Author Rank

It seems that the master search engine has always kept its promise. It always surprises us and gifts us with something new and more challenging. We had promised in our previous posts that there will be new things on the SEO horizon coming New Year. The year ends today and Google gives us the surprise.

Content as we know as always ruled the internet world. Original, fresh and healthy content has always been valued more, weighed more and had been favored by Google. Now, once again Google says that you need to be creative, original and develop new informative content and get it ranked well. This time the master search engine has come up with Google AuthorRank. For those who are familiar with the Google Page rank, this might come up as a surprise. Yes. You need to come with the fresh, original and healthy content, not just the web page content, Google talks about every bit of new text that you place on the search engine for your search engine marketing purpose.

We need to be on the Google+. Here content that has harnessed natural links is considered to be written by the expert author. The Google+ contributor’s section is the place where you need to put up the blogs and places where you are placing your written content. Bloggers, now have new place to put up there blogs names, thus creating a relationship with the search engines and hence the authors name and profile image shows up in the results. Not bad, but you need to have an author, the person who had the power of creating powerful informative content.

SEO, it’s not about running the magic lamp

There is no rubbing of the magic lamp. There is no jinnee and there is no magic in SEO. It’s just plain and simple hard work. We need to have understanding of the search engine algorithm and read through the tutorials that are spread over the web teach us about getting search engine visibility.

Keyword Density – This was the name of the game. The more relevant keywords used in the website content, the fast indexing and ranking could be achieved. This was past. Density is not longer the worry. In fact, the higher density of the keywords now can be categorized as keyword stuffing. We are no longer in the league of making things happen by tricking the search engines with keywords.

Back links – These are still important as they were earlier, but the rule of the game is changed. We still need many inbound one way links pointing towards our web pages, but we need more quality link. Not just any link would do. So it time to say good bye to the link farms or linking methods that get us many links. Here the game has titled more towards the quality of the links that we get.

Meta Tags – Keyword Meta tag has lost all its importance. Meta Title tag and Meta Description Tag are of a lesser interest to the Google and to the Bing, yet are still important from the SERP point of view as the search engines display the title and description tag for the views when processing results for the web visitors.

H1 Tags – This was supposed to be the most important element when we designed the website content. The role of H1 is of presenting your most important line of the text that could attract the visitor’s attention. It used to be the important on Page SEO element. Our brothers – The SEO experts killed it. As someone very rightly said, SEO’s spammed it to the death.

SEO now is really about hard honest work with the web pages to make them search engine friendly. We know the intent of our work. We must understand the intent of the web users when we sit to optimize our web pages as the days of semantic search have started to arrive.

2102 SEO Review

Wasn’t the year 2012 eventful in terms of SEO? Google did knock out some of the heavy weight web pages out of the search horizon. The year started off with a somber note but the SEO activists at the search giant’s office were busy knitting their web. They wanted to give more purposeful information to the web users. The word came out nearing the mid of the passing year that website owners and the SEO strategists need to be careful with their SEO work must not overdo their optimization efforts and must refrain from the unethical SEO practices.

The search giant was serious. It was proved from the Panda and the Penguin updates that the masters of the search were serious with what they were saying. The users of the web, the people surfing the net were the beneficiaries of the updates. These helped them to arrive at the more informative and purposeful sites other than those that were unethically optimized and those that contained Google Ad Sense adverts. Though some such websites are still there, smiling at the face of the web users, making mockery of the sincere efforts being made.

Google did actually write to the webmasters warning them and telling them that their websites would be penalized if the unethical links would not be removed. This meant lowering the authority and the ranking of the websites.

The year 2012 wraps up in few days from now. Leaving the SEO trends with:

• The Penguin updates
• Personalized searchers
• Google Places
• Google +
• Over optimization penalties

The things that remained common throughout are the keywords which make the base for the SEO. The relevance of the keywords to the web content and to the purpose of the website and the market niche remains to be central.

Yet Google came up with the semantic search results where the artificially intelligent Google BOTs decipher the intent of the search, break into the meaning of the content rather than indexing them for the mere words and produce the results in front of the web visitor giving out more purposeful results.

This means that the keywords are about to lose their importance? We have to wait and see what the New Year brings for us. In terms of SEO and search engine marketing we might be in for some more surprises.

SEO – Opening new gateway for e-commerce

With the internet the whole new world of business and ecommerce took birth. The beginning was slow enough as everyone went into the trial and testing mode. It quite a few quite when the marketers saw a new horizon taking birth. To their astonishment, the free bees, low cost dream started to get fulfilled.

The commerce ball game started off, with the email marketing spree, went to the website designing and over the years the birth of search engines took place. Yahoo led the way, with MSN to follow and then the big Bang, Google started to make waves and started to dominate the internet scene. We saw the website era change from the text based sites to the fully interactive multimedia sites. The fight for top search engine placements grew fierce.

Now SEO (search engine optimization) strategies lay the foundation for your web business flight. It is how correctly you figure of the relevant keywords, phrases and the long tail ends. The rank your website achieves for the low competitive keywords and for the highly competitive keywords. How efficiently have you chosen the relevant keywords that would help you to convert the visitor to the customer marks your success and failure in the web marketing game.

SEO relates to every element of the website design of your company. The text, the images, the videos, the anchor text, “Alt” image texts etc and yes, the domain name, the Meta Tags too form the heavy weight SEO elements that have to be taken care of, while developing the SEO plan for your search engine marketing strategy.

Visibility here is the name of the game. You need to be prudent and get into the ethical SEO practices if you need to survive and open your gateway to commerce and trade.

SEO – The game beyond

Our aim with SEO is more than getting the high ranking on the search engine search results. The purpose of the search engine marketing or the internet marketing is to let the people know about the existence of our business online. With SEO we get high search engine ranking and with the ranking comes the visibility on the web, thus the flow of web traffic is the gift that we get for the efforts that we put in the SEO game.

In a nutshell, SEO is the important element of our web presence online. This helps us to let the web visitors arrive at our business hub, enticing them to interact with us and buy. These activities need us to be more creative with our web copy, our marketing offers, our website design and our SEO techniques.

The game has changed every since Google woke up and looked at the black hats with a stern eye. Not just the quality of web content matters, but a number of features in the web design including the design code errors, slow downloading speed, quality of links etc are accessed by the search engines to determine the quality of the web pages, hence, SEO depends at lot on other features now, since the Panda and the Penguin updates have taken effect.

Now we get penalized by Google for over linking or getting 1000’s of links through the automated linking systems. Google knows what is best for the web users and in the effort of providing better and purposeful search results, the search engine leader tried to pull the breaks on the spammed websites.

The SEO strategies still yarn. The tight SEO algo changes opened new gates, new terms and now when the efforts of eliminating spam was about to get enforced, the SEO’s came up with the term negative SEO. New ways of pushing the competitors out of business took hold where spamming competitor’s websites with useless and irrelevant links came into use in the effort to get them delisted by the Google.

SEO, in the game beyond always the cut throat competition exists

SEO is getting difficult with time

True. SEO is getting difficult with time. I was debating this title with my friends and we opined that number of factors have made the SEO difficult. (a) The search engine algorithm changes have changed the SEO process. (b) Competition on the limited web space has made it difficult for the websites to rank higher.

There is only one FIRST spot on the SERP for a particular search. Imagine how many website owners would be aiming for that spot, thus, the competition; the cut throat competition forces them to use ethical and unethical means to rank on the top. No understanding that the black hat techniques would get them to achieve only limited time on the top of the SERPs.

We have to understand that the first 10 spots on the first page of the SERP are equally important. These are the important place holders that attract the attention of the web visitors and for those who find the title and the description displayed on the SERP interesting, click through to visit the website.

SEO is not just about high ranking. It is also about the art with which you draft your Meta title tags, how intelligently you create your web content and how much juice you can put in your off page optimization. Intelligence and clear understanding of the SEO process would lead you to building a powerful web marketing strategy.

SEO today, is about being natural and not increasing the density of the keywords, as we use to do earlier. Even 3% is like stuffing keywords. Be sure that these are the days of the semantic searches. We need to natural and build a purpose in our web content. More than your purpose of selling to the customer, our focus needs to be on the intent of the customer who arrives at our website must be kept in mind, as through artificial intelligence, the search engine bots, index and help us to spread the information most relevant to the users query.

The mistake that most of the SEO’s make is that we focus on our intent of selling, more than we focus on the intent of our customers, hence, fail to create buzz that is needed. SEO is getting complex, we can no longer stuff keywords, no longer can we buy links and no longer can we wear a black hat.

Ignorance of Search Engine Optimization

You might be surprised that even in these days of fast access and fastest dissemination of information people remain ignorant of SEO. The search engine optimization process and how it could help us in getting our business to become the talk of the town.  We are living in the high tech world. Tabs, smart phones, note books, net books, laptops etc. We use these devices for our business and personal purpose, but there are people who use these high tech machines to entertainment purpose only, for them the use of these machines is limited to watching movies, videos and audios and playing games.

The businessmen, in this respect are familiar with the websites yet, optimization is an alien field for them to venture in. I am talking about the people who are not so internet savvy and not so computer literate. They still believe much in the physical world.

“I don’t need a website” said a vendor who walked in for cold call. I was shocked. What was he talking about? “I had a website, but it did not get me business.” He said. Good. This meant he was in the league and was one of those people who had been bitten hard by a website designer who failed to give him a chance to succeed on the internet. We would find many website designers, developers and the search engine optimizer pocketing money in terms of fee and not caring for their client’s business outcome. They have a lot to say about their failures. The blame is always on the client’s business.

We were in conversation about the product he was offering me. The product was interesting and was useful for my work too so I was looking forward to the purchase, but at the same time I started to tell him about the SEO process and the good of the business website design. He was a small business owner, who was running his show on tight budget and did not like the idea of getting a CMS website developed and get it optimized for search engine ranking.

It took me 35 minutes and 3 phone calls for testimonials to convince him that he would be better off with an optimized website and other search engine marketing strategies. I had to offer a lowest plan, with easy payment so that he can pay the dues.

This was the first time he came across the terms like On Page Optimization, off Page Optimization. He learnt about keyword research and the importance of Title and description tags. The art of SEO fascinated him.

Power of Long Tail Ends

Really if you are looking for top search engine ranking, you will have to distribute your SEO curve in phases. If you are getting into SEO for the first time you will have to focus on the keyword phrases that are less frequently used and have lesser competition in the search results. Long Tail Ends are, many a times misunderstood and are perceived to be long sentences, phrases with more words in them. This misunderstanding leads to the wrong usage of keywords and hence, lead to poor SEO ranking, poor traffic and frustration.

If we draw a frequency distribution curve we will witness the traffic starting off and ending at the lower ends is thin, where as it peeks in the middle of the curve. Generally all curves or graphic presentation for demand and supply curve also display the similar graphs. The thin traffic at the lower ends represents the long tail end, where we have just begun to SEO our web project in the highly competitive environment. Hence the lower traffic gets generated, but this traffic tells us that we have succeeded in our efforts and have gain visibility through search engine marketing.

Long tail ends are important for the SEO beginners. We would find a prominent spot on several search engine results pages for the most targeted keyword “SEO” while we might be able to find a spot for “Austin, Dallas SEO” and even easier if “Austin, SEO company Dallas” is used to optimize the web pages. This would get you the lower targeted traffic but you can look forward to conversion of visitors to customers, fewer in the beginning, but it would lay down the path for your future search engine ranking.

The strategy of using long tail ends for SEO beginners works well. But if you decide otherwise, you will truly have to invest much in terms and time, efforts, SEO services and in longer waiting period till your efforts bring your website visibility.

Content – The core SEO element

Content is the king, they say and they are right. Your SEO efforts really depend a lot on the quality of the web content that is put up on your website and on the other places on the internet to harness more web traffic. Copied content, they say, is harmful to the SEO effort and for the reputation of your web business. Do you agree with this?

I do. Copy cats don’t survive for a long time. They are penalized. The search engine attribute of not indexing or not ranking duplicate content has led many web developers and designer and the web companies to craft their own, original website content forcing them to build the web copies that they use for search engine and social media marketing. For blogs, for articles and for press releases, we need to come up with bright copy writing skills to give our web presence and our web business a chance to thrive on the internet.

By content, we must not limit ourselves to the black inked, brightly paraphrased lines. We must also consider the web page titles, the descriptions, the Alt Tags and similar hidden stuff too, as these are the elements that tickle the search engine spiders and force them to crawl to them and index them.

Content is the element that helps us to build back links. Again, we discuss the supremacy of the content. If the humans remain un-attracted towards the website content and walk away from the web pages, the links would not be passed on, save from the weaker content sites, hence the power of the healthy and authoritative links would be missed.

Over all, content dominates the SEO scene. If you are familiar with SEO, you would know the worth of relevant keywords, keywords phrases and long tail ends. We are the ones who would embed these on the web content and help our website in indexing and improved search engine positioning. But if cleverly collected relevant keywords, phrases etc are used in the duplicated, copied or bad web content, we will miss extracting the juice from search engine optimization efforts.

Want to hurt your website, Give you Website an overdose of SEO

Our aim, I mean every web business owner’s aim is to get to the top of the search engine ranking, with the 1st spot of the first SERP being the dream location. Our focus remains the top position or the top ones on the SERPs. We focus on how to get our web pages keyword rich with loads of healthy back links. Ha, so true, we have seen people getting to the top, getting the visibility yet, this resulted in the users frustration when some good for nothing sites propped up, filled with Google Ads.

Our friends at Google witnessed this for too long. Kept quite but worked at the same time to find ways of reducing the appearance of the over optimized sites and give the good sites a chance, that were not so much optimized but had something natural at their end, I mean, not so many keywords and with naturally built back links. These sites were built with purpose and intent.

The inevitable change came. People had to pay for the over optimized efforts, and got penalized.

If you truly want to hurt your website’s visibility do fall into the footsteps of the black hat SEO specialists.

Build your focus on quantity – The best way to get your web pages penalized by Google is to stuff the web page content with the keywords. Make the web content for the search engines robots and trigger their attention to get fast ranking and top positioning.

Buy Links – Links matter most. Your effort to get your site de ranked will be fulfilled if you buy links from link farms. It does not matter now from where these links come. Unless you web page is linked with other websites, your purpose of over SEO is being met.

The search engines previously did not pay attention to the relevance and the quality of links, web content and the keyword density being used in the web content. It though made the content meaningless, but it got the web business owner the top position on the search engine results pages.

This would not happen now. If you want to thrive on the web learn through the Google SEO guidelines. Like over eating is bad for our health, over optimization is bad for the health and the survival of your website. Search engines have got smarter and want us to play the SEO game on the level playing field. No unethical SEO practices please.

SEO – The Intent of Search Engine Optimization

They show the bundle of greens in most of images, enticing the web visitors to click through and learn about SEO. Showing the dog, the bone and forcing the thought of getting rich overnight onto the cash starved people. Does SEO get to you the bundle of greens that fast? Well, if this were true, Harry would have been a billionaire. Let’s get to the bottom of the truth of bagging the bundle of greens through search engine optimization.

To get rich through SEO, we need to understand the web visitors. Ranking high does not guarantee business, let alone the greens that lure you towards the world of the web. Understanding the need of the web visitors when they conduct a search, study the problems of the web visitors with the range of products and services you are offering and how to create an appealing web presence that could make the web visitors stay on your web page and buy.

What is SEO, by the way? The acronym stands for search engine optimization or search engine optimizer. The former relates to the search engine marketing activity in which we make our sites search engine friendly and prepare it to be index by the search engines and expect that the site would be returned in the list of first 10 websites that appear on the first page of search engine ranking results. The later means the person who does the optimization bit. The skilled person who is expected to know be familiar with the search engine algorithm and can optimize the websites for higher search engine ranking.

Good, so you talk to the search engine optimization expert and get your website ranked higher. Say the first page, first spot. Than what happens. Even when people visit your website and click away to another destination by conducting a similar search and your website is not present there, the business flies off to someone else.

The intent of the search needs to be understood here. Not all visitors are customers but those who are serious buyers and do not find worthwhile information, walk away in disgust, never to return back.

Off Page Optimization – Getting the link juice from SEO

Too much has been said about the On-Page SEO. Too many people stress on the basic SEO elements that have to do with the web pages. SEO is a large area where getting backs play a vital role. The new search algorithm demand’s getting more one way back links from relevant and authoritative websites to anchor your hold on the search engines and also to get better search engine rankings. What needs to be done in the off-page optimization? I asked my friend who is now is Dallas and is running a SEO company in Dallas, Texas.

“Off-page optimization is an interesting part of SEO process and an important one too” he replied to my question. “If you are a social animal, you would love to talk to people, meet people, interact and leave your traces; so much so that the people coming into your net follow your trail and link back to you in appreciation of the valuable information being shared. These will, naturally be, people belonging to the same interest group, or the market niche or will be the people hunting for solution through the products and services that you are commenting and talking about. It’s that simple.” “Get the point,” he said. “All the people linking back will be relevant, some might be bigger than you, people that command authority on the net. How would you feel if you get linked with an influential person and can take benefit of his connection? My friend, the web works the same way in the Off Page SEO.”

“Getting into the following will help,” he said.

• Blogs
• Forums
• Press Releases
• Blog commenting
• Article writing and submissions
• Blog submissions
• Submitting your website to web directories
• Link Wheel development
• Social Bookmarking

“Participating in the niche forums and commenting in the blogs will leave trails. These will lead many people to your web pages, so would the press releases, articles. Directory submission too will get you back links. You have a lot to play with; you can also employ social networks to build your links,” he commented.

I figured out that there is a lot to do when we start with the Off-Page search engine optimization. We need to be focused and need to spend time on our computers and with the search engines Web 2.0 sites.

Monitor your SEO expertise – Google Analytics help

Google Analytics have been here for quite some time now. The SEO gurus and experts have a gate way opened for them and now are in the arms length of monitoring the performance of their optimized web pages. The strategy change and adjustments have become easier. We no longer need to beat about the bush; we have everything in front of us in the form of Google Analytics report helping us to measure our websites performance.

A tool by Google that helps us getting customized reports on our websites performs, user behavior, most visited pages, which keywords have performed well in generating more traffic and similar stuff that helps the web masters to articulate the SEO strategy for better search engine ranking.

Let’s take a deeper look. Dan is a SEO expert. When we met and discussed SEO he was all over the place with the analytics. “If you don’t keep a regular check on analytics you will not know what is happening with your website’s performances. If you want to understand what on the earth triggers your website visitors to click through and arrive at your website and from which place on the internet they are entering your website. The exiting points are also outlined and hence tell the owners of the website and the webmasters how to tailor the website for its best performance.”

“Great, but does it tells us exactly from which source the web traffic is arriving at our website?” I asked. “Yes, it breaks down the points. If the traffic is flow through Yahoo, Bing or Google, it will tell you exactly how many do arrive through different search engines. Whether the visitors are coming through PPC ads, it will point that too. It will also tell you whether the traffic is coming through Face book, Twitter, Press Releases, articles or blogs.”

“Yet, my friend, if your browser is not cookie enabled it will not be read by Google Analytics. This tells us that, though very useful for the insight of your website’s performance, Google Analytics does not give a 100% picture. People with cookies blocked while browsing the net get left out.

On the whole the analytic gives us great measurement of performance results and helps us in our SEO strategy.

Why is Meta Description Tag Important?

We had just yesterday discussed the Meta Title Tag. We know why it is important. Moving beyond this let me tell you about the description Tag. I had learnt fast. Fast enough to do the On-Page Optimization for my website. The biggest and the tricky hurdle in my effort that made me spend more time was the keyword research. But now, once the keywords have been selected I can move ahead fast.

This is how your Meta Description Tag looks like < Meta name="description" content="#">

“Is it important?” I had asked my tutor. I asked a silly question. He told me it is important as this snippet tell the readers about the web page and its content. After reading the meta tag, the website visitors go through this summery to decide whether clicking on the link would be worth while or not.

“It should not be more than 250 characters (with spaces). Here bigger is not better, it will left out by the search engines. So make it precise and to the point.”

Leaving the Meta Title Tag blank harms your SEO process, but if we leave the Description Tag unfilled, you would find that Google and the Bing will fill it up for you. I learnt that the web pages description tag must contain the some very important keyword relating to the web page being optimized. Hence, when the user‘s query is made, the search engines return your website displayed on the SERPs. The position i.e. the placement on the search engines results page depends how effectively you have made your description and title tags.

It is difficult to please the search engines and the web users in 250 characters summery displayed as description. Practice will make you perfect. It is an interesting test of you English drafting skills.

People might end up making Meta Description Tag that might look spammy to the web visitors. With the generic description i.e. the snippet picked up by the search engines might be interesting for the search engines. Thus, we need to create the description tag that are more meaningful and those that do not look like keyword stuffed Descriptions made for SEO purpose only.

What to do next in SEO – Have gone through Keyword Research

Keyword research is a complex area of SEO. If anyone thinks it is easy, he can take a walk. Perceptions have no place in the keyword research. If you think that you know the right keywords without checking them out, you are wrong. You need to go through the process. Our customers think differently, you would too think differently if you go out to buy something. Similarly our perceptions deceive us. We need to make a thorough research. I have been there. I have done what you might think of doing and believe me; you will find yourself in a mess.

Get ready for trip. Once we have selected the keywords and the search terms to optimize our website, we must first check these search terms for the current competition level.

We move ahead to build Meta Tags. The HTML tags that still have a say in the SEO and now out of three important Meta Tags, just two have maintain their important position in the On-Page SEO. Yup, I am talking about the Meta Title Tag and the Meta Description Tag. Keyword tag has lost its place, though you can use Meta keyword tag too, during the On-Page Optimization, if it is not useful, it will not harm your SEO process.

Meta Title Tag, my tutor told me that this is the heart of the On-Page SEO. This tag is displayed by the search engine in the search results and is the first line, hyper-linked to the relevant web page. This is the link that the web user clicks, if he finds it interesting. So build you Meta title tag correctly and make it interesting. Make it relevant to the users query and do not, he DO NOT stuff keywords. Use keywords in the Meta Title Tag but do it intelligently.

“Make is interesting. Do it for the search engines, but do it for your web visitors too. If the web visitors find it uninteresting, you will not get the needed visitors”, he had said.

I am practicing to make powerful title tags. You must too, redesign your title tags and make them as is being preached by my tutor.

Learning SEO – 15 minutes or more

Reading through the SEO e-book and a few search engine optimization tutorials on the web made me realize how easy it is to learn SEO. Actually, I had been living in the fools land till now, thinking that SEO needed me to learn the software development basic skills. This is exactly what pushed me away from the learning optimization.

My research on the subject and my friend’s guidance led me to a number of valuable informative pages on the web.

Though very interestingly told, the learning curve, the beginning of the SEO process titled as the basics of SEO led me to understand the keywords remain central to the SEO strategy. This is easy to understand. We as visitors to the web do conduct our searches by keying in search terms. Sometimes we search with vague terms but many a times we are searching very specifically for goods and services.

The core of keyword research as they tell me is to arrive at the right set of keywords, as the correctness and the relevance will make or break the situation. Make us thrive on the web or make us lose the internet marketing game.

Understanding keywords

Conceptually, the keywords are the prime words that relate to your products, services or the marketing niche. I had to dig deeper to understand the process of keyword research.

Keyword research tools like Google Keyword tool, Word Tracker or Good Keywords help us to arrive at the selected keywords. We need to list down our search terms and check these on Google, Yahoo and the Bing to see the competition that we face for these search terms.

They also tell us in their SEO e-book that we have to go for lesser competitive keywords if we want ourselves to be seen on the web search results. Face less competition at first and then go for the bigger move.

Yes, Learning SEO is easy, but the fact of the matter is, putting it to practice is difficult. We understand the first steps but I guess practice makes the man perfect. I have requested my friend to let me help him in some SEO projects where he will supervise and I will work. Guess this is the best way to learn.

How to become SEO expert

Are you still thinking of becoming an SEO expert. In these days when the SEO gurus are finding themselves stuck with Panda and Penguin updates. I think people have been feeding you with wrong information. It’s become difficult. The good old days when we could have brought links, when we could have stuffed keywords, go a few hidden keywords on the page, get the crawlers to crawl by a few black hat techniques and call ourselves ethical search engine optimizers. Friends, the search world has changed.

White hat is the call of the day. Forget buying links, forget pushing for back links. Forget stuffing and cloaking, the search engines have gone smarter and whoever is feeding you with information about getting website up in minutes, is misleading you and unfairly leading you to lose the Seo game.

SEO is still there. The rules of the game have changed and are being regularly altered. We had forced this situation onto ourselves. Our friends, through unfair competition pushed the quality sites up on the SERPs that resulted in the web visitor’s frustration. Google watched with hawk’s eyes and so did the Yahoo and the Bing. Google made the first move to favor the users. Gave a pat at their back and make the web more useful by pushing back the search engine tailored sites.

Today, SEO needs us to concentrate more on the fair competition. Keywords are still there as these are the triggers that force the search engines to collect the answers to the users query. Artificially intelligent BOTs can now make out the user’s intent and return the search engine search results accordingly.

You also need to be intelligent and be natural. Content has always been the king. It still is. So dress the king with vigor. Being original helps. Copy Cats do not made a permanent headway to success and are pushed back by the search engines.

To become a SEO expert while you need to study SEO guides available on the internet. Do study the Penguin update to remain in the SEO ball game.

It’s difficult to SEO

Yes, this is true. I had sat down to build my website. I thought it will be easy to get the pages up and running with the on page SEO elements. I was wrong. It is not as easy as they tell us in their articles and PDF tutorials. Making the deign layout and panning the website structure is not that easy too, but getting your SEO guns ready is far more difficult. I have designed the layout, had selected and tailored the images for my website. Have used Photoshop to build my graphics and have used Dreamweaver to make the web pages.

Now that I am hear doing my bit. My friend tells me to move to Joomla – the content management system. He said it is easier and faster to customize the Joomla web templates and the content management system has the SEO elements built in. I would find working with Joomla easy.

Great! But my friend does not know that I am comfortable with the CSS and the HTMLs. I don’t find any problems with building my site. I have been doing website design professionally and now I have turned around to start my part time business building websites for small businesses. I need my website up and put up some of the work I did for people who asked me to build their websites.

I like to be creative and I like to work out with colors and images. Building web content is what chases me off, but many of my clients did give their own content which I had placed in their websites. Now that I have also decided to optimize my customer’s website, I need to work through the SEO elements. I have learnt online how to optimize the sites. It seemed easy in the beginning but believe me I am not on the bed of roses.

I have searching for keywords, the most relevant keywords. I had also checked the competition for these keywords, heck, I found the competition too high. Then I had to choose lesser competitive keywords and had to settle for the second best, as I had learnt that getting to the first page for the lesser competitive keywords is easier. I need to take small steps. Get to the top for lesser competitive keywords and then leap up to fact high competition.

SEO Now

Some people say SEO is dead. Some are of the idea that SEO has gone useless after Panda and Penguin. I was told about Bing testing paid search results. Heck, what is going on. If organic results too are paid, than why we would need to compete for top positioning, just buying off the top position would do the trick and get bags of greens for the search engines. The web thing will lose the luster. Till now many have thrived and it was this umbrella that had helped many small bees to climb from rags to the riches.

SEO in terms have become difficult. Look back to the good old days, getting top search engine position was easier, when the optimizers stuffed keyword in Meta Title tags, the description tags and the website content. Though the content then looked a lot articulated and manufactured out of the mill but it did the bit for the optimizers.

Today, the scenario is difficult. The companies find it hard to get to the top as easily as before. (a) thanks to competition (b) thanks to the Panda and the Penguin updates. Manufacturing links seems to be difficult. The search engines smell the rat. Buying off the position proves expensive for the new entrants, thus the only way out is to spend time on the SEO. Yes, now SEO need more time, more concentration and far more efforts in terms of working hours. We need to be more creative with our web content.

SEO now demands more sophistication. Remember the semantic search days are here. We need to be creative, authentic, and our writing must be targeted for the visitors more than the search engines. The intent weighs more than the words. While quality of content and more focused on page optimization, good website structuring, being social and disseminating of the information is needed now than ever before.

Future of SEO

I have been wondering about what does future hold in the terms of SEO. The web marketers have been repeatedly jolted by the fact that the search engines have changed their algorithm and kept the optimizers busy with their changed programmings. The way bots crawled has changed. I needed to clear out the confusion and I was seeking SEO specialists who can guide me through. Reading Google’s Blog and other informative articles gave me the idea but hearing out from the experts usually gives me a particular advantage as I get out some tips and tricks from them.

Penguin brought the big change. Those who based their SEO heavily on the keyword density felt the earth below their feet rocking. The earth quake measuring XX was felt by them. The surprise was the artificial intelligence being used the search engine to read between the lines. Not just what the words meant but the intent behind the search was under scrutiny before the search results were present in front of the web visitors.

Today the semantic searches built within the Penguin update is an eye opener. Google thinks beyond, their focus are the web visitors and their aim is to provide value for the time spent by the users on the search engine and give them more precise results for the search being conducted.

Our focus, thus changes. We as SEO’s now talk about being natural and use less traditional keywords. When 3% keywords seemed prudent and thoughtful keyword density ratio we walked that path, now 3% is high density.

What do we do now and what about the future of SEO?

Can you predict future? I cannot, but by looking at the current scenario, we must agree to the point that we need to be natural when we build content. The targeted keyword must mean something instead of mere alphabetically ordered words. The content must have the purpose to compete on Google. You will be up against your competition and the same time fighting for the place on the search engine with searchable content to get into the latent semantic indexing process.

Aim of the SEO

Really it is not difficult to understand why people need to optimize their websites. Google is making all the efforts through the change in the Google algorithm and with the Panda refresher update, as I have heard, just couple of days back, to make the sites most relevant to the users query to appear in the search engine ranking results. Good for us, as the users, like me, will get to get better precision results, not fake landing pages with Google Ad sense ads smiling at our facing. That was and at times, still is the case when searches are conducted.

Being natural helps today. We have to get out of the habit of making keyword rich documents. Like someone rightly said, we need to keep our ego out while optimizing the site. I did not understand what he meant, than yes, the dust cleared. We must focus on the web visitors, people for whom we make the website. Sure the in-depth or the hidden fact is that our websites are made by us to serve our bottom line, yet it is the web visitors through which we ultimately benefit. If they don’t find us, we cannot thrive. Thus on the web we must aim for full visibility.

The recent changes in the Google algorithm, Google says, are designed to give the users better results. The updates done last years had an impact of 11.8% on the user’s queries and this resulted in lowering the ranking of poor quality websites.

To create a healthy web ecosystem, Google says, they need to make the changes and that these changes will affect the websites. While some sites would go up, other might not be found in the older positions. Web content, they say, rules and will continue to rule the game of SEO. Lower density of keywords and more natural style created content for the web visitors and not just aiming for the search engine bots.

You need more customers, than think in the terms of the web site visitors. Aim your guns at them and for the time being, forget the “YOU” in you.

The aim of seo is to create more visibility on the search engines, get more free web traffic and from amongst the web visitors get hold of the leads that we get in the process.

SEO - Get ready for the local market

With more than half of the people fighting for the top search engine positions for global searches, we see that the competition is really tough. I have been there, and am still there, but what did I get. Yes, free web traffic was the fruit of my effort and I did get healthy business from the 1st spot there. Yet, I think things could have been better, if I had at first understood the importance of being on top for local searches too.

Why did not it cross my mind that most of my buyers, my customers and the prospects will be the people living in the area and the city where my business exists? I am not one of the Fortune 500 companies; neither am I a global brand like Apple or Dell. I am a medium sized local business who has gained online visibility though hard effort and by spending valuable time in learning the trade.

Local SEO has its own importance. It brings more locals into your net. When we were discussing business, this weekend, my friends and I concluded that lets take a turn and get our local SEO in place. We all agreed to follow the footsteps of Mr. Green, the owner of the printing company, who has launched every campaign for the locals. In return, he has not got people from all over the country talking to him about getting their printing jobs done. He is sending business cards all over the US and the Canada.

He told us that he put the company up on the Google Maps and Google local listings. Yahoo local was his next target. Now, he said, Google+ is giving him more advantage. He and many of his customers are there and share information. I am loving it. Additionally, Facebook, Twitter and my printing blog has got me many local customers.

I think it’s worth the effort, he said and suggested that by far our efforts have worked for global seo positioning, why we don’t get a few pages up with local SEO tags, build a Google+ profile and also get listed in Google Maps.

The rest would be easy for us as we a familiar with the tips and tricks of SEO. Our market concentration will change, the basics will remain the same, he said.

SEO tip of the day, November 01, 2012

Harry just called me to talk about the SEO of his website. He seemed to be jittery about search engine friendly website designs and was seeking advice on how to carry on with the process. My suggestion was:

Take each page and the sub page separately. You don’t need to push through.

Your home page is the main landing page and we should take careful steps to build purposeful Meta Title Tags, Meta Description Tags. The H1, H2 and the H3 tag must be finely designed. Optimize the images by placing good ALT Image Tag.

Each page of the website, I said, was equally important. As such, get into the act now and first select the keywords (a) general relevant keywords for your website, (b) specific keywords that would go with and are more relevant for the particular web page. E.g. Products page would need more specifically related keywords. We must look at the each page as a separate SEO project and optimize these for different searches.

Similarly, once we are done with the On-Page SEO, we must opt for Off Page SEO with the same mind set. Our articles, our blogs, our press releases and our social media must be developed so that it gives effect to the each page separately while, our efforts must not hinder the collective SEO effort for the website.

The SEO process is a big ask but is not a difficult process. Most of the common sense plays it parts, but do not forget to go through a thorough research process. We need to study the web; we need to know what other people are doing on the internet. How well placed our competition is on the search engines?

Harry needs a SEO specialist. He might not be able to carry the SEO work through, as he is busy with his business details.

SEO –beyond the Meta Tags

SEO elements take up most of our concentration when we put efforts to make our websites search engine friendly. The On Page Elements extend beyond the Meta Title Tag, the Meta Descriptions Tag, the URL structure and the image optimization. We are, today, going to study an onsite SEO element that helps a great deal in search engine optimization.

Heading – (H1 to H6) Tags

We know that creative content has a big role to play. Neatly paragraphed text on the web page looks similar and uninteresting to the readers if the type style, fonts, sizes and color or the text are all the same. We also know that seldom few people read through the entire web page content. We need to mark the lines according to their importance; this will gives us two (2) benefits:

• The website visitors can read through the important lines and decide whether to read further or not
• The search engines crawl to index and read through the important areas of the text. 

The H1 tag has its own importance. The characteristic of the written text, whether we are writing for the magazine or the newspaper, the people look for the headlines, these are generally the H1 tags in the terms of SEO.

H2, H3 to H6 are categorized with the level of importance these heading get from the search engines. Optimized H1 tags play a vital role. While building the script and while deciding upon the H1 tag, do consider the use of relevant keywords, so that the page being optimized gets its desired position on the search engines.

Google SEO best practice guide, guides us through the SEO science. About <H> tags it says, “Heading tags (not to be confused with the <head> HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>, the least important.

Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.”

SEO Tip for Today

Optimizing our websites is the issue central to our need of visibility on the web. We need not to walk barefooted and hurt the soles of our feet, here, learning helps and prevents and face ward fall. We have learnt steps to healthy SEO practices in our previous posts. Let’s look at one more important step to optimize our web pages. Today, we talk about optimizing images. Yes, images make our websites aesthetically appealing and create interest of the web visitor in out website. Why not make the best of the images and optimize them for the search engines.

Search engines, as we know, do not read images. We need to make them read these PNG or JPEG formats so that these images become search engine friendly.

Google tells us about optimizing images in its SEO best practice guide, it says, “Images may seem like a straightforward component of your site, but you can optimize your use of them. All images can have a distinct filename and "alt" attribute, both of which you should take advantage of. The "alt" attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn't support images, or is using alternative technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.

Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images.”

Let’s not waste time pondering on the errors we have made in the past. Fastening our seat belts and getting our SEO right, will help in furthering our ranking on the search engines.

Handy SEO Tips, Keyword Research

Organic ranking never comes without the relevant keywords and without original good quality content. Why do we believe that every thing that we do on the web, will carry us to our desired position on the search engines, so much so, that many of our friends do not hesitate in “copy + paste” of the content from other sites to make their sites look good.

User can make out the difference. They can make out the difference from the good quality web content from the bad ones and so do the search engines.

Coming back to the keywords, we need to understand the importance of the keywords and the importance of its prudent use, hence, we must:

• Look for the relevant keywords in terms of daily, monthly and annual searches being conducted.
• Look out for the competition for the relevant search terms

Anticipating user behaviour while conducting search will help in organizing our Keywords and phrase, Google SEO best practice guide educates us by saying, “Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time baseball fan might search for,  an acronym for the National League Championship Series, while a new fan might use a more general query like. Anticipating these differences in search behaviour and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results.”

On-line Keyword research tools come handy at this stage. Google Adwords tool, Word Tracker, Good Keywords etc are some very reliable keywords research tools. Even though if you have arrived at some very good keywords, do not forget that their prudent use in the web copy is the most important aspect of SEO. Do not over use, do not stuff, but keep the density of the keywords in check, so as not to displease the search engines.

SEO Guide – Let look at Website Navigation

Today we will talk about the website navigation, as being the important SEO element. We have learnt in our previous posts how Meta Title Tags, the Description Tags, and the structured, user friendly URLs can help in SEO and help the visitors understand the search results. The website navigation, Google SEO guide tells us, “The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.”

We get the point. For Google this is the best practice. It is the same for other search engines too.

Making the search process for the website visitor easy should be the main goal of the designers. The most visited page, the home page is the place which leads the visitors to the other sections or the pages of the website which carries the information required by the website visitors. Our aim must be to make his visit to the site eventful and easy. Making him move around with easy and letting him arrive at the destination without having to search frantically on the website will help the visitors and the website owner meet the end goals. The difficulty of finding required information might chase the visitors away and make your loose your prospective customer.

Our focus must be to create a common, easy to understand hierarchy of pages. Common sense plays its part and the general content flow is often the choice of the website developers, yet, the internal pages with are rather difficult to access must be projected on the home pages, so much so that the visitors find the information or are guided through the website intuitively.

Text Links are the best for this purpose. The search engine crawls, understands and indexes the text links, but if we use java or flash, please understand that the search engines are not able to handle any of the fancy scripts and your efforts to make the website search engine friendly might fail.

SEO Best Practices, creating search engine friendly URLs

This part is directly concerned with building a better website structure. URL – Uniform resource locators, the address to your website and to the subsequent web pages must be understandable and readable and must create relevance to the web pages. Such URLs are easy for the search engines to understand and easy for the web users to remember.

While describing the URL structure, Google SEO starter guide tells us, “Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.”

Unrecognizable characters in the URLs make them more complex and unreadable by human eyes, though the search engines can easily crawl any URL structure, yet user friendly URLs make it easier for the humans as well as for robots to understand the website structure.

The benefits of search engine friendly URLs include:

User friendly URLs help the web visitors in understanding the relevance and the context of the web page.
URLs are displayed on the search engine results pages below the title, just above the description and the web visitors understand the web pages more easily. Odd parameters or symbols would not make users understand the URL and might reduce the web traffic.
If your webpage is being linked to other pages (as anchor text) by some users, odd parameters in the URL will make it difficult for the users to understand and also difficult for the search engine spiders.

While search engines can crawl all types of URL structures, but making them search engine friendly will help in SEO, as the search engines will easily crawl index these and the viewers will easily understand the URL through the relevance it creates to the web pages.

SEO – The Description Tag

Just yesterday we went through the SEO starting point, the Meta Title Tag. Now that we have learnt the first important element in the ON Page SEO where we shared the precise topic of discussion in the web page through the title, lets move on to the next important element i.e. the “Meta Description Tag”.

The name of the Tag tells us about its attributed. Yes, the Meta Description tag, describes the content of the web page. It is the summery that gives the search engines and the web visitors a fair idea about the content of the web page. Google SEO starter guide describes the Meta Description Tag as, “A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.”

The Meta Description Tag can be further explained as the snippet of the text displayed by the search engine below the title tag when the user’s query is displayed on the search engine results pages. I will again refer to the Google – SEO starter guide that tells us about the Description tag.

“Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there (learn how to prevent search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description Meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet.”

The reason we base our discussion on Google guidelines is obvious. Google’s importance as the leader of the search engine industry cannot be underestimated; hence, all of us strive for visibility on the Google, hoping for success of our web presence.

Let’s get started with SEO

If you have a website, you must be than familiar with the term “SEO”. As soon as we hear the word SEO (search engine optimization) our first though is to make the site search engine friendly. Our focus than, is to make the search engine like our site and help us rank higher on the search engines. The top spot, the first place on the search engine’s results page is the most wanted spot for ever optimizer. Helpful tools help us to attract the search engine spiders and help us to gain visibility through the organic search results. We forget the users for whom we have built the website. We must, in unison, work to make the both ends meet.

If you are a new bee to the SEO, the post might be helpful to you to learn some basics of SEO. The fundamentals that we must understand before even thinking of making our websites search engine friendly

Take a look at the best practices

Making the Title Tag 

Title tag tells the viewers and the search engine about the content of the web page and about the topic that has been discussed therein.

Looking at the best practice of making the title tag, we understand:

• Not to create a title that has no relationship with the website content
• Do not stuff keywords. Use of keywords must be logical and systematic, over use will cause harm
• Do not use default or hazy titles for the web pages
• Avoid using the same title tag in each page
• Each web page must a unique title which relates to the subject of the web page content
• Title must be of prudent length; too lengthy titles are not useful for the web visitors.

Title tags are the important element for SEO and for the viewers as well as there are the first things on the SERPs that the web visitor reads on the search results. Effective titles leads to more web visitors.

Is Google Places gone?

Why is optimizing for local search results important? We need to understand the basics first. Optimizers got into the habit of optimizing websites for search engines. Good work, we need visibility, top ranking and free web traffic. Yes, we got the fruits of SEO. In this effort we missed out on few important things, we forgot the visitors, we forgot our target market, and we forgot the business prospects that would be searching for the products we are selling.

We understood the fact quiet late, that we have to target the local customers first, as these are people who would be interested to buy locally first, instead of ordering pizza from Japan. The global village is still spread on thousands of miles and not easily reachable for pizza delivery or even for a plumbing job.

Locals must find local businesses. IF we are not there to support their cause, and if we are not there to tell them that we have the answer to their quest for products and services, the local customers would look else where. Google Maps and Google places web search results were the best places to prove our local web presence.

Google now integrates the Google Places with the Google+, thus taking benefits of its strengths and send the world of customers reeling to the business places; they need to be in contact with.

Yell.com’s author Ahtisham Hussain cleverly puts this scenario in the following words, “Google are at it again and recently changed the name over to Google+ Local.  Yes, they have linked up Places with Google+ their social networking platform.

Most business owners who are serious about local SEO will have claimed their Places listing and updated with content including images, video, categories and location targeting preference.  The algorithm is not so straightforward to understand when it comes to placement of these ‘pin’ listings but now has a further twist.”

Google Plus is still there but with a new set up. We must take notes and get ready for the ride with Google+ local and give out our best presence performance for the viewers, to impress them and make them act on impulse.

5 SEO mistakes that we must avoid

SEO today has gone fragile. We could have given little thought to the nitty-gritty’s earlier but as time passed the search engine pulled the plugs, thanks to our own action where we had forced the stringent changes and enhancements. Yet many of us make mistakes and land ourselves in hot waters. To err is human, but some of us purposely do things that lead to penalties later.

Let’s see, what not to do. 5 mistakes that people usually make in SEO are outlined below:

Creating websites with frames and flash – The search engines do not recognize the flash. It passes away. While we attempt to make our web visitors happy with animations and flash intros, we forget that we are harming our SEO efforts. We know that the search engine read text and index the same, than, let’s not spend time and money on efforts that can do harm to the website SEO.

Pushing too hard on keywords and keyword phrases – We must understand the thin lined difference between the keyword usage and keyword stuffing. The required or we can say that the appropriate density today stands around 1%. If you are doing more than that, you will be in trouble. Forget the 3% to 4% keyword density.

Use Hidden Text – Do not make such a mistake. Any black hat technique will get you no where. Your SEO efforts would bounce back as soon as it is detected. Some SEO’s might tell you to use hidden text to get top search engine ranking, but they might not tell you that search engines have got smarter and can detect hidden text. If you want to get your site banned on the search engine, you can follow through.

Buying Links – Great, if you have already done this, be ready for the out lash by the search engine. This is a big NO NO. The trend of links is foreseeable, the search engine can make out whether you have gathered links naturally or you have brought these links from link farm. Many incoming links and those too from not so relevant sites, creates the buzz on the search engine’s platform.

Using copied content – Surely coping content from your competitions website is the easiest way out. Many of our friends used to prefer copying the text. It used to save “hell lot of time”. Good haa, bad for the search engine. Your content would not be ranked no matter how hard you try.

Organic SEO v/s PPC

Is PPC good for your web presence? Why do SEO companies focus on PPC?  The instant free web traffic flow to the website of the web business owners through the search engine ranking results and presence on the SERPs is the reason why the SEO companies preach taking on to the PPC campaign. The more you pay for the targeted keyword the higher the placement and hence, you will witness the increase in the flow of web traffic to your website. This is a short term strategy; is does not replace the organic SEO strategy.

The facts are:

We cannot do without organic SEO

PPC helps in getting instant visibility and can be used as a short term solution to long term goals. We cannot live with SEO but can live without PPC. Organic search engine results garner more trust from the web visitors

Does PPC help in Organic SEO?

Well to me, the answer is yes and no. PPC does not help in organic SEO directly, but its surely helps in getting more traffic instantly to your website, which means, the as many people would visit your website, the search engine spiders would be trigged to index your web pages fast and allot a position in the SERPs.

While we are looking at our organic SEO to take advantage of our PPC listings, we must not forget that PPC will also be helpful in learning the desires of our website visitors and will be helpful resource to monitor the relevant keywords response. The visitors search habits and their search trend will also be outlined through our PPC ad campaigns.

This will affect our organic SEO strategy directly and we can improve upon the basics by embedding the most relevant and result oriented keywords in our website SEO.

Benefits of PPC 

Pay per click campaign can help you to get listed for the keywords that your website is not optimized for, hence, help in capturing the traffic that could have been lost otherwise.

Creating Brands Awareness – While organic SEO takes time to mature, PPC helps in creating brands awareness almost instantly by propping up on the SERP’s paid inclusion sections and leading the traffic, mostly the targeted traffic to your website.

Instant Placements – Depending how much you have bided for the keyword, you sponsored advertisement would be instant placed on the SERPs thus creating visibility.

How to hurt your SEO efforts?

We have seen lots of changes in the world of the web, especially when we talk about SEO. Follow through from Big Daddy, to Panda and now to Penguin, we know what SEO strategies are the best for our website visibility, yet we knowingly and purposefully close our eyes are, try something different and hence hurt our ranking results or get penalized by Google.

Let’s study how we can hurt our SEO results.

Over use of keywords and phrases – Great – why do we need to do this? The keyword density is not the same as it was previously. Instead of using 3% to 5%, now 0.5% usage of keywords is good enough. The text or the web copy now makes more sense to the readers. With keywords and its variations stuffed, you could hurt your website ranking.

Copied Website Content – Sometime content on someone else’s website looks great. Copying and pasting it your website. Search Engines indexing and ranking is hurt, such websites are not given ranking after indexing, hence, your website (a) would not be ranked, even if it gains temporary ranking, it could be de listed any time by the search engine.

Broken Links / Bad internal Linking – Website structure with broken links is like a man with a broken back bone. Weak structured websites have never achieved high ranking, as the broken links do not give the search engine spiders a chance to properly index and understand the links.

Irrelevant Back Links – Walking into the trap of link sellers to get back links hurts and hurts the ranking real bad. Today, the search engines demand back links from the relevant sites. Image if your plumbing business website gets a back link from a gambling website or an adult website. Instead of gaining authority your website would tend to loss value.

Take care; don’t fall for illicit SEO practices. The days, when you could have got away by trying unethical means are gone, search engines have got smarter. Stay away from the SEO practices that SEO your online presence and visibility.

Keyword Research Tips

If we are familiar of how search engines work and if we are aware of the customer behavior on the internet and if we are aware of the search terms being used by them to search for the products and services we deal in, your keyword research part for the SEO of your website becomes easy. Usually, this is not the case. The business owners perceive that inking the most common words related to our website design would do the SEO task well. That is not true. Before jotting down the keywords and the search terms we must keep in mind the following:

• Put yourself in the web visitor’s shoes and search for the products and services online to find the products and services you deal in. By using different variations of the search terms and by using the search terms that you have in your mind, will help you conclude what are the web surfers searching for and how they conduct their searches? You will also access your competition and hence form a SEO strategy.
• Our first aim should be to find the words, keywords that are most relevant to your business niche, phrases that are relevant and the long tail ends that can help in garnering more healthy results.
• Do not go after the keywords or phrases that show high traffic or high competition volume. If competition is high, remember, achieving good ranking would be rather impossible.
• Go after lesser competitive keywords and phrases. This will help you in getting to the top speedily. 
• Once you have achieved top ranking or prominent ranking for the lesser competitive keywords, getting to high ranking for highly competitive keywords would be rather easy.
• Make the choice for keyword, webpage by webpage.  By doing this, you will be able to select unique keywords for each pages, hence achieving ranking for each page of your website and getting more visibility on the search engines.

Understanding human behavior is an important element in the building your SEO strategy. Keywords have ruled the search engine marketing game and so has the user behavior. Keeping track will help in building a sustained search engine position.

SEO Best Practices for 2012

There was a time when SEO’s preached the best search engine optimization practices by focusing on the SEO web copy stuffed with or filled with keywords, phrases, their variations etc, most of the time making the content meaningless for the website visitors. There were keyword Meta tags and high density of keywords it the title and description tags. Since then, when the black hatters took the advantage and the Google search results gave meaningless web search results with fake or poor sites coming up on the search engines top ranking, the search engine looked to improve the standards of indexing and optimization.

The year 2012 has been eventful so far, the Penguin update daunted the efforts of the black hatters and gave them the signals that they will be for sure penalized by the Search Engine Leader by delisting of their sites.

We have since then come off age and became more realistic when we perform SEO. In this year, we need to:

Focus more on natural ways of building one way back links

Use keywords in lesser density, than we used to do previously (not 2 to 5% but the preferred keyword density ratio is 0.5% to 1%). This forces us to build website content that flows naturally and makes sense to the humans coming across our website content.

Focus on LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing is the call of the day. The artificially intelligent search engines can make out and sense the nature of the search, hence provide the best and meaningful results through semantic search results.

Our focus on Meta Tags - we need to change the habit of embedding the hardcore keyword in the Title tag. Instead aiming on the ability of search engines to index on LSI standards must be given weight. More effective Meta Title Tags and description tags can be developed and help the users find your website through LSI search results.

Before you get into the act of optimizing your website do study and learn through the guidelines provided by the search engines. Visit the SEO guidelines pages to get a complete handle on the SEO best practices for the year 2012.

3 Simple SEO Tips

Survival of the fittest, that true. Every coming day makes the competition on the internet fierce. More people come up with their websites and aim for high search engine ranking. While some succeed, others find themselves no where.  With many businessmen striving to find a prominent position on the search engines for similar keywords and phrases, it is not usually possible for everyone to find the top search engine result’s page spot.  It is but natural that only few survive the intense marketing game on the internet.

Visibility matters, even if it doesn’t come through top search engine ranking, your website visibility matters. 1st page ranking, within the first 10 spots, is good enough to a website. Alas, these positions do not guarantee business, but may be, a high click through rate is the reward for the visibility that you achieve.

To get more web visitors search engine optimization methods, especially, the off page gives a long lasting strong hold position to the web pages being optimized. The conditions remain to be the same. The On page and off page optimization must carry relevance to each other and must be inter related.

Let’s discuss 3 simple Off Page SEO steps that can help in strengthening the search engine position of your web pages:

Write, publish and distribute press releases – The news hungry nature of people helps us to leverage our search engine marketing. Our businesses have news to break to the people. Every business activity can be changed into a news worthy story and the same can be published and distributed through the press release distribution services online. If done well, the news might get picked up by the major media outlets and disseminated further. The benefit - more visibility, more readability by the target market and more one way back links

Blog – Blog – Blog – Create your marketing niche weblog. Communicate with the people about the products, services that you deal in. Tell them the good and the bad of your products and invite them to participate in every blog by leaving comments. Leave your web page link in every blog that you write.

Submit your website to niche web directories – This can your first step towards the off page SEO. Submit your web pages to the most popular online web directories and take the benefit of search engine spider’s crawling activity.

Getting ahead of the competition is the challenge that is faced by many online marketers today. We have to take our SEO steps soon before other fill the space.

Meta name=”news_keywords” content – SEO news

Google brings back the Meta keywords tag. Not really, it back for the news publishers only. The good old Meta Keyword Tag, which had been done away with, is refined and being re introduced for the Press Release writer and news publishers giving them more flexibility with words, also helping them to leverage their creativity. Building attractive news titles without having to bother about the keywords being must in the title and without having to focus on embedding more keywords and variation inside the news text. The Meta keyword tag will handle the job for you.

Wait, don’t rush, you need to understand the mechanics first. As Google announced this just a few days from now, we need to wait and see, try this out and understand the mechanics. Google has limited the length of Meta name=”news_Keywords” tag to 10 keywords. We don’t need to over step, no use.

We have been cautioned here by Google. They say using this tag isn’t your ticket for top search engine ranking; rather it is for identifying to the search engines and calling in the spiders for indexing, even if no keywords had been used in the title of the publication. Quality of the news release remains to be of essence.

Search Engine Land explains the mechanism by saying, “Google also warns that using the “news_keywords” meta tag isn’t a quick path to ranking better in Google News. It’s only one signal, and “high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.”

Rudi Galfi, the product manager at the Google News, explained the need of the “News_keywors” meta tag by saying, “Since the headline is a sequence of text that’s only readily understandable by a human, most machine algorithms would probably attach some sort of biological association to it. In turn, this would make it difficult for millions of curious users who are using Google.com or Google News to find the best article about the stock market crash they just heard about.

 The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.”

SEO, Using Press Releases

We have been reading many press releases with great interest. Mostly, the attractive title of the press releases makes us click and we read on. We are news hungry people. Every morning we try and gulp down news as it breaks on the BBC or CNN with our cup of coffee or while we are driving for work. Our passion for news gives the opportunity to businessmen to break their business news, stirring interest and thus we walk into their physical store or log on to their web store to find stuff.

On one hand, press releases have the power of bringing interested target marketing into the business net, on the other, more interestingly; it is the Off Page SEO tool which if built properly, with the relevant SEO elements can help in achieving multiple goals on the Off Page SEO.

Press Releases are:

1. Online marketing tools. The press releases, tells your business stories, gives the readers the insight about your business and leads many to your place of business. Some online marketers describe press releases as the best local marketing tool. 
2. Search Engine marketing angle must not be over looked here. Our purpose behind every online marketing and SEO strategy is to make our business and business activity searchable. Building in the search engine friendly features like using relevant keywords and phrases in our web conversations will help in triggering the search engine spiders and forcing them to visit and index the press release. 
3. The creative, original and purposeful press release get the attention of the other media outlet, gets pickup and gets more healthy back links for the website, thus strengthening the hold of the web pages on the search engines.

We need to write the press releases, get them published on the online press release journals and get them distributed through the press release distribution services to harness the fruits of the press release marketing activity.
Our hidden aim here is to get more one way back links and a higher page rank for our website. With prudent off page SEO steps we can ensure better off page SEO and better page rank for our web pages.

SEO, The new outlook

Many business people still are unsure as to how can SEO benefit them. They know about visibility as they are themselves the web users and use Google to search for information. They are familiar of what web user do online, how search is conducted and what needs to be done if you don’t find the exact information that you are searching for. Hence, not knowing what SEO can do for the business is ignorance. What is good for others is good for your business too. Hence, when put in easy terms, SEO bring visibility and free web traffic to your website, if your SEO elements are properly built in and your website off page optimization is done with good search engine marketing strategy.

On Page elements are technical, as these have to do with HTML codes like building Meta Title Tags, Description tags, image (ALT) tags etc. We have to be vigilant and learned enough so as to tweak out basic HTML elements of our web pages. Are you equipped to handle this? Mostly, entrepreneurs are not. They are not familiar with the HTML, so website designing is alien area to walk into. Here they need the help of the search engine optimizers and pay them so SEO fee to help them research their keywords and build the SEO tags and elements on the web pages.

Off Page Optimization – This can be a “do it your self project”. You need to know good English. Save your vocabulary, as you don’t have to show off. You need to keep your web content simple and understandable. You have to give some time to your off page SEO.

People on the web are looking for information and best source of information is the web content. We can helpfully look at:

a)      Submitting website to web directories

b)      Article writing and submission

c)       Blogging

d)      Press Releases

These are the best sources for spreading information. Leaving a link back to your web pages in these web conversations will help in bringing the interested web visitors to your website and would also generate healthy and relevant back links

For the entrepreneurs the more challenging task is to let the people know about the articles, blogs and the press releases, hence, thanks to the social marketing techniques, we can spread the word by leading the members of the social networks, your friends and peer by posting links on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn etc.

No so technical and not so difficult, “do it yourself SEO tasks” where you need intelligence and common sense, can be of great help your search engine optimization and help in getting your web pages more visibility on the search engines.

Semantic search

Wiki opens its discussion on Semantic search by saying, “Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable data space, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.”

Discussing the process of creating relevance during search, Wiki goes on the explain, “In order to understand what a user is searching for, word sense disambiguation must occur. When a term is ambiguous, meaning it can have several meanings (for example, if one considers the lemma "bark", which can be understood as "the sound of a dog," "the skin of a tree," or "a three-masted sailing ship"), the disambiguation process is started, thanks to which the most probable meaning is chosen from all those possible.

Such process make use of other information present in a semantic analysis system and takes into account the meanings of other words present in the sentence and in the rest of the text. The determination of every meaning, in substance, influences the disambiguation of the others, until a situation of maximum plausibility and coherence is reached for the sentence. All the fundamental information for the disambiguation process, that is, all the knowledge used by the system, is represented in the form of a semantic network, organized on a conceptual basis.”

We take our discussion further, but take into account more of the semantic search results process through the SEO Bridge. 

The optimizers and the website design builders need to take into account the relevance of the web pages to the web copy or shall we say website content. Even, when we talk about semantics we cannot over look the Facebook wall postings or the blogs or even form commenting cannot be over looked. Every thing is linked to the relevance of the subject, hence, filling the database and making it ready to produce the relevant search results when a query is generated by the web user.

Building content for the web, that has relevance to the subject, use of keywords, phrases and long tail ends with intent, not over using, over emphasizing or any way stuffing the search term, as the search engines are intelligent enough to analyze the intent of the content maker and the web surfer while processing search results. Let your content be naturally flowing, easy to be read and understood. 

Today’s SEO Tip

We read so much about search engine optimization that frequently we loose track that what has to be done today, to get more links. We are usually indulging in off page without a proper secure plan. With no plan of action, we remain beating about the bush really and getting no where as far as the building links is concerned.

The our link building activities where we prefer to leave the links of our web page we usually end up leaving the backlink to our home page. Well this is good, but enough to get the real juice out of the link building strategy.

There are other pages on your website that need attention too. May be the visitors are not interested in your home page but your products page might propel them to get in touch with you. The links back to your products page would give your website more links and better hold on the search engine positioning.

Think about it. What are other pages on your website that might be helpful if used in link building? There might be a few. The product page, the services pages, or better still, you can choose the three best pages you might think would be helpful in building links.

Ramapati Singhania shares my thought and says, “Take stock and choose any 3 of your "most important" pages today andset a plan to specifically work on increasing some natural link popularity, directly to those pages individually. Part of some people's trouble (when it comes to linking,) is that they become overwhelmed. The job seems too massive when really, it's not. Just a little plan and a little consistent effort even once a week, can carry you an ENOURMOUS distance! What's your plan? Start by choosing just 3 of your "most important" pages”.

SEO – Adding value to SEO services

SEO companies strive for business. Marketing SEO services had never been as difficult as it is these days. Out many reason for this saturation one of the main reasons for people walking away from the SEO companies is that, the companies failed to provide value added services. Why do we need highly optimized website? What is the purpose of getting high search engine ranking? We get visitors, more traffic, but our sales have not increased, our visitors are not converting into customers? We need to find answers.

The marketing edge that SEO companies used to sell their search engine optimization services was based on getting top search engine ranking for the selected keywords and keyword phrases. Many of the SEO companies succeeded in their work got the pat on the back and walked away with their booty for their job well done. They delivered what they promised.

The point everyone missed out was getting to the top does guarantee visibility. It can get your web traffic, more clicks, less unique visitors but it does not guarantee business, it does not guarantee conversions. The ROI of the business owner was hurt.

The tip of the day is – for the SEO companies – To make some efforts to deliver value for the money they charge. Getting to top might not be difficult, but getting the visitors to convert to customer’s is the task, if done well, will bring customers to your clients and hence give you an edge over other SEO companies.

My friend Ramapati Singhania shares my sentiments and says “Converting visitors to customers may not always be in the forefront of our minds as an SEO (we're always so busy thinking traffic), but once you start examining methods to convert your client's visitors to customers, you'll start to deliver additional value to your clients and you'll find a full consultancy approach does not go unrewarded.”

Link Building Methods

Link farms flourished before. People used to buy links, arrange reciprocal links and make efforts to strengthen the hold on the search engine ranking. This shows that link building has always been central to SEO strategies. But now the game has become more serious. Link farms are a big No No from Google’s point of view as links coming in from any site are not the links that matter any more. These have to come through the relevant and authority sites, with better page rank. Here quality of back links matter. The bad guys are in trouble.

Keywords focus must not be let loose as these are important and precious commodity. SEO web content development contains the set of and variations of targeted relevant keywords and phrases. Every web conversation that we get involved in if is with the relevant keywords, which must be prudently used, not stuffed or used meaninglessly, will help in SEO and link building.

Methods of link building

We are here to discuss various methods and must look at the easiest ones that can help you to garner more authoritative and relevant links.

Blogging – Web2.0 blog sites are the tools of general interest these days. Creating niche blogs and uploading your blog posts, and leaving the links in the signature sections help in generating back links. If the post is original, interesting and creative many other bloggers will like to link to your blog and many other might link to your website.

Forum Commenting – Forums are the best places on the internet where loads of conversations take place. The best forums are the ones that belong to your market niche. Participating in forums and leaving links of your website, will help. Two pronged benefits are visible here; (a) you get loads of web traffic to flow and (b) back links

Social media / Social Networks – Most of the web users are there to mingle, make friends and have fun but the serious side of social networks tells a different story. Creating interesting conversation and leaving links of your blogs, articles, and the social media updates etc, leads to the traffic flow to your sites but the juice that we get are the link, one way back links from these sites and other sites that link back to us.