Archive for October, 2008

Importance of outbound link

Outbound link is a key element in search engine marketing. Outbound links are composed in HTML code. An outbound link is defined as a link that directs users to another site. E.g. when site A links to site B, site A has an outbound link and site B has an inbound link. Outbound link send visitors away from your website. Some site owners still link freely. Some refuse to link at all, and some provide links that open in a new browser window. Outbound links can add value to your site by providing useful information to users without you having to create the content. The number and quality of the outbound links is of great importance. What is more important when creating outbound links is the quality of the site that is linked? Fewer high quality links are much more valuable than numerous low quality links. There are several items to consider when determining the quality of a link. First, links that have been for a longer time and have a good standing with search engines are looked upon with more favor. Another important thing that determines the credibility is the domain name extension. Links with extensions like .gov, .edu, and .org have more credibility because of their content. Links like .info and .biz has less credibility. Links are the skeletal system of the web, without them, it cannot stand.

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 Link Building No Comments

Social Media

Social Media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and content creation. Social media use the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner online. Through social media, individuals or collaborations of individuals create web content, organize content, edit or comment on content, combine content, and share content. Social media uses many technologies and forms, including RSS and other syndicated web feeds, blogs, wikis, photo-sharing, video-sharing, podcasts, social networking, social bookmarking, mashups, widgets, virtual worlds, micro-blogs, and more.

Some Forms of Social Media

  • Blogs
  • Microblogging
  • Podcasting
  • RSS Feeds
  • Social Networks and Government
  • Wikis
  • Virtual Worlds

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 Google No Comments

Ten Tips for Effective Internet Article Writing

1 .In the first paragraph obviously state what the article is about. In standard journalism you would tell who, what, why, when and where an event is occurrence.

2. Organize your material in a point-wise fashion. Before you start writing think of the points that your article is leaving to cover.

3. Place the reader at ease. You are not writing for a scientific or literary society, but to your peers on the Internet. Write in an easy style and if you bring in new terms, describe them for your readers.

4. Explain your points in little paragraphs. Short paragraphs are easier for the reader to follow. No one likes to appear at a long block of solid text. Three, four or five sentences are typically enough for one paragraph.

5. Dont be afraid to fall all the beans! Tell your deal secrets!

6. Give real examples and personal experiences to back up your points

7. Emphasize the benefits of your product or service. When it comes to selling, it is the benefits that sell, quite than the features.

8. Give resource in arrange to your readers. Give the addresses of websites where your readers can obtain more information on the subject that you are talking about.

9. Get another view on your article. Demonstrate it to your friends and colleagues, and dont worry if they disapprove of you, it is better that your friends find the mistakes than your customers. Always remember, a good editor is a writers best friend

10. Keep your most significant information near the beginning of the article and summarize what you want to say at the ending. Editors typically cut things near the end, so keep your most important points and ideas in the beginning of the article. At the very end of the article you can summarize what you set out to achieve in your opening paragraph.

Thursday, October 9th, 2008 Search Engine Optimization No Comments

Stuck In the Google Sandbox?

How Do You Know if You’re Stuck in the Sandbox?

Heres a rough set of criteria for you.

  • Your site is indexed and appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked) type site:www.yoursite.com into Google to check this.
  • Your site has PageRank (use the google toolbar, or nichebot.com to find this)
  • It is regularly crawled, and the cache dates are newer than 10 days
  • On your keyword, you rank in the top 20 for allinanchor, allintext, and allintitle. To check this, type, e.g. allinanchor: and see if you’re in the top 20.
  • You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for

Does the Sandbox Really Exist, or is it Just the Google Algorithm?

This is a big controversy. Everyone has a different opinions.

Don’t listen to guys who handle bluechip companies – they optimize older, high PR sites. It’s your everyday mainly-new-sites webmaster who knows this problem intimately. In fact, all the big sites need to do is place the keyword in the title and they’re on the first page. This gives them an unfair advantage not unlike what the media elite has enjoyed for decades.

Regardless of whether the sandbox is a separate phenomenon from the algorithm, the degree of prejudice against new sites has hurt quality of Google’s search results. This is especially true with products and topics both new and urgent. The bigger sites may not be covering it, but searchers end up there without high quality answers.

The common wisdom now is that if you’re looking for new websites, go to MSN or Yahoo instead. Neither of these sites is using this kind of filter. Many websites rank in the top 10 (for their targeted keywords) on these two search engines, yet are nowhere to be found in Google.

Why Would Google Do This?

Google frowns upon SEOs who try to overly influence ranking, so they needed to find a way around SEO factors to deliver quality results. So they’d look for signs of SEO in websites, e.g. how consistent the addition of backlinks is, and how repetitive (vs. natural) the anchor text of backlinks is, and they consider the age of the site and its backlinks.

Redesign Penalties

Similarly, websites that have made the mistake of too comprehensively redesigning their look, content, or navigation have been shocked to find that they get penalized for this updating. Google seems to prefer a frozen in time or moving like molasses kind of internet. But to be fair, this is something that had to be included to beat spammers who were buying old websites and refueling them with keyword spam.

Why Do You Get Sandboxed?

Some sites have gotten out of the sandbox in a week, while others can take up to a year or more. No one knows if any one contributing factor gets you out sooner rather than later. Some point to the age of inbound links, or the frequency with which your site acquires them. Some say that getting too many inbound links too quickly appears artificial, and is flagged as spam. But others argue that Google can’t know how fast a site should acquire links. A website that received national news coverage, for example, could acquire hundreds or thousands of links in a day.

It’s likely that no one outside of Google fully understands how the sandbox works. The problem has been noticed and discussed for nearly 2 years, and no one has given a satisfactory answer. What’s crystal clear is that Google has made it so complex that it cannot be reverse engineered.

How Long Will You Be Making Sand Castles?

The delay seems to vary anywhere from four to 11 months. Since we don’t know exactly upon what and to what degree the filter depends, it’s likely a different magic combination for every site- and this fits with webmasters experience. So keep your head down, develop content, get inbound links, and eventually you’ll get out.

Some suggest that when you come out of the sandbox, you are not fully free. They notice a rationing or gradual increase in traffic from Google. In the meantime, older sites may rank better than you, regardless of the quality of their look, feel, and content. Deal with it. Keep your head down and keep working.

Another wrinkle: some webmasters suggest that sandboxing can occur at the page level, not simply at the site level, and that it is the bigger money/traffic keywords that get sandboxed. Again, this could simply be due to the level of competition on that keyword, as the entire site is not sandboxed if you’re getting rankings and traffic from other keywords.

Is There a Way to Trick the Sandbox Filter?

Some webmasters have talked about finding cracks in the algorithm¦ and they mainly involve backlinks. For a while, there was a lot of linkspam on blogs, but everyone Google, bloggers, and blog providers have cracked down on that exploit.

The real sandbox solution is not a trick – unless you define everything done by the SEO-aware as tricky. The answer is to grow your content and backlinks naturally over time. Don’t look for the quick buck, the quick ranking, or the easy way out. Go back to basics and build websites that people can use and enjoy. Exchange links with quality websites.

To avoid frustration, I’d suggest, if web building is what you do full time, that you begin a new site every month or two eventually, if you’ve worked consistently on all of them, you’ll have one after another emerging from purgatory and flourishing in the rankings.

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 Link Building No Comments

Link building solutions Backbone of SEO operations.

Link building is one of the popular SEO solutions, which helps in providing higher page ranks. It is the backbone of the SEO operations and it helps in attracting quality traffic. It is important that while choosing a SEO company you ensure that they are offering quality web development services and quality write ups that generate one way links. Smooth web traffic is ensured by quality content management solutions which gives a professional look to your website and even user friendly features.

Link building benefits can be acquired by generating quality and keyword rich back links. Once your bank links are ready you can submit them to some of the good directories lie Digg, Sphinn, Reddit, Ezine and Yahoo! and many others.

You can also use some of the link building strategies like URL links, text links, image links and dynamic links. It is to be kept in mind that back links are crawled by the spiders. So incase you want to attract the spiders then one sure short way is the well written professional write ups rich in articles. This will definitely facilitate both one way as well as two way links.

Website Optimization Tips for Link Building and SEO

Trust, timing and power are three metrics that crash the aim site for building links. Sites that rank at the helm of search engines do so because of fundamental characteristics communal across multiple industries, websites and topics.

Sites ranking in the top 10 are there because they (1) either started previous to others realized the potential for those keywords and contain an advantage of time to market / indexing diffusion (2) because they appreciate link popularity and contain built a plethora of links from a diversity of sites or (3) because they understand the value of a good domain, site structural design and on page optimization.

Not to say that this is the simply way, but we are only focusing on three metrics for the sake of argument. I have mentioned before that chronology begets power, in layman’s terms, if you in progress years ago optimizing, cleansing and grooming your site for senior search engine visibility, you understand the layers concerned in producing high ranking search engine consequence pages.

Offer Quality Content

  • Ensure your home page has at least 150 words of relevant, descriptive text about your products and services. Include the keywords your customers are most likely to type into a search engine when looking for your services.
  • Stand firm and say NO when your web designer insists on an animated “Flash” intro page to your site. Search engines disregard them and your customers have seen enough of them!
  • Provide as much useful content as possible on your site.
  • Create fact sheets and expand your existing content. Search engines view a 50 page site as more “important” than a five page site.
  • Create a news section – it’s a great way to have a continual stream of new, relevant content.
  • Archive the articles even if they may seem out of date search engines will love you!
Monday, October 6th, 2008 Search Engine Optimization No Comments

Five reasons that Google uses to rank websites

Page rank: Every site is given a page rank from zero to ten. The basic rule that can increase a page rank is to get links from other websites and limit the number of links going out to other sites.

Incoming links:
The quality of links is an important factor. Google looks for sites that have natural link popularity. It means that a variety if sites have to be linked and not just one type. Also link text is important. Relevance of the links is also important

Page titles:
This is one of the most important factors of the page that the algorithm looks at.

Keyword density:
If keywords are used too many times then it is a sign of spam to Google and will actually hurt the sites ranking. A good idea is to keep keywords density lower and instead use related keywords.

Age of domain:
The age of a domain can be a friend or enemy for SEO. Newer domains are difficult to be ranked but domains that are two years old are much easier.

Monday, October 6th, 2008 Google, Search Engine Optimization No Comments

5 Simple Steps to Great Search Engine Rankings

Having your website rank well in the major search engines is crucial to a successful Internet business. However, the information on doing so, which abounds on the Internet, can be perceived as complex and contradictive. Many website owners end up overwhelmed by all the data and simply quit and move on to other areas of promotion. By following the handful of steps presented in this article you will be well on your way to solid rankings.

Primer

Each webpage is its own unit, which has its own title and theme. A theme is most commonly referred to as keywords or a keyword phrase. The theme should be based on the most dominant data for that webpage. Therefore, if you have a webpage that lists ten types of coffee cups, “coffee cups would be the likely choice for the theme. However, if the theme is too general then you should work to compact it as there will be far too many results in the search engine to contend with. Perhaps your webpage lists ten types of coffee cups which all have American symbols on them. Two of the various possible themes would then be American coffee cups and patriotic coffee cups.

To determine if a theme might be too broad, search for the theme at a popular search engine and see how many results come up. It is typical to see up to a few million results for any theme. However, one hundred million results would be extremely high and a different theme should be chosen.

Step One:

The title of your webpage means a lot. A website should never have a loose and thoughtless title. The title should be clear, compact, and related directly to the main theme of the webpage. Let us look at three title examples for a webpage that sells different types of red coffee cups.

  • Bad Title: Welcome to Joes!
  • Better Title: Joes red coffee cups.
  • Best Title: Red coffee cups.

Notice how we trimmed the title down to simply the main theme. In the bad example, the title does nothing to describe the products offered on the webpage and therefore will end up hurting the search engine rankings for this webpage.

Step Two: Use the H1 tag.

On the top of your webpage put the main theme in a H1 tag. This will help establish what the webpage is about and Google will take the data enclosed in the H1 tag more seriously which helps boost the overall theme in its ranking algorithm. This should be at the very top of the webpage if possible and include only the main theme. Using our title example above, you would insert the following on top of the webpage:

Red coffee cups

Step Three: Utilize the written word properly.

The main keyword phrase (theme) must be printed on your webpage multiple times. It must appear natural in the flow of writing and not just thrown on the webpage somewhere a few times. After massaging your keyword phrase into the copy, bold one instance, underline one instance, and italicize one instance.

Again, basing this example from the one above:

  • Bold One Instance: My name is Joe and I sell red coffee cups.
  • Italicize One Instance: Our red coffee cups ship directly to your front door.
  • Underline One Instance: Order today and receive free shipping on all red coffee cups!

By doing this you will help enforce the theme of the webpage and achieve better search rankings.

Step Four: Establish incoming links.

Before going any further, I recommend you visit google.com and install the Google toolbar. This will allow you to see what is called PR (page rank). Knowing a websites PR is extremely helpful, and basically mandatory, for this step. It is more important to have links today than ever. To rank high in the search engines, you must have people linking to you. Failure to acquire incoming links results in low or non-existing rankings. Here are some techniques to build up incoming links:

  • Submit your website to directories. Once listed, directories, such as the ODP (dmoz.org) and business.com, will increase your incoming links. When viewing a directory, check to see if they have PR. The higher the number the better.
  • Purchase text links. Many websites today sell text links at varied rates. Purchasing a text link can help you gain traffic and will increase your incoming links. Text links must be purchased or placed only on websites that have either the same or related theme as yours. If your website is all about coffee a link from a website about oil changes is not going to help you much and could actually harm your website rankings in the future.
  • Link Research. Find out who is linking to top ranked websites under your keyword phrase (theme) and try to get listed on them. The idea here is to not reinvent the wheel, rather do what already works. To find out who is linking to top websites, visit Google and type the following text in the search box: link:site.com where site.com is the website URL.

Step Five: Work to ensure anchor text from incoming links contains your main theme.

When other websites link to you, try to get them to use the keyword phrase for the webpage they are linking to as the anchor text. This is not always possible and that is ok. You simply want to try and get as many links on target as possible. Not all links need to go to your homepage because having incoming links to a webpage within the website is beneficial also.

Sunday, October 5th, 2008 Link Building No Comments

Top Task

A top task is any action that

  1. A large number of people need to complete online
  2. Is essential for people to accomplish quickly and easily

Importance of Top Task

  • People come to your website with a specific task in mind. If your website doesn’t help them complete that task, they’ll leave.
  • Identify the mission the purpose of your website, to help you clarify the No1 top task your website should help people accomplish.
  • Don’t yet have a mission statement for your website? Now is a great time to write one!
Saturday, October 4th, 2008 Search Engine Optimization No Comments
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