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.