press release will ever garner you. You build relationships no article in the news media will every let you create. You touch people on a more personal level and they in turn can relate that personal story to all of their friends, and so on. Conversing in the social media realm also puts a more human touch to your message or your marketing efforts. People want to connect to people, not buildings, not marketing pieces of paper or websites, not systems or gadgets (although iPhone users can argue differently) and you connect through holding conversations.

Social Media Requires Providing Value

Just putting up a blog that regurgitates your press releases, articles on your site or some boring piece about another product launch doesn’t provide value to your audience. That’s all about you, and what you perceive value to be. Audience perceive value totally differently. Give them a new or interesting way to use your product or service that they might not have thought about - or better yet, ask one of them to help out with creating the piece about the new way to use the product - now that’s value an audience can relate too. Don’t just write about it either, shoot photos or even a video and create even more value.

If you stop and first think about, “what will my audience find valuable in this content”, rather than “how many Diggs will I get”, your success with your content will turn out a lot better. By focusing on the value you can provide, it puts the focus squarely on your audience and off of you. In social media it’s not at all about you, it’s about the value the customer/audience gets from you that’s the most important factor.

Social Media Requires Passion

Considering building a blog because it will get you some “link juice”? Want to get posts out there because they’ll rank for certain long tail key word terms? It may seem like a great idea at first, but unless you’ve got someone who’s passionate about the subject that your blog is about and willing to be social in the community beyond the blog posts, your blog will go no where. Blogging is about sharing your passion with a community for something whether its your life, your hobby, what your company does or the industry your company is in, you have to have someone writing who loves to write about it and wants to talk to others about it. It also extends into other forms of social media. Participating in forums? Having a person passionate about helping people understand your company or product or industry goes a long way in building relationships and trust. If you have someone out there that is just doing it because “its their job” or they were “mandated” to do it, will do you more harm than good.

Outsourcing your blogging can also shine right through, too. If the company you choose to “ghost write” your blog isn’t deeply involved in your industry, a lot of your posts will come off flat, probably overly SEO’d and read like a true marketing piece. Look at successful company blogs like Nuts About Southwest, GM’s FastLane or even Bill Marriott’s mix of podcasting and blogging, all of these are wonderful examples of companies not just blogging about the company but their industry, their employees and customers. Asking you to buy their products, announcing a sale or a new pricing structure from their blog is the furthest thing from their minds, unless its something the audience has asked for.

The Reality of Social Media With Links & SERPs

It takes a lot of time and resources to be successful in social media if your only end goal is getting links or SERPs from it. These are natural byproducts of a truly good social media effort. What you never hear about some of these “overnight successes” is that it takes a lot of man hours creating content that is of value for an audience, as well as being truly social (listening and conversing with your audience). Just because you’ve gone out and bookmarked your blog post, or posted a picture in Flickr or a video in YouTube doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. There’s another entire realm of involvement here that companies need to take into account when planning their social media strategies. None of this really works unless you are being social on some level.

Profiles don’t gain “power” unless they are out socializing with the community - making friends, commenting, rating, adding media, etc. Just because you made a profile in MySpace or a page in Facebook, doesn’t necessarily mean it will take a spot up in the SERPs anymore, 2 years ago, yes, now only if you’ve got an obscure name. The search engines are looking to different signals within the profiles to understand if people are finding these profiles relevant. Sure they still look at links, but now also weighted into the mix are ratings, comments and interaction factors. If you create the “optimized” profile and just let it sit there its not going to do you a whole lot of good.

In the end, you need to plan your social media strategies around other success factors, not how many links you gain or SERP spots your take up. If you plan your strategy around other success factors, the links and SERPs will only naturally come because you efforts were successful in other ways. The links, the SERPs - in social media, they are just icing on the cake to a successful venture in social media.

Did Google's latest algorithm changes affect your website?

Google improves its ranking algorithm on an ongoing basis. During the last weeks, Google changed three things on the result pages that are visible to all Google users.
The changes are an improvement for searchers but they might be bad for your website.

1. Google has increased the snippet length. Less visitors for you?

Google now shows an extended snippet for queries that consist of three or more keywords. The idea behind this change is that these multi-word queries are very targeted and complex. The usual short snippet might not contain enough information.

What does this change mean for your website?

The longer snippet contains much more information. As Google tries to provide the user with the most relevant information in the snippet, the snippet might already contain the answer to the user's query. The longer snippets might result in the following:

Fewer users might click through to your website because they get the answer to their question in the search results.

Users might begin to use more multiple-word queries to get more detailed search result snippets.

As the longer snippets need more space, the longer snippets move another result page below the fold and web surfers will see fewer results at first glance. That increases the importance of very high rankings.

It seems that Google ignores the meta description tag for the snippets. That means that you must include a call to action in your web page titles.

2. Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the results

When you search for a keyword, Google will display related searches at the bottom (and sometimes at the top) of the search results.

For example, if you search for the keyword "principles of physics", Google will suggest "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanic" as related terms that could help you find what you need.

What does this change mean for your website?

It's important that you optimize the different pages of your website for different keywords. Do not concentrate on a single keyword but cover a wide range of keywords so that Googly will classify your website as relevant to the complete topic.

The more related keywords and pages can be found on your website, the better.

3. Google now shows local results based on IP addresses

Search Google for the keyword "pizza" and you'll see local results in the middle of the search results. These local results are delivered based on the IP address of the searcher. That means that you will get different results than people in another city.

What does this change mean for your website?

It's now easier to rank for competitive keywords for some local searches. While it's very difficult to get a high ranking for a very competitive keyword such as "lawyer" in the regular results, it's much easier to be listed for that keyword in the local results if you're living in a small town.

You should submit your website to Google Maps so that web surfers can find you in these local searches. You can submit your website to Google Maps with IBP's semi-automatic directory submitter.

If you run a local business, you should include your business name, your category and the name of your city in the title tag of your homepage.

If you want to get on top of Google's search results then your website must have optimized content and good inbound links. If you give Google what it wants then your website will get the best possible rankings.

How to rank first on Google. Do you like to be first?

Funny question right ? I mean who wouldn’t want to rank first on Google.

But the question is – Aren’t we focusing too much on the first rank and leaving everything else in the water ?

In fact aren’t we all fancying a first rank on Google for those “dream keywords” while not giving any attention whatsoever to other areas of benefit ?

A first page is good. A first rank, awesome. But is it all just about the first rank ? Honestly, I don’t think so, but that might be the webmaster in me. If you ask the marketer in me, I’d prefer a first rank.

Building a healthy site is important than a first rank

Being a webmaster I’m concerned about the overall development of my site, for a long term that is. I want to rank for a series of terms on Google, preferably first page. I don’t want to rank number one just for a few keywords and then expect life to become easier. No.

I’m not trying to say that first rank is bad or anything. First rank is awesome ! But I know that for a website, ranking number one for every keyword they want to is close to impossible. Even if I did, I don’t want to take the risk of losing out the long tail keywords (which is huge).

However, to rank first on Google, you need to put in everything you got. You have to be an authority and you have to have a real good website. Thanks to Google’s algorithm, with those guys, I’m almost sure all the time, that the first site for a search is always an authority site. They have built their algos that way that the first rank is always the best site. So there is no reason that I want a bad site and get away with the ranks.

I want to build a great site. A user friendly site. A cool site that people will remember for its design. But I also want to let people know that there is this awesome site of mine that is very relevant for their search. Once this gap is bridged, I guess one is safe.

Changing User Behaviors

Also, I don’t believe that information seekers on Google, click only the first result. Some die-hard Googlers might only visit the first result, but I think a major chunk of others are more human-like and knows that Google might be hiding a better site in its other pages/ranks. So I strongly believe that more than being on the first, its equally important to rank for a variety of related search terms on other ranks on the first page.

I wouldn’t be even surprised to see a rank 3 website amass more traffic than a number one website. Quite possible if you have an awesome site.

So the point is, there is life beyond the first rank on Google. There are awesome sites, of lesser known brands doing twice or more your business (on first rank). They are doing it good not because they are better but because they are clever and they aren’t foolish enough to concentrate only on the first rank.

How To Optimize Your Page Titles For Singular & Plural Terms?

Most SEOs will agree that the title element is your strongest on-page element, and optimizing the title is critical for rankings and traffic. However when the keyword or phrase you are targeting has both a singular and plural version, many people have a difficult time optimizing for both. Novices decide to create a page for both the singular and plural version or just target the one term usually with the higher search volume. However with some careful planning it is possible to get both versions in your title tag.

For example lets assume you are an SEO consultant. Chances are you want to rank for both phrases [SEO Consultant] and [SEO Consultants]. However creating a separate page for each one would be awkward from a user point of view, as there isn’t really a need for two pages with content that will ultimately be very similar. In this case what you would want to do is find a way to get both versions in your title tag without it looking keyword stuffed. You could do something like this:

Manikiruban SEO Executive, SEO Executive
While that does have both terms it’s awkward and spammy looking. Here’s an alternative that is better:

SEO Executive: Manikiruban SEO Executive

The words are identical; however by changing the order it becomes much more readable and useful. Let’s try a commercial example:

Discount Disney Vacation, Disney Vacations

Again the wording is awkward, looks keyword stuffed and appears spammy. However by changing the order and adding a word we can come up with something much more useful:

Disney Vacations - Planning a Discount Disney Vacation

Experimenting a bit more you could even come up with something more useful and purchase driven:

Disney Vacations - Find A Discount Disney Vacation Online

The next time you are trying to target singular and plural phrases or phrases that are very close, look for ways to add an extra word or two, experiment with word order, and incorporate some natural language into your title. With a little effort chances are you’ll find a way to get both singular and plural forms of your keywords into your title, and be more click enticing.

Is There Any Use In Using Keywords In The URL?

Is there any value in using keywords in the URLs of web pages? Would a search engine look at keywords that you might include in the addresses of your pages, and associate those keywords with the content of your pages in the search engine’s index?

If so, how would a search engine go about looking at the web addresses indicated in the URLs to your pages, and break them down into meaningful parts to identify keywords?

Breaking URLs down into parts may also play a role in how the pages of a web site might be crawled by a search engine.

A newly published Yahoo patent application gives us some ideas on how it might extract keywords from the URLs of pages, and rank them, as well as using information uncovered in the process to determine which pages to crawl first from a web site.

Techniques for Tokenizing URLs
Invented by Krishna Leela Poola and Arun Ramanujapuram
Assigned to Yahoo
US Patent Application 20090083266
Published March 26, 2009
Filed November 6, 2007

A search engine will look at many different signals to determine what a page on the Web is about, and attempt to rank pages based upon keywords that might be an indication of the subject matter or content of those pages.

Many of those keywords are extracted from the content of pages themselves, but a search engine can look at other information associated with pages, such as the addresses of the pages.

Keywords may also be extracted from the URLs of pages, by using an algorithm that can break the URL into components, understanding the structure of those URLs, and removing candidate keywords from the different parts found within the URL.

Parts of URLs

The patent application provides a definition for different parts of URLs:

Scheme - This section of a URL identifies the internet protocol used to access a resource, such as HTTP or FTP

Authority - The part of a URL that identifies the host server where the documents or resources are located, or the domain name.

Path - This is the information following the slash character after the authority, or domain name, and it identifies the specific page or resource

Query arguments - A string that may appear in a path that can be broken down into name and value pairs, such as “category=shirts”

Fragments - A fragment identifies a subsection within a page that might be pointed to in a URL, ususally started with the “#” symbol

An example of these five different components from the patent filing:

http://www.yahoo.com:80/shopping/search?kw=blaupunkt#desc

In this URL, the scheme is “http”

The authority is “www.yahoo.com:80″ which shows the domain, and also includes a port number of “80″ in this instance.

The path is technically everything after that first single slash: “shopping/search?kw=blaupunkt#desc”

A query argument shown in this example is “kw=blaupunkt”

A fragment from this URL is #desc

Tokenizing URLs for Keywords and Web Crawling

The patent application describes a way that it might break down URLs into parts, or components, to extract keywords from URLs. Those keywords could be used to categorize pages for web search, and to understand what pages are about when providing advertisements for those pages.

This breaking down of URLs into components, and even smaller parts is referred to as “tokenizing URLs.” In addition to helping a search engine find keywords in URLs, it can have an impact on the indexing of the pages of a web site:

The tokens generated by URL tokenization may also be assigned with features of the web document to improve the efficiency of a web search. Tokenizing URLs is also the first step when clustering URLs of a website. Clustering URLs allows the identification of portions of a web document that hold more relevance. Thus, when a website is crawled by a search engine, some portions of web documents may be white-listed and should be crawled, while other portions may be black-listed and should not be crawled. This leads to more efficient web crawling.

Conclusion

Yahoo provides a fair amount of detail in the patent filing on how URLs can be broken down into components, and how keywords can be extracted from those components, as well as provided different rankings. If you’re interested in how the URLs of your site might be treated under this process, it’s worth spending some time with the patent filing itself to get a grasp of the technical details. Keep in mind that the processes from this patent application may not be the ones that Yahoo may presently be using at this time,

A cautionary note - changing the URLs to your pages, especially if those URLs have been around for a while and are indexed by search engines, is an undertaking that shouldn’t be started without careful consideration, and without using a cautious approach that keeps the risk behind such a change to a minimum. Such an approach can include using proper redirects (permanent 301 redirects) to any new URLs for external links pointed to pages of the site, actually changing URLs in internal links to the new addresses upon the site itself, and other technical methods that might help a site retain its rankings in search engines. How a search engine might react to changes to the URLs of the pages of a site can vary from one search engine to another, and traffic to the pages of a site may be negatively impacted by such a change for a period of time regardless of how carefully such a change is implemented.

12 Content Strategies To Make SEO Great

Its been said time and again, to search engines, “content is king”, but when it really comes down to it, many companies say they don’t have the time, patience, or budget for content creation. It begs the question; why then should they be ranked high in the search results? Maybe, just maybe, they’re not thinking about it logically and aren’t considering all the options at their disposal.

Here are 12 different types of content (not necessarily mutually exclusive) that when implemented properly, can drive tremendous volumes of visitors, links, and even business:

1. widgets/badges - for those unfamiliar with widgets, a widget is typically an interactive tool, that can be embedded in a web page. Since they’re interactive, often they can help potential clients find solutions quicker than they otherwise might have, making them a very powerful online marketing tool. Sometimes widgets are also made available for download to other websites, making them a powerful link acquisition tool too. Below is an example of one such widget.


2. videos - a good video is difficult to beat. People like to hear and see things for themselves, as opposed to reading about them, or being told about them. Video makes this possible, and accordingly is very popular. At the same time, video can be instructional, entertaining, and/or informational. When well done, videos will drive tremendous volumes of traffic, links, and/or potential clients to a site … and offers additional opportunities to appear in the search results


3. images - if a picture can say a 1000 words, then its also possible for images to generate 1000 visitors or links. We’ve seen many client sites, who’s images drive 20%+ of their overall website traffic volumes. In many cases, images are the reason people visit websites … they need to see what they’re buying! All that to say, do not underestimate the power of good quality images!


4. research - people often buy from websites they’ve heard about before, because familiarity breeds loyalty and trust. One means of breeding familiarity and trust is to perform and publish unique research that others in your industry or potential clients will find useful. When well thought out, timely, and topical, such research can generate thousands of links, visitors, and potential clients. Good research also helps to establish you as an authority in your space.


5. awards - everyone likes to receive cudos, or acknowledgement of a job well done! Now image that you as a site owner offer the ability for others to take those cudos, and post them on their site for all to see. Its a powerful tool, often generating thousands of visitors and/or links.


6. contests - while not for every business, contests can generate alot of relevant links, and accordingly help a site rank much better. The key is to ensure that the contest somehow relates to your business.


7. news - sites that are routinely first to publish industry news, are often visited more frequently, generate more links, and are viewed more as industry authorities. Alternatively, those running news stories after the fact, typically don’t experience all these benefits, unless they add some value or unique intepretation angle. Of course, one way to ensure the news is new and fresh is to make the news (aka a publicity stunt) … so get creative!


8. blog posts - perhaps one of the most popular techniques to create content, and one of the most poorly done! Most don’t understand the subtle nuances of creating blog content. I’ve posted about it previously (12 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid) as have many others, but the majority still continue to write blog content as if it were for another form of offline media.


Blog content generally consists of one of the four types listed below:


a. editorial/opinion based

b. entertaining

c. resource/educational

d. news (see #7 above)

The type you choose should be based on your objectives.


9. do something “remarkable” - if a company truly does something remarkable and unique, and publishes it on their site, the content will take on a life of its own. What does this mean? Well, if you’re a sausage manufacturer, manufacture the largest sausage on the planet. If you own a burger joint, offer a $2700 burger on the menu. Even if no one ever orders it, its something to mention on your website, and something interesting that others will notice and talk about (which results in links, visitors, and often clients). Consider this term alone “most expensive martini” … there are 1200 mentions on it in Google, and presumably a good number of those mentions link to it!


10. create an ebook - much easier said than done, but creating a ebook can result in perceived authority, visitors, links, and …. business!


11. make and distribute applications - if you can find a way to make potential clients lives easier (online or offline), it can have a profound impact. Creating an online application such as a WordPress plugin, a calculator, or industry software, and hosting it for download via your site, can increase awareness of your site, your perceived authority in the industry, attract large volumes of visitors, links, and yes, even business.

12. user generated content - content added by others, is content that you didn’t have to add yourself. With most business owner’s arguing they don’t have the time or budget for content, user generated content (UGC) would appear to be a logical solution. Although, most business owners then become concerned with their inability to control the content. Precautions can be taken however in most situations, making UGC a solution worth investigating.

Google Releases Major Blog Search Blogroll Algorithm Update

The much awaited update to the Google Blog Search blogroll detector algorithm has finally been pushed through.

An updated Google Groups thread has Googler, Jeremy Hylton saying:

We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement over our earlier fix. We had originally planned to launch an experiment for link: queries, but decide more recently to release this change first. We are still working on the link: change and expect to have that ready in a few more weeks.

We did expect to see an update for how Google Blog Search responds to the link query, but as Jeremy said, that won't be released yet for the next few weeks. But the blogroll matching detector, which matches for keywords in the blogroll sections of sites, should no longer return results for those keywords.

Why does this matter? Well, lets say you are like me and you track who links or mentions you via Google Blog Search. If someone has the Search Engine Roundtable in the blogroll, and the do a daily blog post, even if that blog post doesn't mention the Search Engine Roundtable, blog search would show that new blog post as a match. Why? Because it is in the blogroll and Google thinks it is part of the content of the blog post. Google said they fixed this issue but they do want feedback at the Google Groups thread.

Is Flash Being Indexed By Search Engines?

It seems that once a year for the past five years or so, a search engine representative will stand up at a conference and announce that they are now indexing Flash. Website designers jump with glee, and SEOs lament that all the work they did educating their clients on why they need to curb their use of Flash will be for naught.

Think of it this way, if Flash were a food, it would be an herb or a spice. Let’s say it’s basil. While basil is great in pesto, it’s not something that you’d typically make an entire meal out of. You use it to add flavor to your tortellini. And yet designers across the world—as well as CEOs who want to appear cool—want huge chunks of their websites in Flash. Sigh.

Of course if the search engines truly are indexing Flash this time around, then what’s the problem?

Flash sites certainly can do some neat tricks. People can interact with them in ways they can’t with a typical plain-Jane HTML website. Interaction is certainly good, as it can make a site “sticky.” And people pass around fun websites to their friends so they can make the little balls spin, or play with the cool virtual cubes. This is great for some websites which are looking to entertain people.

If, on the other hand, your company wants people to actually understand what you do when they come to your website, how does playing with the spinning balls further this goal? I don’t personally find it endearing to have to guess what’s behind each ball or cube when I mouse over it and it makes a funny sound or explodes and perhaps shows a single word or cute saying. If I’m looking to kill time, I might visit your site. But if I’m wondering if you’re a good fit for my needs at the moment, I don’t want to do a puzzle to figure this out. Instead, I am likely to seek out your competitor that provides me with information, rather than games.

As you can tell, I’m not a fan of cool Flash sites for a typical business. But what about those that have a more basic Flash site that does indeed provide information? For them, I would ask, why Flash? If you don’t need to allow your visitors to interact with your website, then why not just use HTML with Flash accents? Because even if the search engines are indexing the information contained in Flash (more on this in a bit), there are other reasons not to use it. First and foremost, not every browser has Flash installed. In fact, currently on an iPhone, Flash shows up as a little blue cube. Second, many Flash-based sites use only one URL for the entire site. Besides the search engine implications of that, it is also a nightmare for bookmarking, as well as for most web analytics programs.

So, even if search engines are indeed indexing the information in Flash, my recommendation is still to not design your entire website with it.

With that out of the way, I just rolled up my sleeves and started looking at how Google is currently treating Flash and whether websites can do just as well in the search results even if important information is contained within Flash.


Guess what? Most Flash is still highly invisible in Google.

To test this, I went directly to some Flash sites, and pasted exact words contained within their Flash into Google (using quotes) and most of the sites did not show up in the search results. Upon review of the source code of two sites that did show up I found that one was using the phrase I looked for within their Meta description (see… meta descriptions actually DO count for something with Google, despite what some will tell you). The other site had lots of text within the code beneath the Flash so that search engines and browsers without Flash would have some meaningful info. While that’s a good alternative, the info they had was very different from the info contained in their Flash. That’s a bit of a dangerous game to play with the search engines if you ask me. If that info is good enough for search engines and iPhones, why isn’t it good enough for your most important users?

The other thing I noticed was that even on pages that used Flash sparingly, if they had words in the Flash files, a search for those exact words would not typically pull up the HTML page that the Flash was embedded on. However, when performing a search for the exact phrase plus only .swf filetypes (which is what most Flash files use as an extension), the Flash files themselves do show up in the results. This tells me that the Google reps were kind of telling the truth about Flash being indexed, but that it doesn’t do website owners much good in a real world setting.

Google searches for the brand names of Flash sites do bring up the sites in the search results (note that their brand is typically in the Title tag). So if that’s all you care about, then using all Flash shouldn’t be a problem for you. However, if you’re interested in showing up in the search results for people who may not have already heard of you, i.e., those seeking out exactly what you offer rather than your brand name, then you may want to rethink the cool factor and go for the smart one instead!

Way Of Google Analyzing The Top Keywords On The Site

Google recently filed a patent application that deals with the keywords that Google finds on your web pages.

Google's new patent filing describes a way for website owners to view the top phrases that Google assigned to their website. The patent shows that Google finds the most important keywords on a website with a phrase-based indexing system and it describes a method that could allow website owners to add additional related keywords.

How does Google find the top keywords of your website?

All major search engines index web pages based on the individual words that they find on the page. If certain words and phrases appear together on the same page, search engines assign a topic that is related to these words to the page.
For example, the words "Paris" and "Hilton" are associated with a woman instead of a city and a hotel, the words "Tiger" and "Woods" are associated with golf.

Google's patent application indicates that Google might plan to tell you what they believe are the top keywords for your website and let you suggest changes to these phrases.

How can Google find the relation between words?

Google has billions of web pages in its index. If Google finds that many web pages contain both the word "Paris" and the word "Hilton" then Google might assume that these keywords are related. The other words on these pages could give Google a hint that this special word combination is about a woman.

Words that frequently appear very close to each other could get a tighter connection. Google has a lot of algorithms that allow them to calculate the relation between different words.

What does this mean for your website?

Google does not allow you to suggest your keywords through a form yet. That means that you must use other methods to tell Google for which keywords you want to be listed on Google's result pages. That's why search engine optimization is so important.

Here are some things that you can do to show search engines that your site is relevant to a special topic:

• Use a meaningful site architecture
  

Use a logical system to organize your website content. Create content sections that deal with different parts of your main topic and make sure that everything that is related to your topic is mentioned on your web pages.

Make sure that your web pages are put in the right categories on your website and that it's easy to find the different categories.

• Create web pages that use different relevant search terms
  

If you want to get high rankings for the keyword "shoes" then it's not enough to mention the keyword "shoes" on your website.

You must also use related keywords such as "sneakers", "boots", "sandals", "footwear", etc. to show Google that your website is relevant to the general topic.

• Find out why other pages rank higher than yours
  

If you ever asked yourself why another page has been ranked higher than yours although you perfectly optimized your pages for your search terms then you should analyze the inbound links of the top ranked pages.

The number and the authority of inbound links are important. However, it's also important that the links come from semantically and topically related pages.

Don't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your pages. Modern search engine algorithms require you to create a website that has been optimized for many different but related search terms.

How To Use PPC For SEO Benefits?

Pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) are widely used for search engine marketing, but are mostly performed in isolation to one another. The cross utilization of data is seldom seen, which if done, could potentially produce far better results.The idea behind this post is to ascertain how best PPC can be used to gain useful insights, which when implemented in search engine optimization can help us derive improved results. Mentioned below are few tasks that can be performed better by using PPC to ‘test the waters’.

1. Keyword selection: There is no shortage of free and paid keyword research tools but the data presented by them is not always accurate. Many of us would have learnt this fact the ‘hard way’ – by optimizing for keywords that don’t deliver targeted traffic, or for that matter any traffic at all. It is a costly mistake both in terms of time and money.

PPC can be used to determine the ‘traffic generation capacity’ of keywords by mining raw data such as number of impressions for that particular keyword. This data can be extrapolated to predict the traffic yielding capacity of keywords. Optimizing the website for such keywords would therefore drive more traffic to the website.

2. Building a wider keyword portfolio: Every website has a set of core terms it wants to rank for, in addition to other semantically similar key phrases. High rankings for core terms will deliver maximum targeted traffic, but at the same time the importance of ranking for secondary terms cannot discounted.

By running a PPC campaign for core terms on broad match, we can identify keywords other than the core terms that trigger the ad. This will not only help in building a database of relevant keywords that are searched for, but also assist in ascertaining keywords that Google considers relevant to the core terms. Tapping these keywords along with the primary keywords would therefore channel more visitors to the website.

3. Judging keyword efficacy: As everything else in search engine marketing, not all keywords are made equal. It is a well established fact that some keywords convert better than others, but the only certain way of knowing keywords that convert better is to test.

PPC is a quick and efficient way to check the ‘conversion potential’ of both the primary and secondary key phrases. Optimizing your website for keywords that drive conversion is a sure shot way of generating more revenue.

4. Writing compelling descriptions: Meta description may have lost its importance as a ranking factor but plays a crucial role in enhancing ‘click through rate’ for organic listing. In short, it is the ‘ad copy’ for organic listing.

PPC can be used to test different versions of ad copies and their corresponding click through rate. The best performing ad copies, based on their click through rate, can then be improvised to develop Meta descriptions that are likely to attract more clicks.

5. Testing landing pages: A website that does not have the potential to convert visitors into customers is no good.

In order to create a landing page that facilitates conversions it will need to be tested, modified, and tested in an iterative manner. Since PPC has the propensity to deliver quality traffic quickly, testing can be performed without waiting for organic rankings and the consequent traffic.

The whole exercise of leveraging PPC to build a high performing SEO campaign has an additional bonus attached to it – you get the ‘best of both worlds’ and here’s how.

It is a well established fact that an online marketing campaign produces best results when search engine optimization and PPC are implemented in tandem, and compliment each other.

After initial spillage and fine tuning, the PPC campaign that is being used to churn data will start to deliver positive return on investment. Synergizing the PPC campaign with your search engine optimization campaign will result in a holistic search engine marketing campaign. This is bound to deliver best results. And our philosophy is - why settle for less when you can get the best.

Is Link Building Necessary For A Website?

Everyone in the field of internet marketing knows that without link building, your site will not be valued by search engines. Also, we agree that links are a path through which our prospects can reach to us. Most importantly, we need to develop high quality links to outrank our competitors.

Link building is not easy, however. It requires hard work, creativity, patience, and a lot of timel. This job becomes more challenging when you hear remarks like "This technique is not good; it will not work for your website ranking," "This is unethical," and much more. In a real sense, these are inevitable comments.

We are constantly being questioned by our clients about what works and what doesn’t work, so I thought I would compile a quick list of misleading link building statements to help our clients.

#1 Outbound links can kill rankings

• “Linking out to other sites isn’t worth doing because you drive people away from your website.”
• “All outbound links leak Page Rank.”

My verdict: If you send your visitors to useful content often enough, they’ll keep coming back for more.

A site cannot "drop" or "lose" PageRank by linking out. Also, there are few ways of linking to other sites that don't result in leaks. The best option is to set “rel” attribute i.e., rel="nofollow". The fact is search engines not only look how the site links in, but also check how it links out. Sites with a lot of incoming and reciprocal links can only be viewed negatively by search engines.

Tip: Link to websites that will benefit you. Linking to authoritative sources can help establish visibility and build credibility. Outbound links hold a lot more weight than is generally perceived.

#2 Reciprocal links won't work

A common myth concerning reciprocal links is that if you exchange links with sites, you will not get any value of those links in rankings.

My verdict: It’s not true that reciprocal linking is bad. If you link to a site you liked and this site also link to you (depends on site requirement), there is nothing bad about it. And it will pay you in terms of ranking for sure. Besides, the wrong way of reciprocal linking is creating a link page on a website and then trading links with other websites' link pages with the intention of “Give link and get link.”

Always remember, Google will never penalize the site that has backlinks coming from relevant and quality sites.

Tip: Stay within your domain and it should not be your only linking strategy.

#3 Link with a Page That has a High Page Rank

Get 25% links from PR-5

15 % links from PR- 4

10% links from PR- 3 and so on….

PR…PR ….PR. One of the major concerns of clients. Even service providers differentiate their services by offering the highest percentage of links from high PR sites.

My verdict: We think it’s totally misleading your prospects. We (SEO professionals) know quality and relevancy is paramount, so why do we always try to fool our customers by using statement like this?

Who says backlinks from PR 5 is better than PR 1? Look at this PR calculation formula:

PR (A) = 1 – d + d ( PR(B) / L(B) + PR(C) / L(C) + PR(D) / L(D) + ….. )

d = 0.85 (damping factor derived statistically)

The final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (PR/ number of outbound link).

Now, for instance, you have web page A. You are getting links from two pages: one is B and other is C.

Page B (page rank- 5, number of outbound links – 100)

Page C (page rank- 1, number of outbound links – 10)

According to the formula above, if web page A gets link from page B, the final PR will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 5/100= 0.193.

And if A gets a link from C, the final PR will be approximately 0.24.

So you see, the final PR value of Page A will be better if linking with C has PR 1 than linking with a page B that has PageRank 5.

Tip: It is advisable to check the total number of outbound links on a page and the quality of a webpage rather than PR only.

#4 Linking With High PR websites!

“Always Link with High PR page.”

Another misleading concept. There are a lot of differences between websites and web pages.

My verdict: A high PR website indicates the PR of the home page and web page can be any of the inner pages. Google assigns PR only to a particular web page and not to the whole site. Therefore, home page PR cannot pass value to the inner pages of website.

Tip: It is imperative to check the PR of a web page and, most importantly, the relevance of that particular page from where the link is sourced.

#5 Permanent link building

“Links can be permanent.”

This is the biggest myth that makes service providers' pitch sound compelling to most of their prospects.

My verdict: Links cannot be permanent. Getting links on other sites depends on the webmaster of that site. He can either keep it for long or remove it, all up to his or her requirement. We cannot take direct control on others' sites. However, we can take assurance from them to keep the links for a particular time period (6 months, 3 months, etc.) and not forever.

Tip: Develop links that can pay you longer, not even stay longer.

#6 Paid links are unethical

There is much conversation around paid links, like:

“Paid links are unethical; Google can penalize you for paid links.”

My verdict: What is the differentiating factor between natural links and paid links? Or how could you detect paid links? No way at all, but there could be guesses about paid links, like developing a large number of links within limited time period, with most of the backlinks from High PR sites, links from irrelevant sites, or many other quality issues. If you know these things can pull Google to suspect your sites, it’s better to avoid these types of links while buying.

Paid links are none other than paid advertisements. If you can post banner and text ads, then why not links?

Tip: For quality links, it would be better to go for experienced and authorized link builders (who know the real purpose of link development and could give your website maximum business) rather than linking networks. Don't even buy links in bulk and pay for only those links that can return you more.

How To Find That A Blog Link Is Useful Or Waste?

Sometimes when you’re on the prowl looking to acquire links via link trades, buying links or contributing optimized content to a blog in return for a link or two, you can run into some sites which may seem like you’ve struck link gold .. but these opportunities may prove too good to be true.

Case in point, you may find some site owners who are more or less giving away good links on sites with high PageRank or lots of incoming links, but what may look like incredible places to get links from, but I highly suggest taking a deeper look before striking a deal. Here are some red flags to look for when judging the quality of a site.

Topic Irrelevance : Is the site’s content relevant to its theme or URL? Site relevance is one of the first things I look at when judging the quality of a site or linking partner. If it’s a blog, are all of the posts about the genre or theme of the site? Or are they just blatant reviews designed to make money. If the answer is the latter, then that site has no real value and will probably lose anything it currently has going for it right now. If so, the value of your link will be nothing, or some negative value could be associated with your link.

Dropped Domains : Look through the history of the site via Archive.org and its Whois information to see if the site has been dropped. Google looks at two aspects with dropped or transferred domains : has the site changed hands and has the site changed content.

If you find an obvious site like CatholicsforLieberman.org with lots of juicy association or church links pointing to it, and the site is a Wordpress blog running off a default template and blogging about office furniture, stay away from it; it’s been dropped, picked up and all of its old good content was replaced with crap.

Buy a Sponsored Post Buttons : I’m not going to name any companies, but there are a lot of paid blogging review companies out there. Some use good blogs, are responsible and a bit under the radar, others are pure garbage and will result in negative association with a bad linking neighborhood. If you see buttons to buy a post on a blog, WITH A PRICE, and the posts say “Sponsored Post”, and you see that the links in the posts don’t use a no-follow .. hit your back button NOW!

Penises, Viagra and Poker : OK, this should be a given but if the site or blog which you are thinking about obtaining a link from links out to or writes about online gambling sites, penis enlargement or sex pills like Viagra, there’s a 99% chance that you’re about to obtain a link from a spam blog (or splog). Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it … unless you sell penis pumps or have an online poker spam site (and if you do, I hope you’re thinking of better ways of getting links … like comment spamming Search Engine Journal or Daily SEO Tip!)

Generic Wordpress Defaults : Not all blogs with generic Wordpress templates are spam, but a lot of the spam blogs I run into do not venture too far away from the freebie Wordpress templates available from Fantastico or basic Wordpress template sites. You’ve probably seen these when you first develop a Wordpress blog.

Also, check their “About Us” page, if it says the following, the blog could be spam, new, or just lacking some basic TLC :

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

I really do use this as a quality indicator and if I find a good blog for becoming a link partner with and I see that they have not changed their About Us page, I usually make sure they do so before embarking on a blogging or link campaign with them.

Tips To Track Email Marketing Campaigns

Email campaigns are a cost-effective way of attracting quality return visitors to your site. It's important that you tag your email campaigns with campaign tags so that you can track how well each email performs. This lets you optimize your efforts and track your return on investment.

What are campaign tags?

Campaign tags are additional information that you apply to links. Once a link is clicked, the tag information is passed to Google Analytics. Tagged links allow you to evaluate the performance of individual links within your emails.

Why tag email links?

Let's say that you send out an email newsletter in January and February that does not use campaign tags. Visitors coming from emails reported within the Referring Sites Report will only include visitors coming from web-based email clients like Gmail:


But, did they visit your website as a result of the January email or the February email? Unless you've used campaign tags, you'll have no way of knowing.

Visitors who click a link in your email using an email client on their computer will be reported as Direct Traffic -- and will therefore be grouped in with visitors who used bookmarks or who typed your website's URL into their browser.

A quick reference for tagging emails

The Google Analytics URL Builder is a great tool for generating tagged links to use within your email campaigns.
For more information vist Google Analytics Blog

Do Setting Up A Blog Gives Out Quick SEO Solution?

Sometimes, I feel that the emphasis on blogs and blogging have taken dangerous heights. Especially with someone who has to sell his products online. There’s enough and more information flowing around that says setting up a blog on your site is the “band aid” to your falling SERP ranks.

I should disagree with this statement. Not only because it sounds too easy and vague but also because it is wrong.

Most of my clients do have an old website, which has a falling SERPs record and are looking for a healing process. Some are still doing good while some have serious issues such as page not being indexed and “penalty like” issues.

Its a bit surprising when most of them suggest blogs as a solution. Probably from what they’ve heard over on the internet, but the expectations from a blog is just too much and hyped I must say !

Blogs do help in oiling back the machine but I’m seriously concerned over the “setting up a blog” part of it.

I strongly disagree that just by setting up a blog, some miracle is going to happen. No.

Blogs and social media should be embraced in the right way with lot of commitment and involvement. You should be able to “utilize” blogs and the social media channels to your benefit. You should still be able to deliver content frequently, should be able to connect with the audience and on top of all able to deliver quality without actually promoting your products directly. Its easy to piss off people with your content and in blogging its a bit too easy to. So you have to be really careful with it.

There’s a lot more to using blogging and social media as a platform to sell your products. It doesn’t end with setting up a blog, adding some meta keywords and waiting for the traffic to rush in.

Having said that blogs are good tools to bring in that much needed traffic rush and google juices to your failing site, if you use them effectively that is.

So essentially, setting up a blog is a good thing, but not definitely a quick solution. Its only a starting point and there’s quite a lot more to go. The time, effort and commitment required to bring in the traffic is almost as equal as in a normal site.