Keywords in domain name do the help ? Search engine optimization tip Thursday feb 17 2005

Lots of people in SEO industry are still worried about having keywords in their domain names, So are they worth having it, NO,

In our opinion best domain name is a domain name good for the users, Usually keyword domain names ar hyphenated and they don’t have good value from users, These days search engines place so little value on keywords in domain names it is just a negligible factor,

There are more important factors than just keywords in domain name, Keywords in domain name help if you are spammer, Say if a spammer wants to do automated blog comment spam and guest book spam he might not always get the backlinks with the anchor text he expected, that time if the keyword is in domain name search engines give value to them,

For legitimate search engine optimization keyword hyphenated domain names are a waste of time and effort, Best we recommend select a domain name best your brand and business, Keyword domains are a thing of the past don’t worry about keyword rich domain names unless you are spammer who want to spam search engines,

We hate spam and we hate people who do that,

SEO Blog Team,

Is sitemap necessary for a site? Search engine optimization seo tip wednesday February 16 2005,

Site map is a term coined and used for a site to show a list of important pages of a site, To avoid the homepage or any other page look cluttered sitemaps are created and connected to an important page of the site, Mostly it is connected to the homepage of a site,

There has been various debates across various forums whether a sitemap is essential for a site, As an opinion of search engine genie we suggest adding a site map to your site, Site maps help in various ways both for visiting search engines and regular visitors,

Some benefits of sitemaps on a site,

1. Users wont get lost of your site if you run a big site, If you connect your important pages in your site map users can navigate easily to any page listed in the sitemap and return to the main page without loosing their path,

2. For large sites it is difficult to navigate deeper and deeper, A good sitemap prevents this and users can navigate to any page without getting lost, Also most of the inner pages will come more closer to the homepage and this helps effectively in good navigation,

3. Not all search engine crawlers crawl a site deeper and deeper, Some crawlers like yahoo slurp tend to go into a site only to a certain extent, For crawlers like slurp pages shouldnt be buried deeper, A sitemap will combat this problem, When a site map is used pages will come closer to top level and this help yahoo’s crawler slurp to reach inner pages too,

4. Also suppose if a site has javascript menus, DHTM menus and other menus that are not search engine friendly a sitemap will definitely help in better crawling of a site, A sitemap with text only links to inner pages is very much useful,

5. Sitemaps also help in better spreading of a pagerank, Pagerank google’s trademark algorithm

Site maps are good for large sites as well as small sites, Hope our tips on sitemaps will give your site a better exposure to search engines,

SEO Blog team,

Keyword research an important step towards effective search engine optimization – Seo tip tuesday feb 15 2005

keyword research is a vital part of search engine optimization, Targeting wrong keywords for a site will put all efforts in vain,

An effective keyword research and finding the right keywords will bring in targeted traffic to a site, Targeted traffic means good business,

Points to keep in mind when doing keyword research,

1. Compare the keyword suggestions of overture, wordtracker and adwords and see which are most searched and most popular,

2. Try running an adwords or Overture PPC campaign and check which keywords convert best,

3. Don’t try optimizing for all keywords, eliminate keywords which are too low competitive and which are bound to bring very less business,

4. Always research for both singular and plural keyword phrases/keywords,

5. Don’t go for spelling errors for a legitimate business site, it makes the site look bad,

6. Apart from the suggestion tools suggestion on the popularity of a keyword phrase we can analyze the competitiveness of a keyword/keyword phrase by checking the number of pages having that term in google/yahoo/msn, checking the number of pages added in title using allintitle: command, checking the targeted keyword distribution by using allintext: command in google, this command will reveal all pages having that keyword phrase on the page,

7. Short list keywords which are good for optimization, Separate words that are useless, words that are too authoritative and too competitive, Optimize for lower competitive keywords first and then move towards competitive keywords,

Hope the above tips are useful for your search engine optimization keyword research process,

Some tools for effective keyword research,

https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.wordtracker.com/

SEO Blog Team,

Meta Description tags – Meta keywords tag Do they help in search engine rankings Search engine optimization tip Monday 14th february 2005

Meta description and meta keywords tags are used in olden days when the search engines didnt have crawler capabilities and cannot crawl a whole site, They used to read only those tags and evaluate a sites ranking based on that, Later search engine spammers got aware of this tactic and started abusing these tags a lot, they just stuffed keywords in these tags,

Then crawler based search engines came into existence and they started seeing much more on a site than just just meta tags, they say onpage factors including alt tags, visible text on the page etc, Slowly the use of meta tags by search engines have become lesser,

But not all top search engines completely dropped using these days, Various top search engines use various meta tags for different reasons,

Yahoo uses meta description tag as part of their ranking algorithm, they see the keywords in that and use it with all the other factors of a site, similarly MSN uses meta description tag in their ranking algorithm, We have proved the above in our tests across these search engines, Also we have proved yahoo and MSN doesn’t use the meta keywords tag,

When it comes to google, NO they don’t use meta description tags,

How we tested for google??

We made up some bizarre phrases and added them to the meta description tag, only our site has those phrases, so when we search for those phrases in search engines we don’t see the result coming up so mostly google don’t use the meta description tags in their algorithm, But google uses snippets of meta description, google indexes the tag and during query time if the relevant words are present in the meta tags they just fetch it and display it, So it never hurts to add the relevant phrases to the page in the description tag, Keywords tag is completely ignored so we can just forget it,

SEO Blog Team,

Froogle an important shoppnig search engine – Search engine optimization tip Sunday 13th february 2005

Some tips on froogle can be found on our froogle section of the site,

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/froogle-feeds.htm

What google says about froogle:-)

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google’s search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

To use Froogle, look for the Froogle Product Search box on the advanced search page or go directly to the Froogle home page. Type in the name of the item you want to find and click on “Froogle Search.” Almost instantly, you’ll see photos of relevant products and links to the stores that sell them. Or you may choose to browse through the merchandise categories listed on Froogle’s home page until you find exactly the item you want to buy.

As with all other Google search results, Froogle ranks store sites based only on their relevance to the search terms you’ve entered. Google does not accept payment for placement within our actual search results, and advertising that appears to the right of Froogle search results is always clearly identified with the label “Sponsored Links.”

Do you need a Robots.txt file for search engines?? Search Engine Optimization Tip 11 February 11th Friday 2005

Robots.txt is a text file placed on the root of the server to tell the search engine crawlers that there are restrictions for the crawlers in crawling the targeted site,

We can perform various tasks with robots.txt, some of them are prevent search engine crawlers from crawling the site, stop crawlers from specific pages/directories etc,

Robots.txt is not necessary for better search engine crawling, it will be good if an empty robots.txt text file is uploaded to the root, that way you can prevent 404 errors when crawlers request fetching the robots file,

Robots.txt file is not for users, it is only for search engines so nothing will be affected if there is no file, But adding one wont make any harm, An empty robots file will be nothing wrong in that,

keep visiting for new tips,

301 redirect to conserve pagerank and distribute proper link popularity , Search Engine Optimization Tip 10 February 10th thursday 2005

301 redirect is the most effective way for telling the search engine crawlers that a particular page is moved, For example if you want to drop a old domain and create a new domain then you are bound to loose all link popularity of the old domain, For new domain you have to create link popularity from scratch,
with 301 redirect we can tell then search engine crawlers that the page has moved to a new location and that the link popularity of the old site or old page should be transferred to the new page or site,
A simple way of creating a 301 redirect from a page to a new page is
redirect 301 / http://www.anysite.com”

since we cannot post the whole tip here due to server issues we are attaching it here Please read the 301 redirect tip in this text file

Search Engine Optimization Tip 9 – Writing articles an ultimate way of building free links, February 9th Wednesday 2005

Contents are called spider food, Search engines are basically blind browsers they dont see your flash , DHML, or fancy javascript they only see visible text, anchor text etc, Contents play a vital role for a site,

There are various ways to build free links, One best way is to write article about your industry, Bloggers, message boards forums etc pick well written articles, Also allowing articles to be republished with a back link is an other great way of link popularity, when you distribute an article make sure it reads well,

Use article submission softwares to submit your articles to various good resources,

wait for more tips tomorrow,

SEO Blog team,

Search Engine Optimization Tip 8 – Tips for buying text links, February 8th Tuesday 2005

Tips for buying text links, text links have become a vital part of off page search engine optimization when it comes to search engines, Google’s foundation algorithm was built around links, every search engine treats links as an important factor in ranking sites, Google relevant anchor text links from quality sites matters a lot in search engine ranking algorithms,

Now there are lot of link broker sites / link auction sites out there, textlinkbrokers.com , text-link-ads.com , textlinkbrokerage.com , linkage.com , easytools.org, linkworth.com etc, Though these company sells links on sites which are well established in business there are some drawbacks too, we have to be careful on what basis we buy links, here are some useful tips on link buying,

First check the URL of the site where your link will be placed see how good their site is where they get all their link popularity, whether that site is truly a valuable site for users or just a useless site, Check to make sure you will get some traffic from buying links from their site, Check their back links. Check to see how many pages they have indexed. Check the web archives pages and see how their site used to look and how they improved their business,

Always try buying relevant links, though search engines don’t have the capabilities now to relate the source of links to the target site in future we never know search engines might move more semantic and sophisticated and they will be capable in detecting relevancy in a much better was, so it is always good to buy relevant links, Also relevant links brings good targeted traffic which might in turn bring some good business for you,

Vary your anchor text in incoming links; having same anchor text in all inbound links will trigger some sort of penalty in search engines. Though search engines haven’t implemented any sort of filters like that, we might never know what future holds, so it is better to shuffle anchor in inbound links,

Don’t buy links based on Toolbar pagerank, Toolbar pagerank is not an absolute measure of the quality of a site, A sites quality is determined only by judging the value ability of the resource, A site can easily gain PR8 but that doesn’t mean that site is a quality site,

Track your paid links referrals and the impact on your anchor text popularity for your target term. If your link doesn’t send quality traffic and doesn’t work with search engines it is best to try an different anchor text on a different site, Best is to stop buying links on sites which doesn’t send any value when it comes to search engines and visitors,

Buying site wide links are good for traffic but not good for search engines, Search engines are not too comfortable when you get site wide links, Best option is to get links only from some pages of the linking site,

Avoid buying links from pages with too many outbound links to other sites, This type of tactic typically looks like a Link farm (Definition: A set of web pages that have been built for the sole purpose of increasing the number of incoming links to a web site. This is done in order to increase link popularity and search engine rankings. Link farms usually require a reciprocal link from sites seeking listings. Link farms are a known spam tactic and sites that participate in them are likely to be penalized or banned from the major search engines. ),

Avoid buying links from sites that link out to Viagra, spam pharmacy sites, porn sites, phentermine and spam drug sites,

Avoid buying links as a package from link brokers, usually packages has bad links packed within some good links, those bad links will never be sold and those brokers just include them as package, so beware of those scam tactics, If you want to buy a package make sure all sites listed in your package are legitimate sites and not sites built solely for selling links,

Hope the above tips will help in buying quality text links,

More to come, Keep visiting everyday,

SEO BLOG TEAM.

Search Engine Optimization Tip 7 – Why a Dmoz listing is important for a site??, February 7th Monday 2005

Dmoz.org as we all know the largest human edited directory on the web, There are more than 4 millions sites listed and more than 66,777 editors edit over 590,000 categories, Dmoz is really huge, Also Dmoz is an ultimate starting point of crawling for search engines like yahoo, MSN, google, Gigablast, exalead etc, These search engines like sites listed in dmoz and there is always a slight edge over the normal ranking in dmoz,

There are various good points to be listed in dmoz,

1. 100s of mirror sites use Dmoz RDF file to create their own directory, so one link from dmoz is equal to 1000 links from all the sites which use dmoz RDF including a link from the google directory which is a RDF dump of Dmoz,

2. Dmoz is called the best expert directory and yahoo has made it clear it definetely like sites listed in dmoz, Google also feels sites listed in dmoz as authority and gives a small plus for that site,

3. Dmoz data is used by the google directory and google directory is an important listing, google directory shows the pagerank display next to it and sites listed there can check their pagerank values and how their site is performing by checking the categories where their site is listed,

4. Dmoz directory listings perform well in search engines, dmoz categories rank in various places so they get good search engine traffic and all those traffic are returned to the sites listed in that category, so a good top level category listing in dmoz will give good targeted traffic, Though the traffic is not huge it does drive some useful traffic,

5. Dmoz categories have good pagerank, Those pagerank is inherited from their root level pagerank, Dmoz usually has pagerank 9 and more of the top level categories have pagerank range from 4 to 8, Google whose foundation algorithm which was built around pagerank likes links from dmoz categories which has high pagerank,

6. Dmoz links are themed links, those links originate from relevant pages and it is very good when it comes to related pages,

7. Good anchor text from an expert/authority site, If you get a good anchor text when listed in dmoz it is a very good boost for that particular keyword or phrase,

Some draw backs with dmoz,

1. Takes any where between 2 weeks to 2 years for a listing,

2. Many categories dont have editors though higher level editors edit lower level categories it is a slow process,

3. Difficulty in finding status, Except resource-zone.com there are no good ways to find the status of your submission,

There are not many drawbacks with dmoz, A dmoz listing is very good for all sites, though it is not the only solution it is a vital solution for a site, So submit a good site and wait to get listed,

SEO Blog Team,