SEO – The best approach towards visibility

Visibility is the only reason why we get involved in the search engine marketing. Our website needs to have presence, a prominent presence on the web, where people surfing the internet can find us, talk to us and get involved with our business activities. Every business needs customers to survive and SEO gives us the opportunity to reach out to our target market through appearance on the search engine search results and hence lead them to our web pages. 

Know your keywords well – We are talking about the back bone of search engine optimization, the keywords. Not all words are keywords save for the words that are related to your market niche and those that are frequently used by your target market to find products, services and information that you are disseminating or selling. 

When the race of SEO began, the keywords, phrases and their variation stuffed into our web content worked well, but than it make the text less understandable to the human eyes, hence, the stage where keywords were stuffed passed away really fast, giving way to more ethical approach of using the selected keywords and phrases, directly or in variation but in decent keyword density so as to develop the content that made sense when read online.

Build effective META Tags – Once we have done our homework with the keywords, building HTML tags is our next work. The Meta Title tag, this tag is as good as it was since the beginning. But now do not stuff it with keywords, make a powerful Meta Title Tag, off course keyword rich but the one that makes sense to the search engines as well.

Meta Description Tag – This is the tag that carries the summery of the web pages content. It has to be made with serious efforts. Actually this is read by the web viewers and forces them to click or not to click.

Link Building – Building links is a serious game. It gives our web pages strong hold on the web and on the search engines. We know for a fact that naturally gathered links help in better search engine placements.

Search engine optimization is the only best approach to online visibility. We must learn how to play our cards right.

Building Links to create a strong foothold

Get a vote; get other better ranking websites with high Google page rank to link back to your website. If you pay for the link, you will be punished; the master search engines have ways of finding out. The link better come from the same market niche and must be from authority websites. If they are fewer, but are of high quality your web pages will be given a NOD from the Google and get better placement in the search engines for the keywords and phrases you have selected to optimize your website.

Previously link meant any link. It did not matter to the search engines from where they come or how they come. The link farms thrived and we found many highly monetized website hitting high while quality websites with tons of healthy information lagging behind. This led to the web user’s frustration. 

Let the links come naturally. Let other people come to your website, read what you have to say and link back. This gives your website a vote of appreciation. 

Getting back links naturally involves a great deal of effort from your side. You need to:

• Share you web content. If you are blogging, do talk about it, share you blog with your Facebook Fans or your followers on the Twitter. Generating interest in your blogs and articles will help in fostering and building conversation and thus building more links to your web pages naturally.
• Share inside pages of your website with people. Your web store is not just your website’s home page. The internal pages are the places where the actual story is given for the people to read. Exposing the internal pages will help in getting back links for these pages as well. All the links pointing to the homepage will caution the master search engine to rethink your ranking.

Use variation of keywords in your text and Tags. People do use different variation of keywords, phrases and long tail ends when they conduct a search. This will also show the search engine that you are not trying to force ranking for one particular set of keywords or phrases.

Creating good content will make it link worthy. Force on quality and not quantity. Try and get the best web copy made that could force authority websites to link back.

SEO - What is the game all about

Quest of every web entrepreneur is visibility for his website. Our presence on the web can be acknowledged by web visitors coming in on our website. Visitors mean a lot and if our website remains unseen or unfound on the web, we remain traffic less, with no web visitors, no business prospects. Our website remains to be expensive bill boards lying in our back yards.

Web visibility solution can be reached through ethical organic SEO. It’s about getting traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Ranking high for the relevant keywords and attracting link back, thus gaining immense visibility on the search engine leading people to learn about your web presence and flowing towards your web pages.

 There has been a lot of changes recently in the algorithm of the search engine where the bots or the search engine spiders are programmed or told what to do and what not to do, which pages to pick up, rank high and which pages to drop. Not everything has changed. Many things still hold good with SEO, since the time the race for top ranking started. People, the optimizer and the web users are the teachers who taught the search engines how to alter the programming part of the search engines (a) to keep away black hatters from exploiting the search engines (b) providing the end users with more relevant and fresh web search results.

Points to note

SEO is from free. Until you start buying links to force a strong hold on the search engines. Remember this not call for. Buying link is risky and not liked by Google; you can get a beating for your illicit practice. Google eyes that link from a relevant site as a vote and thus more links your website naturally collects get favored by Google. Buying links may cause harm.

Make sure that the content of your site must be original. Search engine place a lot of weight in the creative decently crafted original web copy.

Internal linking matters. Good internal links, unbroken links are helpful for the search engine spiders to index the pages of the website. Clean internal linking is also helpful for the website visitor’s navigation. 

Is SEO becoming difficult?

Yes, it is. It is getting more difficult for those who try to cheat the search engines. For those who use black hat techniques to rise to the top of search engine results through unethical means of SEO. SEO is becoming difficult if you are not paying attention to internal linking structure and to quality of links points towards your web pages, to your website content and to your HTML tags.

Let’s elaborate – SEO has changed rather matured from the state it began from. The purpose of the search engines has always been to provide the users with better, purposeful search results that are more relevant to the user’s query. But what we saw lately was that the top ranking websites used to frustrate the web surfers. The monetized web sites with less to tell and more to earn became the game of the SEO and the optimizers did everything possible to cheat the algorithm of the search engines. 

The twist was inevitable. Be it the Google, Yahoo or Bing could not risk their reputation. These are made to facilitate the web users and not the black hatters who preached the public on the idea of becoming rich overnight by following their techniques. These people made millions and are still trying to do so but with less vigor now as they have lost their rankings and are trying to figure out what to do next.

SEO remains the same. Save for some changes that the search engines made to the algorithm to discourage the optimizer who tried to exploit the search engine programming with keyword stuffing, buying links, invisible text and other means. 

• Meta Title Tag and Meta Description Tag must be made right and ethically do matter with organic SEO.
• Content is still the king – If it original and purposeful. Copied or plagiarized content is caught and punished by the search engines
• Internal linking in important and must be done correctly
• Let your back links come slowly. Do not force fast linking. Content quality matters and this is the sole source that will help you get authority websites to link back.

It is the habit of the black hatters that has made SEO difficult for them. If you follow ethical SEO standards it will be smooth sailing for you on the search engines.

Improving search engine ranking - SEO advantages

With the growing number of people logging online to search or research and with new people getting access to the web, the opportunity for the business owners keep rising. Their need is to be visible in front of the web surfer. The good quality website, with good content and information is rewarded by the web visitors in terms of traffic flow to their web pages. Hence, our need is visibility.

This need takes us to the search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing to speak of, essentially. Consider now, how many of go to Google to search for information? Approximately 85% of us to Google, Yahoo and Bing take the best of the balance 15%.

The growth of the internet and the increasing number of the content being uploaded on the search engines gives the search engines the responsibility of providing the visitors with improved and relevant search results, thus forcing them to keep an eye on the people, the optimizers who want to get to the top through which ever means they can by exploiting and challenging the search engines using techniques, commonly known as black hat techniques, to get to the top of search engines leaving the more deserving sites behind.

Google Panda and Google update is the result of the changed forced by these unethical SEO practitioners who get punished with every algorithm change.

Improving the search engine ranking for your website really depends on the website structure or we can say the architecture and the website design. Not to say that flashy looking websites, with numerous ads and pop ups with jazzy color and layout will get you to the top, but the content, original, informative and quality content, balance website design will help.

Factors that can help in improving the search engine ranking include:

• A Site Map that carries links to all necessary and important parts of the website
• Less use of flash and Java script
• Avoid the use of frames
• Proper internal linking of web pages
• Simple and uncluttered web pages
• User friendly and intuitive navigation through out the site

Keywords do play an important role. By avoiding keyword stuffing and letting your content flow in the natural manner, let your website enjoy the fruits of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) which Google incorporated recently. 

SEO – The truth behind the SEO game

Web is not a juggler’s platform.  Magic doesn’t happen here. SEO – search engine optimization is for real. It can bring your website in the forefront. Get you the visibility that your web pages deserve, but it takes time. It takes much time to see the results of the hard core ethical SEO that you practice on your website. May be a good 12 months, in the intense competitive environment when you start sighting the results, with your website showing up in the search engine results pages.

SEO is the talk of the town. Especially for those who have their web businesses online. Website ranking matters to them, as the flow of traffic gets hindered if the website is invisible from the web surfer’s eyes. The difficulty behind SEO, for those who are not aware of the search engine SEO practices gives them a jolt. They need to hire a SEO specialist who can help them in getting top search engine ranking for the keywords for which their website is being optimized for.

The journey of from being found to being seen has been covered. We have started to use to the social media – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube etc in the effort to support our ethical SEO practices and to propel our web pages and our social media profile to be seen in the search engine search results.

The SEO game revolves around keywords

Keywords have always remained central to the SEO game. Competitive keywords are difficult. The new bees, the new small business owners who have just begun to SEO their sites are advices to use less competitive keywords and long tail ends. You would be able to harness the benefits of the SEO faster than your competition.

The truth behind the SEO game is to learn every step you take, even before your talk to the SEO Company. Take baby steps to rise, do not take a leap. Learn what Google tells you about ethical SEO before you play the game of “snake and ladder”. 

Building links the natural way – Step to powerful SEO techniques

When I started my business, I was the not going out to meet and network; just advertised, sent out offers and stayed put and hoped I would hear from the prospects. Work started off slowly but since I had started to talk about my business with my friends, their friends and with the people I meet occasionally, my business picked up real fast. I started to build links and woom, I started to get leads, people wanted to talk to me about my products, many of whom were eager buyers. 

SEO today, works exactly the same way. Google like links, specially the way the come, naturally. Going to link farms will be like giving your search engine ranking a “Death Sentence”. Go out, meet people, tell the people, the web visitors about your web business, get referred, leave comments and ask for comments, get busy, network online, build content, build authority and see where your website ranking goes. To the top for sure, if you are tweaking other online SEO elements right.

The search engines are looking for original and fresher content. Creative web content on the website and every business conversation online whether it's a blog, a press release, an article or a Facebook comment etc. You need to be original to build authority and to gather links for the authority website, preferably from the same business niche to which your website belongs. 

Avoid keyword stuffing which makes your website content look like robot readable only. 

SEO is not dead; it is more refined to give the web visitor with quality search results. We have to adhere to the changing scenario of the web, give quality rather than quantity, provide better and more purpose oriented website design, no gimmicks like pop ups, unnecessary videos and advertisements. Our aim is to get authority websites to link back. Google will love it.

Google updates –Bad news for Black Hatters

We have regularly been bombarded with the Google updates. The next thing we see on the search engines shatters our online world. Our websites that rankedhigh, may be on the top, disappeared and our business is lost. Not a good situation for business owners, but yes a good situation for web surfers, who are Goggling to find the products, services and the information. For black hatters, who might have come over the hick ups of the past update now get hit by new algo changes and boom they need to start all over again, adjusting and tweaking their websites for top search engine ranking.

Google first rolled out the Big Daddy update, followed by the Panda update and now the Penguin update. Yes, it seems they never rest at Google.

Lets talk about Penguin Update

If you have been buying link and if you have been involved in unnaturallinking for your website your website might be in trouble. With Penguin Update Google is aiming to crack down on:

Unethical linking practices
Stress less on SEO Tricks
Copied or plagiarized content

Link Quality matters now – Spend time in building a good website. Google will evaluate the quality of links by the authority of the websiteslinking back or pointing towards your website. Task, the business of link sellers might go down. No more shortcuts for linking would work.

Content - Quality of the website depends much on the quality of web content. Content has and will always rule but now more so with the Penguin update, where cheating the search engine with badly reworded articles will hurt your website. Penguin Update uses the latent Semantic Indexing. We will have to be natural with our text and also give better value to the website visitors by giving them better, informative content when they visit our website. Again quality v/s quantity rule would apply here too.

The updates have come as heart breakers for many SEO professionals who had put days of hard work in optimizing their client’s websites. They have to take a fresh approach and work on ethical SEO practices. Rethink their strategies and not take shortcuts on building content and not to work on the underhand linking practices.

If we think, honestly, things are the same as they had started. The black hatters and the people who try to take shortcuts are in trouble. People, SEO professionals who have worked on ethicallines are still holding ground.

Google updates – Providing better search results

SEO has always been a hot topic. It has surrounded most of the Internet marketing conversation on the web. More so, the regular updates by the search engine leader concentrated to lessen the web user’s frustration of not finding valuable information. Website, generally sites loaded with ads, providing that the life of the website depended more on revenue generation from adverts placed and those that provided no or minimum worthwhile information.

The owners of such websites with top ranking suddenly found themselves out of sight on the search engine and bad mouthed the sincere efforts of providing better value to the web visitors for their time spend on the Google search. “Google hates SEO” were the words heart quite often.

Good quality original content stills rules

We are in the era of reality. Here the time is ripe and the search engine maturity proves that their aim is now more clear, more precisely aimed than before. Article spinning, twisting and rewording of content for the website, Google now smells the rat. You have to research more, get hold of a good writer if you cannot write web content by yourself, place lesser ads, define the purpose of your presence and create an authoritative website design. This is what Google wants now. The aim is to give the visits information that is worth their time and efforts.

As always content rules the SEO game, quality v/s quantity is the name of the game. The SEO companies that used to update their blogs daily and those websites (newer sites) with tons of spin content on their sites had to pay the price, got delisted. Older sites held ground, as Google says those sites had original and quality content. The update by Google “The Panda Update” as always aims at more fresher, good quality website content and thus is bad news for websites that have based their ranking through quantity instead of quality.

Five Basic SEO Tips

Just yesterday when I was discussing search engine marketing with my friends, business owners who were worried about the internet marketing trends and the intensity of competition online, I was surprised to see that many were still unaware of what SEO is and how would it help them to gain prominence on the web. They were more concerned about getting hold of the SEO specialist. More over their concerned revolved around the investment in the SEO and the ROI.

For them and for many other small business owners who are worried about their web marketing and about gaining visibility on the search engines, the piece of advice is to find time and learn SEO. I can help you to understand the basics and take you to the next level if you keep following up the posts on this blog.

Believe me, by just spending a few hours either day or night, you can SEO your website, yourself without having to get into a contract with the SEO company. No investments, no outflow and get the maximum visibility on the search engines.

Lets begin

We must understand that it is not just Google that we are looking at when we are talking about SEO. Yahoo and Bing are important too. For sure we know that Google takes 85% of the market share while other including Yahoo and Bing share the balance 15%.

We must optimize for Google, Yahoo and Bing, the most used search engines to gain visibility on the Internet allowing the web users to find out business on the web.

Tip # 1 – learn about your competition. Study their ranking, their visibility and their participation on the online social marketing mediums.

Tip # 2 – Research the industry related keywords and phrases. Study the keywords your competition is using. Use keyword research tools to arrive at the most relevant industry related keywords, Keyword phrases and long tail ends

Tip # 3 – Develop website content. Make the content for your customers and embed keywords with the ratio of 1% to 2%. Make your web content in easy, understandable English and make sure that you do not copy the content from other website. Do not plagiarize.

Tip # 4 - Develop META Tags. Meta Title Tag, Meta Description Tag are important HTML elements that hold important place in the SEO of a website.

Tip # 5 – Take care in building internallinks.Error Free internallinking not only helps the search engines to index the web pages in the website but also helps the web visitors to follow the links to arrive at the desired web page.

SEO Web content – Creating Balance with readability

Old school of thought SEO element would take us to high keyword concentrated documents, keywords repetitively embedded in the text, as we keep SEO, search engines and search engine robots in mind. We used to create documents for search engines, usually named them link baits and concentrated our efforts around hard core SEO to gain top search engine ranking.

Building SEO web content, means building content for your website or for other web marketing activities, articles, press releases and blogs etc. This means that we creating the search engine feed. Giving enough for the search engines that could help in indexing and at the same time bring good relevant links. But today, within the days of semantic search we need to create content with web visitors in mind. Building content creating a balance between readability and search engine friendliness is a must.

Semantic searches have changed the scenario. We have to keep the web visitor in mind and create documents – web content for the web users. At the same time use the same web content to optimize our websites and to generate one way back links. As such we have a more challenging task to perform. We have to create a harmony, unison between the readability, search engine optimization and online marketing activities. We have to aim for the search engines robots to visit, index and rank our web content whether it is an article, a blog or an online profile or any marketing message and at the same time make sure that the content that has been created has enough juice for the web visitors to read, understand, digest and act.

Bottom line – search engines have gone smarter. The algorithm changes now force us to be natural. Our docs need to have fewer recurrences’ of keywords, may be around 1% to 2%. The other elements like original and error free content hold ground. The article hence must be both, readable and search engine friendly.

Creating SEO web content is an art of its own right. When you sit down to write a marketing copy, or a About Us page, or while you are making content for your website’s home page make sure that you write with balance, write for the website visitors and at the same time write a search engine friendly content. 

SEO – The first step “Selecting Keywords”

You bet, selection of relevant keywords is the first step in SEO. Keywords are the red cells for SEO; these make us live a healthy life of the search engines. Relevant keyword research is needed and is essential as per best SEO practice. It will take you to the top or else will make you loose online visibility. Keyword research, unfortunately is left by the website owners for the end where as it must the first step when website design and development is being done.

What are keywords? Keywords are the words a web surfer uses to search for information. Your selection of keywords would revolve around your business niche. With proper keywords used in the website content and in every web conversation, the keywords would help the search engines to return your website when a web surfer conducts a web search.

When we conduct a search using keywords, the search engine looks through the indexed pages and picks up the most relevant pages i.e. the pages close to the keywords being used by us. Hence, we see the relevant search results on the SERPs.

Types of Keywords – Words that represent our market niche. These can be general keywords or more specific. Here we can also use long tail ends or keyword phrases that, we conclude after extensive keyword research, which would be the best for optimizing our web pages.

Keyword research and the proper use of relevant keywords bring the juice of SEO and help us to achieve top search engine ranking.

Use of keywords – Once we have made the choice of relevant keywords through thorough research, through the use of keyword research tools, the next step that we need to take is the proper use of keywords in the website content, the Meta Tags etc. If we opt for over use and keyword stuffing, we must be ready for the backlash from the search engines.

Selecting will always remain to be our first step and it should be done at the planning stage of our website, not when the website is complete and ready for being launched. We would need to rework a lot if we keep keyword research as the last step.

Why SEO – Some facts to remember

Our web presence must change to web visibility. With our websites being not visible to the web visitor’s eyes, our web business would not get the required thrust and would not be able to thrive on the internet. This thought brings us to the SEO. Optimizing web pages would help in visibility on the search engine results pages and flow more web traffic to our website. It is a fact that the web visitors prefer not to go beyond the first page of the SERPs. If they don’t find anything of their interest, they prefer to conduct a new search, but very seldom they click onto the page 2 of the search engine results pages.

Fine tuning the website and making it search engine friendly to achieve top search engine ranking with the aim of creating buzz word for your products and services and to create your brand’s awareness is the first thing that comes to one’s mind. 

SEO has much more to it, than selecting keyword rich domain name, original SEO website content, image optimization, building Meta Tags etc. Search engine optimization being our first step towards search engine marketing, involves many other online marketing mediums that help us to climb the search engine search result spaces. 

We need to remember here, that SEO, the organic SEO essentially comes free of cost, yet with the growing competition on the web and with the number of websites entering the competition arena, we need to take more steps towards optimizing our websites. Today the words being found have changed to be seen. We need to be seen by the web visitors. As such, we must employ the following into our SEO strategy.

• In build PPC into your search engine marketing campaign – The sponsored listings help your website to appear on the first page of the search engine results, much before the organic SEO matures, hence, our website, its links can be seen on the first page of SERPs
• Social Media use must be expanded. Piggyback on social media by uploading informative, creative text and messages on the social media outlets. Take advantage of their search engine ranking, indexing and web traffic flow and make your website rank on the search results when users conduct the web search.

We might have to use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Press Release distribution services, Blogs and forums etc to create the marketing punch needed to thrive in the competitive environment of today.