Is it necessary to look at competitors while implementing SEO?

All the growing businesses all over the world discover that search engine optimization help them gain a competitive edge. But the marketing experts say that it is also equally important to know what the competitors are doing to achieve the goal.

It is possible for any one to develop the SEO strategy without knowing about the competition taking place around you. But it is always better to have the information of the competitors in order to perform better from their rivals. Before implementing any strategy it is better to do some researches on the search engine optimization, so that they can learn more about themselves as well as the competitor?

This research will give you an idea about the competitors like who are they, where are they, what are they doing, what is right or wrong about their campaign, is their campaign effective. These ideas if taken in to consideration will help you to develop better search engine optimization. Which will help you perform better than your competitor and will lead you to success.

So it is always better to look at competitor and their strategy to for implementing better SEO.

Ten important myths for search engine optimization

1) All the Meta tags are equally important.
2) There should be a timely submission of new post in order to drive traffic to your site.
3) SEO involves less expenditure when compare to the PPC as SEO clicks are free. It is always more cost effective than sponsored or banner advertising. You just need to pay page set up and monitoring charges.
4) SEO is better than PPC for long term. Because in PPC you are visible in search page for short period of time but if you get good ranking in organic SEO. You will definitely drive good traffic to your web site.
5) Always try to hire SEO firm than in house SEO as it involve lots of other expenditure. Hiring a SEO firm provides you with different specialists writing, submitting, redesigning, and posting your site by just paying certain amount.
6) You should optimize all the pages of your website with keywords.
7) Content plays a major role for ranking the site high. You need to implement off site and on the site SEO to get better search engine optimization.
8) Always try to target competitive keywords in order to improve your site ranking.
9) Lots of SEO firm guarantee ranking and optimization but in reality no firm can guarantee ranking in any search engines.
10) Most of SEO firm also demand commitment but you should not rely or agree on any long term commitment. Just tie up yourself only with monthly commitments unless or otherwise you are satisfied with firm and its progress.

Using Keywords to Achieve Search Engine Optimization

What are Keywords?

A keyword is a word that forms all or part of a search engine query—the word or phrase that Internet user’s type in a search box when they are seeking information in a search engine.
Keyword phrases must be carefully selected and placed strategically throughout your web pages to draw users to your content. Search engines don’t pay a lot of attention to these fields, although sometimes they are used in site descriptions.

General Best Practices

• Search engines prefer pages with at least 250 characters.
• Use the keywords a user will use to find your website or web pages, not the keywords you want your content to be found on. Use words on your page that resonate with your target audience and are descriptive of your site. For example, consider using the search term “car sales” rather than “vehicle auctions.” Get inside the mind of the user.
• Map keywords and phrases to their implicit intent.

How are the keywords related to how the visitor is trying to solve their problem?
How do the keywords and phrases relate to what stage visitors are in their seeking process?
What would the visitor consider a success based upon the keyword?
Use these keywords to plan internal hyperlinks that provide the most relevant and persuasive content.

• On your home page, select phrases that describe the general theme of the site, but don’t try to cover everything on your home page.
• For your site’s internal pages, identify the most important subject of that page and pick words that are specific to that subject.

How to Determine the Best Keywords

Look at Your Log Files-: Log files can be a good way to determine what your audience is searching for and what keywords you should use to draw users to your content.
Log files:

• Capture the “exact phrase” that searchers entered.
• Give insight into the number of words searchers are using.
• Provide a rich source of keyword data.

Remember, log files only show the keywords that have brought users to our site. They don’t show you the unsuccessful keywords that didn’t bring users to your site.

Target Variations of Your Keywords-:
Be sure you target your content to address the following:

• Variant spellings
• Slang, acronyms, and abbreviations
• Plurals
• Synonyms

Evaluate Your Keywords. Keywords may have multiple meanings. “Accessibility” might mean “handicapped access” or “website monitoring.” “Chips” may refer to the snack food or computer part.
Pay attention to keywords used alone or combined with another word. For example, “passport” by itself is likely a search for information; “passport” searched with a location is likely a search for services. Keep this in mind when choosing keywords for a page.

Use Keyword Tracking Tools: use keyword tracking tool to keep a check on it. Some of the keyword tracking tools are-

• Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Word tracker
• Google Adwords
• Snap

Some good reason to choose SEO as career

As the sites began to grow and make money, it became more reasonable to hire a dedicated SEO specialist than to have the webmaster do it. The demand for good and expertise SEO is on rise. There are many people who have made successful SEO career in this business.

Choosing SEO as a career is worth as compensation for SEO is equal to or even higher than that of developers, designers and marketers. This type of profession can be practiced while working for company or as a solo practitioner. As a solo practitioner you can earn even more money. If you are confident and more familiar with SEO then you can even start your own company.

But when you decide to start up a company then you need to be good at both designing and SEO because when the client hire some one to make their site, they expect their site to be SEO friendly. By providing such service you will be the most valuable professional.

Someone who comes from designing, developing or web administration, SEO might look very non-technical and boring which makes you feel that you are downgrading yourself. Being designer or developer as profession and selecting SEO as a career will upgrade your skill package. This will help you better than before. So never hesitate choose SEO as a career if you are designer by profession.

I hope by now you would have understood that SEO is always a great career for every one.

Will unpopular keywords help SEO

With so much content on the internet, it becomes so difficult for us to differentiate each one and get attention towards one content. In order to get attention one way is through using less popular keywords.

Most of the companies today are using same type of keywords for their search engine optimization. This increases competition among them and even ranking become difficult. The best way to attract more viewers to your site is to use less popular or non-commercial keywords.

Use of less popular keywords will not be the short term money maker but there would be less competition which would help you to be placed better in search engine. As you rank for related keywords that build a traffic stream that has the potential to convert or to link at your website.

As such use of less popular keywords will help you to boost traffic to your site and will also build the overall authority of a site. And by posting some good useful content will also help in getting your less popular keyword more popular.

Therefore, with the help of less popular keywords, “slowly but steadily you can win the race.”

What will happen to SEO in 2009?

What will happen to SEO world in 2009 is guessing about what the engineers and product developer at Google have been working for last so many months or year. According to me, I feel that paid link war have not really come good in the 2008 but let’s hope better for 2009.

Google is maturing fast so we can tell that any changes that are decided to be made are tested for long internally before it get released in the market for external testing. The hot news in 2008 was that Google did not do much in penalizing link buyers and sellers. PageRank penalties are very scary tactics and most of the site has reduced their traffic due to their links being penalized for buying and selling.

We all are aware of the fact that Google has spent the last 12 months working on the pattern matching algorithms to detect and devalue paid links. This means very little to the link seller because it doesn’t mater them whether the links they sell pass weight or not.

The link acquisition strategy that was working for past so many years will not continue further once the Google perfect this algorithm. Most of the blatant link buying we see in the UK comes from in-house SEO teams rather than SEO Company. These in-house SEO team realized that all the SEO Company are buying links. These SEO in-house teams don’t keep latest SEO trends and waste thousands of pounds in buying useless links.

Another big issue that came up was how to handle link acquisition for new clients. Google has to cleverly watch all links buying pattern so that the link that is bought is not devalued. However if the link is spread out over few months with lot of natural link built in then Google would never be able to detect a link pattern and link would be highly valuable.

Article marketing, Article submission, Article directories for SEO increases traffic to your site

Article writing gives you an opportunity to increase the page rank of your website. The only thing you need to do is to spend little time to write informative articles that is useful to others. Articles tat you write can be submitted to best articles directories such as Articledashboard.com, ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, isnare.com, and articlealley.com.

Article marketing is the best way to promote your business or website and also to increase traffic to your site. In simple terms SEO uses some keyword optimization to achieve better place or rank in search engine which result in more visitor to your site which in turn results in sales for your business. Google offers a site ranking system known as page rank. Good page rank to your site is given on basis of quality of your website content and number of back links to your site. A website with more and more back links hold better position in the search engine.

Once you have completed your article, make a list of article directories where you wish to submit your articles. Then create a free account before you submit the article. Then make your submissions. Articles directories must approve your submitted articles before it get added to the article directory.

Try to make your article interesting and factual. While writing articles make sure that you describe the content of the articles and also it contains all the keyword associated to your subject. Do not bunch the article together in single paragraph, layout it in short paragraph so that it is easier for the visitor to read it because they rarely read the large section of the text.

While article submission most of the article directories provides you with the resource box in which you can actually place your name and little information about yourself, this is a hyperlink to your money making opportunity. This link help to create back link your site which will increase both visitors and search engine placement. Make sure you don’t link directly to affiliate site they may decline, instead link to your own site and add your affiliate link there.

What’s the best way to determine a web page value?

What’s the best way to determine a web page value?
The best way to determine web page value is treating the outdated pages and getting rid of multiple pages.
It is believed that out-of-stock product pages are not at all useful to any visitor but still carry a lot of weight. So it is necessary to do something worthwhile for the visitors and to take SEO power for granted. Outdated pages can be made worthwhile by the following:
Preserve the page and add “Related product” section.
Put some new content on the old URL and move the old content to a new URL.
Delete the pages and let the return from 4o4 header (if any of the page that has no value at all).
Move the pages to archive and amend internal linking to “leak” less internal PR.
Keep the pages but remove all references from the site; if they have to little value then think about that.
Redirect the pages to new relevant version of 301.
Next is to get rid of some multiple web pages without loosing rankings or getting in to any sort of penalties. WebMasterWorld thread discusses the issues of removing multiple low quality pages as a benefit to the users.
But before deciding what to be done to these pages it is necessary to first define its SEO value. At the WebMasterWorld forums a thread was discussed on how to evaluate the worth of page, so how can a page SEO value can be determined?
Having a toolbar PR, Organic Ranking and Traffic are bad indicator. Pages with Graybar PR get many Google referred traffics and back links too. Organic Ranking cannot be a good performance indicator because ranking come and goes as and when. There are many criteria that influence rankings like Google personalization, Geo targeting, new “Search Wiki” Google feature, new competing pages, etc. just like ranking traffics are also temporary. Traffic comes and goes accordingly. Therefore, with help of this SEO value of pages cannot be determined. But external in-links can probably be a good indicator and with the help of external in-links SEO value of page can be determined because if the page is able to pass PR it does have value.

Best tools of search engine genie

Welcome to Search Engine Genie, through Search Engine Ranking and Directory placement it generates high quality traffic to your website. To build the viewer trust and loyalty and also to find online advertising opportunity, Search Engine Genie works with the customer to develop marketing strategy for website. Though there are 1000s of search engine optimization but the quality of provided by Search Engine Genie makes it special.
All the promotion methods of Search Engine Genie are researched and tested in order to provide you with the most up-to-date technology that is available. It works in such a manner that your website gets placed in the top search engine in keyword categories than any search engine submission optimization service. Most of our clients are listed in the major search engine. There are more than thousands subscriber to our websites. We Search Engine Genie provide free SEO tools which helps to verify optimization of your pages. These free SEO tools provided by Search Engine Genie help you to optimize your pages in right way for right keyword.
Now, let us discuss about the best tools provided by the Search Engine Genie:
Google Sandbox Checker Tool
Google Position Checker
Google Bot last accessed Date
Yahoo Position Checker
Competition Finder Tool
All Search engines back-link Checking
OutBound Links Checker Tool
Mod rewrite Rule Generator Tool
Content To Code Ratio Test Tool
Google Sandbox Checker Tool: This Google sandbox checker helps you to check whether your site is in Google’s sandbox for given keyword. You can enter your keyword and URL in the given field and then click submit. The tool will tell you where your site is placed in Google’s sandbox.
Google position checker: the Google Position Checkers helps you to check whether your URL appears in the first 1000s results of your chosen keyword and it will also tell you which position it occupies.
Google bot last accessed date: This tool helps you to check when your website was last accessed by Google.
Yahoo Position Checker: this tool helps you to check the position of your site in Yahoo Search Engine. Why use Yahoo position checker when you can actually find your site through Yahoo search directly?
Our rank checker decreases your burden a lot by avoiding digging through 100s of websites. Regular users of our tool are well aware that the position checker is a very good tool to check rankings for your website. Our tool checks and gives you the exact position of ranking your website is ranking in Yahoo search results. When you do a manual search its difficult to see where your site is hiding and its difficult digging through 100s of sites. We know being a SEO company how difficult it’s to manual check yahoo and get the rankings.
Competition Finder Tool: This tool helps you to find your competitors and anchor tags of their web page with which you can compare yours.
All Search engines back link Checking: this tool helps to check your back link and tells you how many website are linked to your site. Back-links are important factor in search engine optimization knowing your site back-links as well as your competitor site’s back-links is very important when it comes to search engine optimization and rankings. The more and better quality your back-links are better your website ranks in top search engines. This tool shows your back-link data from various important sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alltheweb, Altavista etc. Today ranking in top 3 search engines means a lot to most of the websites. We show back-link data of all the top 3 search engines here. Note: Google back-link data is not so accurate Google shows much better list of back-links when you check the data using Google webmaster tools. Our tools just checks back-links using Google search which is not accurate. Back-link data we get from Google is just an estimate of what back-links you will have for your website. For a more accurate Google back-link data use Google Webmaster Tools. Website popularity is an important factor in your search engine ranking.
OutBound Links Checker Tool: this tool will give you the top 10 URLs whom you are linking to form your website.
Mod rewrite Rule Generator Tool: This tool helps to rewrite long complicated URLs with multiple query strings into short URLs more ideal for search engines. Most of the search engines today don’t understand complicated URLs with too many parameters. Our tool will rewrite all the parameters and will make the URL look like an html URL or a directory type URL which search engines like to crawl. Though Google is much more sophisticated now and can crawl complicated URLs, Google is not the only search engine out there. So it’s important to keep your website search engine friendly for most of the search engines.
Content To Code Ratio Test Tool: Though not the best tool at search engine genie still I consider this tool a cool tool. This tool was long term pending development but after we released it we were surprised to see the massive response we got from regular and new users of this tool. Every day 100s of people use this tool and they come back to our website to use it regularly. This tool crawl a website and separates the ratio contents with code on a web page. Some search engines are keen on seeing how much text a website has and this tool is ideal to get that information. For added benefit we also give out the percentage of text on the webpage.

SEO experiment keyword rich links webmasterworld member

A webmaster world member asks “Hi guys, I am doing an interesting experiment on two of my more throw away domains. The experiment is testing to try and determine more information about how linking to the homepage affects rankings. The testing involves various controls – linking to the root domain from the nav only using ‘home’, linking from the nav using ‘main keyword’, linking from nav using ‘variations’ of keyword, linking from content only (while nav links saying home) to home using ‘keywords’ etc, etc.
First, I should mention some points about the domain.
4 years old Owned by me Dedicated IP Canonical comdomized HTML only Ranks top 5 in Google.com for main, second and third keyword phrases. Total of 90 pages, all unique content (written by me)
Testing was done over a 3 month period, with grace periods in between testing.
Here is so far what I have found. Might tell us a little about the threshold and re ranking filters
1. Linking home from every page in content using the same keyword caused 6 page drop in rankings.
2. Linking home using keyword in nav on all pages caused the same drop.
3. Link home from every page in content using variations caused a 3 page drop.
4. Linking home from the first 10 pages listed in google.com for site:domain.com/* brought increased ranking (from 5th to 3rd)
What is really interesting is that I gotten this down to the ‘by page’ factor. When I *slightly* cross the threshold and add links to two extra pages, and then wait until they are cached, I tip the scales and drop, to page 6.
What is further interesting is that linking home from content using variations of keywords WAS quite effective to a point, after which the site plummeted.
As well, this might point to a ‘hard line’ being crossed in terms of threshold, at one point I had the website going between position 4 and 51-60 for the same keyword every second day (flipping back and forth)
My test will be about trying to -950 the website by being ridiculously deliberate in nav linking, and then seeing if I can reverse the results by removing those (and how long it takes for the trust to be reinstated to the website) “