Filter your SEO Strategy

If you aren’t on the search engine search results, you are nowhere. This could be your strategy to gain online visibility. SEO is far from being dead. We learnt that the businesses, online had tough time after the constant algorithm updates by Google. We cannot, altogether, shun SEO, but tailor it and learning our lessons. Google is adamant to fight span and have vowed to keep a strong check on manipulative links.

Filter you SEO links. You can take on the PPC that compliments the organic SEO strategy. It gets you instant visibility, traffic and recognition. But what we have learnt, PPC could be good as a short terms web marketing strategy. Opting on this medium for long term results has proven to hurt the ROI.

SEO today has grown towards being more natural. We have learnt through our past practices and from what Google is preaching, are that we must look at SEO from the users prospective. You content, instead of being shallow and sprinkled with unwanted keywords, must be aimed to benefit the user. Forget the Keyword quantity, quality and the usefulness of the content will garner much better search results.

So what are looking for when we are at SEO techniques?

We are looking at being more creative, we have to put more intent or we can call it “be more purposeful” and last but not the least we have to put in some real hard efforts. The bunch of three attributes could get our SEO going. Focus now is the audience. Google’s artificially intelligent BOTs smell the manipulative rats.

In the end, content remains to be the king. You are writing for your audience, you need to choose high authority relevant blogs for guest blogging; you would need the relevant images to go along with the content, make the content more purposeful and hence look around for creative ways of disseminating content and helping it to go viral. We must, here, not forget the role social media has to play with your going viral activity, but in anyway, it cannot be a substitute for your SEO activities.

Get to know SEO – Boost your search engine ranking

If only we understand, that websites are for the website visitors not for the search engines – We can get the SEO ball rolling in our favor

It is about time that we should stop playing tricks with the search engine. It’s about time to play the ethical game and not to re-live our habit of thinking short term. Panda and Penguin have taught us the hard facts. Now we need to get more audience focused more than we have focused to connect with the search engines. We do connect with the search engine anyways, when we are starting off with our internet marketing strategy, of which, building and optimizing the website is the prime part.

We talk about getting visitors to our web pages. We forget that we have to make these pages useful for them. Get the juice to them so that they can hover around with more intent, but to make this happen, we actually need to:

Understand our customers: This is one of the toughest information to get. Many business entities lack the capabilities of research. We should:

Understand the web visitor’s nature (a) when he visits the web, (b) his search trends, (c) the search intent by way of queries, (d) what could trigger him to act, learn and buy, and (e) his needs and preferences.

About our business: We think we really know our business. How many actually do? First things have to be done first. We must understand our business. Create our unique selling proposition, the one that could make us stand out of the crowd and give us and our viewers a reason to interact. This is just not enough, we must get to know our competitors and study how they are different from us, what makes them unique and study how can be give them honest, hard time to compete.

The website: The Company’s website is the most important element of the web marketing strategy. While we are optimizing these web pages to appear in high search engine ranking, we must prepare them; dress them up well for the website visitors to get value once they arrive on the website.

Optimizing the web pages is ultimate goal behind the online marketing strategies, yet, providing purposeful valuable content that could help the website visitors to go through their learning curve, at the same time optimizing the website with the balanced approach, long term strategy would help you boost your website for search engine ranking.

Penguin Proof SEO trick, best ways to get your website penalized

You can get there fast. Top search engine ranking guaranteed. We have the penguin proof tricks. Once we get it done, you are there. CRAP. Get penalized, guaranteed and get lost from the internet search. True once done, you are there. We come across several get rich fast deals, none of them work in the long term. You might get to see some real fast results, yet, eventually all that you have invested in the web marketing game and buying the Penguin Proof crap goes down the drain.

Let me tell you more about the Penguin Proof tricks that can help you get penalized by the search engines. Here it goes.

Penguin’s areas of focus – unnatural back links to perk up the site’s ranking. Search Spamming
Brother Panda is good for poor content sites, low quality stuff etc.

Both are out there watching what you are up to.

• Great so why don’t you try to stuff keywords. Over optimization can help you get fast ranking and fast penalty. We have been taught to use keywords, the relevant ones to optimize. We have been using these, but now for the sake of being ethical we are cautioned not to overuse these. We are now taught to be natural and build a user friendly and human understandable text.
• We need content on our web pages. It is one of the most difficult elements on the web page, so why not use some duplicate content. Though search engines hate copied or duplicate content, we can still use it and get penalized for our actions.
• We need the strong hold on the search engine. Natural links are hard to come. We need faster results. Let’s buy them from link farms. Short term strategy, in long term, the website will get delisted.
• Door way pages, Hidden Text etc are too the tools that can get the back lash from the search engines and are the right things to get penalized.

Friends, we are living with the world of the artificial intelligence, semantic search world of the web. Doing any of the above acts will help us in getting into trouble with the search engine’s BOTs, Can you afford it?

Meet the White Hat Guy – Thoughts on SEO 2013

With every search engine update the ranking falls or rises. It is time to collect piece and think where we went wrong. What did we do to deserve the penalty of lost rank? Did our links bust our secret? What went wrong and we had to face the no ranking penalty? It is hard for those who have tried not to cheat but have not been up to the mark. For those who copied the content, used spinned content, brought links, spammed blogging and social bookmarking sites know that they are in trouble.

My thoughts on SEO 2013

• Watch every move you make
• Be original
• Be authentic
• Build your content for the web visitors not for the search engines
• Do not run after link building, let links come naturally
• Be natural
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – optimize for other search engines too.

Today the SEO has changed its face, or rather, we are forced to change the way we used to look at SEO. Our friends forgot that we had to optimize our website and build content to educate, inform and make the things interesting for the web visitors. The focus of SEO gurus turned to the search engine BOTs who made the website to please the crawling spiders and in the lust of top ranking, forgot the ethics. Such SEO gurus are on the run, yet still quite a few trying to figure out how to manipulate the current algo changes.

Fair practices, ethical optimization and white hat practices demand the optimizers to tweak their website with the white hat SEO techniques to rise in the organic SERP listings.

Piece of advice – Don’t fall for unethical SEO practices, more might be coming for Google as Penguin is out there looking at you. The tougher the competition gets, the more difficult it would become to rank higher on the search engines, optimizers who fall for black hat techniques will lose their ranking in the long term.

SEO is not getting any tougher, its getter simpler with the main ingredients like Keywords, density of keywords and naturally flowing content getting more weight and making the SEO game more purposeful.

SEO Techniques: Review

People are changing their SEO techniques to fit the Google Updates. The changes are forced by the search engine to make the search results better and affective for the users of the web. We are here, in the middle of the controversy raised by some SEO experts where some say that the SEO is dead, while others claim to have reaped benefit from the search engine algorithm changes. Let’s review what HOT and what is working for the SEOs today.

I just came across a blogging site that told me that it has changed its approval system. It cautioned the bloggers not to upload spun content. Give them only original content. Be personal in approach, be natural. Simple, this means that people are adhering to the master search engine’s guidelines. Good for them and good for the bloggers who have serious intention of working with honesty.

What is HOT on the SEO front?

Low keyword density – Stuffing was the way to go earlier. Today, if you go slightly over board, your content will be categorized as keyword stuff content. We must give away content, text that is naturally flowing, understandable by the web visitors. The content must carry the intent and spell the purpose in front of the web visitors, thus helping them to learn when they arrive at a particular website. Keywords are still HOT, but the use has become more purposeful.

Content – Copying content is a big NO NO. It has always been but today, intelligent robots can make out which content is spun, which is artificially generated and which website content articles are originally developed. So make sure you make no mistakes. Someone is watching you and can spell your intent.

Buying links – People made millions out of selling links. Others had the easier way out. Buying links served their purpose as the search engines wanted more links pointing towards their websites. The quality and the relevance did not mean much. NOT today, the spiders crawl the web and are able to delist any illicit SEO activity. It is easy to smell the rat if the links are not naturally built. Making hard efforts to build links is the need of the day. Quality NOT quantity matters.

Penguin, Panda Updates: Not penalties but an attempt to achieve quality

Attempting to fight the spam and low quality content on the web, Google came up with the Penguin update. It not penalty, said Matt Cutts when he replied to a question concerning whether Penguin is a designed to penalize the websites. Penalty means “manual actions”. “Part of the reason why we do that breakdown is, how transparent can we be? We do monthly updates where we talk about changes, and in the past year, we’ve been more transparent about times when we take manual action. We send out alerts via Google Webmaster Tools,” was Matt Cutts reply to the question concerning Penguin Update and penalizing the website for low quality content and spam linking.

With the Penguin updates and the follow up by the Panda update, SEO has become more challenging. The word of advice from the horse’s mouth was not to attempt to buy links. The Google tools are good enough to detect or spot link spam. So if you think that you can buy links and use them without leaving any foot prints and not let Google find out, forget it.

Matt Cutts categorically said, “We’re always working on improving our tools. Some of the tools that we built, for example, to spot blog networks, can also be used to spot link buying. People need to realize that, as we build up new tools, paid links becomes a higher risk endeavor. We’ve said it for years, but we’re starting to enforce it more. Penguin showed that some stuff that may work short term won’t work in the long term.”

So my friends, the things are pretty clear from here on.

The search engine giant is serious from what we learn from the “You & A with Matt Cutts”. Google has shut down many domain involved in spam and would take action against those who continue with their black hat SEO practices.

We need not to take such risks. Good Luck.   

Keyword Stuffing: Phone Numbers back lashed by Google

Considering what’s new and hot in SEO, there is a lot to look at. New and hot news in SEO?, certainly but if we are about to talk about breaking the bearers, forget it. The good old days, when the SEOs promised top search engine ranking with the blink of an eye, are no more. No more you can buy links and create authority. Google is watching your every move. We are hearing about frequent unannounced Penguin updates. Watch out, you would only come to know about it when your links disappear from the search engine scene.

To remain within the scene of the search engine search results, do what the search giant tells you to do. Don’t budge an inch. Act smart and find yourself in the deep manhole you dig for yourself.

SEOs have tried to and have succeeded in getting top ranking by playing with the phone numbers. Stuffing numbers got them to the top. People talked about it and many did complain about getting no news worthy stuff. Matt Cutts said that Google received complaints and hence, the numbers stuffed on a web page, actually not giving out any valuable information would be considered spam and could be taken off. “Pages with the list of phone numbers add little or no value” is the call.

The news now is – get straight up with your content. Give quality, be natural. Do use keywords but make sure you do not over use these. Using variations intelligently to craft a meaningful text, readable and understandable by the web visitors will do the job for you.

Reviewing Businesses Online: Stringent Measures enforced by Search Engine

Google is now going to mind your business. Beware; do not write any fake reviews. The bad habit, in which most of the businesses have jumped into, will now be watched by the search engine. We could say that Google is going to mind your business to keep its business straight. The viewers or the web visitors have always been the focus of the search engine leader, I think that is why they call Google the search engine giant. The search engine never lets is users feel bad about using the search engine and keeps occupying the giant share in the search world.

Quality – relevance – honesty will help in building better customer relationship. Google’s focus – the search engine users get value for their time spent and are not misled by any fake reviews and ratings.

If you are writing for your current employer, just stop doing so. If you have been promised by your SEO consultants for getting your reviews faked up, just ask them not to. We are now being watch. Instead of reputation building by forced reviews, or leading your customers to get gifts in return of good reviews, you might lose reputation. Those who have placed tabs and computers for their customers to leave reviews, better take them off. Google is watching you and has just launched a change in the algorithm for detecting spam and fake reviews on Google+ pages.

Those who had fun time doing this have forced the change. Enough playing around Google’s soft corner for reviews. Google says it will remain committed to quality. It remains committed to people to help them find reviews, rating and recommendations that are honest and trust worthy. The relevant and helpful reviews are what will count.

SEOs are cautioned by Google not to digitize reviews and rating left by the customers on site of business. The search engine has also warned against posting reviews on behalf of others.

This takes us to real time work. The businesses can drop in an email to their customers thanking them for their visit and request them to leaving reviews online, but not tempt them for favorable reviews only. The negative reviews have their own rating and the business people are expected to handle their negative reviews prudently.

Driving Traffic to your website: The road map

Getting a website made and hosting it is not a big deal. The real juice is when people find your website on the search engines and visit our web page to learn what you and your company are doing. Out of many thousands of visitors, a few would actually stick and interact. How to compel the visitors to stay on the web page and how to compel them to buy, is out of the preview of the article. We are here to learn how could be build traffic to our website.

Search engine marketing does the trick, but to begin with we will look at the SEO and learn what does SEO do for our visibility.

SEO deals with the search engine friendliness of the website and makes it easier for the website to rank on the first pages of the SERPs (Search engine results pages). This quick fix of the web page elements to make the web spiders spot the web page and index helps a lot in the long run. Be sure that SEO takes time to mature, enough time that would make you excited enough to make you give up on the SEO tricks. Hold you guns, there are more than one ways of getting people interested in your website. Especially those who are already searching for the products and services you are dealing in.

Blogging – the sure fire way of getting people interested. If you are selling jeans, talk a lot about them. Tell the people about different brands and tell them why your brand is better than the other, Talk to your followers and force them to comment, from their lead them to your website.

Press Release Distribution – Use the power of the news. Shoot breaking news about the launch of your brand. About the stuff that arrives in your web space. Give them the reason to visit your site. Tell them that something interesting is waiting for them there. You can leverage a lot through press releases and drive unlimited qualified web traffic to your website.

We cannot forget the social media. The gang bang where millions of nosey people are online 24/7. Give them the news, show them your product and lead them to your web space by giving them offers. Create events for them and let them have fun when they buy your products.

SEO Rule 2013: Steps to build you online visibility

As soon as we start building our online presence, we think of SEO. In 2013 for SEO the playing ground is the same, the SEO rules have been modified. While many of the websites dominating on the search engines were delisted, others which were not so search engine friendly suddenly found themselves ranking at the top.

Top search engine ranking is always the first choice of any website owner, as he knows that the top spot brings top visibility and drives traffic to their websites. But what goes on, in this year, is a bit different than what has been preached and practiced in the past years. Let’s take a look at the must do things that we need to do. One thing we must remember, top ranking does not guarantee business, it can bring traffic. Business owners need traffic that can convert into customers thus, building a website and optimizing it for the customers should be the intent.

Before plunging into the SEO pool, just wait and think what your customers are searching for. Studying their intent will help you to formulate customer driven approach in you SEO rather than building your SEO plan around the search engines. Customer intent based SEO will help in getting more qualified and ready to buy customers.

Content has been and will always remain to be the king. But dressing up the king for the users to see, study and digest, not for the search engines to index. If your content is creative, easily readable, is understood by the users and triggers the interested of the web visitor, you will have won half of the war.

Back Links – The important Off Page SEO stuff. Unseen by the web visitors but are liked by the search engines. Back links are important, but not all, just the relevant links that your site gets linked to, naturally. Don’t rush into buying links, you website could come into trouble and get delisted.

We have always looked at SEO as the tool for instant results. Our friends have always expected that their website would pop up instantly at the top of search engine ranking once the strategies are in place, WRONG. SEO is a long term process. You cannot get your website ranked in a day’s time, nor in a month’s time. There is a waiting period for your SEO strategy to mature and help your website to rank at the top of the search engine.

Keyword Rich Topics: Successful Blogging ideas

Keywords still do have a lot of game to play in the SEO. Every topic that we choose to write on can be keyword rich. It is up to the blogger, what is he aiming at and does he articulate his blog content to get the results out of his blogging efforts. With every blog post we get the chance to rank well. With keyword rich rick content and the keyword rich title your blog can get the visibility it deserves, only if you do it intelligently.

Every web page that goes up gives us the life time opportunity of the driving traffic to the website, get more relevant links and of generating more leads.

Deciding upon the relevant keywords

Keywords are there in front of you when you pick up a topic. Along with researching online through the search engines and selecting the main keyword, the use of Google keyword tool is quite helpful in letting you to make a decision. The Google Keyword tool gives you the insight of monthly local and global searches, volume of competition for the keywords.

Positioning your keywords to better SEO

Keywords in the blog title are important. The earlier the better. The search engines pick the first words and if these are the relevant keywords it is better for the visibility of the web page.

The trick to optimize the blog content

Put the main keywords in the opening sentences of the first paragraph of your blog post. Let the spiders begin their reading with the keywords. Repeating these keyword in the body of the blog post is a good idea, beware, the BOTs would penalize you if your keyword density is high.  The best thing is to use variations of the main keywords. Be cautious, the text must read well and must make sense to the web visitors.

Original content, the inroad to SEO

Content has always been central to every online marketing strategy. Previously we used to articulate search engine friendly content, with high keyword density to get into the eyes of the spiders. We used a lot of spinned content and did a lot of jugglery with the SEO techniques and made the optimized content qualify for high search engine ranking. This was good for the past. The present has more surprises for us.

Google, we are well aware is the number one leader of web traffic to our websites and to our other social marketing mediums including blogs, Facebook shares etc. We dependent a lot upon their ranking strategies and hence get affected with the slightest change in the ranking factors. Hence we need to keep one up with the changes that the Search giant does.

One thing that has remained a standard since the beginning is the content. Content rules the SEO horizon but you need to check your high ranking urge and not to play a foul game. Google is smart and smells the rat.

• The need of the day is the original web content, not spinned or taken from other web pages.
• We need to embed relevant keywords, not stuff them.
• The content must be informative and carry more value for the readers.
• The content must fulfill the intent of the readers
• Content of every page on the website must relate to the topic being discussion in the title or heading of the page

The get the strong hold and solid footing on the search engines our web conversation need to be web visitor focused. The rest will be easy to achieve as more people, more business prospects will like what is being told to them and would result in more social shares. The more liking by the web visitors would lead to the liking by the search engines and hence, more visitors and more back links would result.

Original, un-plagiarized, creative and intent based web content is the need of the day that could help in creating solid hold on the search engines.

Returning to the Basics of SEO

We do not need to peep back in the not so very distant past about what SEO held for us. We are in the 2013, the basics remain the same. Some tweaks in the algorithm has made things difficult for us in the search engine optimization but in a NUT shells the elements of SEO are not different as they were earlier. The angle or I can say the direction has changed. The flight is more serious or more web user directed. So what? This does not tell us that SEO is dead.

Let’s look at the changes that foster the notion that SEO is dead.

Keywords – keyword remain to hold the same importance, save for the fact that their usage i.e. the density of their keyword being used has changed. Now anything beyond 2% might run down into spam. Keyword, phrases and variation must be more intent driven rather than search engine BOTs driven.  The selection of keywords is now more dependents on its use, competition and how does these keyword match with the intent of the users, when they conduct a search.

Back Links are still important – The off page SEO element – The one way back link. We used to write and submit articles, we still do. We blog a lot and hence this efforts brings is back links. The slower process of search engine optimization which was speeded up the SEO experts who brought back links. Links farm thrived and hence the bottom line of the SEO was met.

Nothing has changed, importance of back links is still there. The change is that not just any link is acceptable. Your back links must come from the relevant website. If your website is about selling water and the back link comes from a pluming website, it won’t work. Natural link building matters now.

Web content – Don’t copy. This was the call earlier. This is the call of the day too. The content still holds the position of the king. It truly is. The change is that you have to put in more blood, more brains and create more interesting and informative articles. Intent driven content will bring more juice to your web pages.

SEO is alive, and lives very much on the search engines. We need to correct our website optimization methods and create sites and content that deliver value to the visitors.

Intent based search results – effects on SEO

Today the emphasis of SEO has shifted from search engine pleasing activities. The focus today of SEO is directed towards the web visitor. The activities logically must be aimed to attract the web user’s attention rather than attracting the robots. Our SEO activities must revolve around the and study of the web visitors search habits, their intent when they search i.e. whether they want to search for information or whether they are searching for buy the products.

Google analytics provide us with the insight and we can actually convert the analytics results into the table turning SEO theme, so that our optimization efforts are more user friendly alongside being search engine robots friendly.

What does a transactional search query mean? Search engine analytics tell us the users have conducted transactional search queries. This means that the numbers of users have arrived on our website through the search engines and they actually wanted to buy. They would have used the keywords or search words like price, deals, discounts and similar words and phrases. These are the people who have arrived at their buying decision and are just hunting for deals or price reduction if any that are available. If your website succeeds in conquering their buying position you can bag the customer

Instructional search query is the query is the query of the first step. Here the buyer wants to go through the learning curve. He wants to see the tutorial, or read a how to article. If he comes across your web content and find it interesting, he would definitely spend some time before moving on to the other site for more information.

People interested in reading reviews and comparing prices do the investigative search. These website visitors would have gone through their initial search and learnt the basics.

Search engine analytics results tell us about the intent of the web visitors and hence we can learn their search patterns and build our SEO strategy, thus focusing more on the web users rather than the search engine BOTs.

SEO – Internet marketing

SEO is one essential element of the internet marketing. We have placed too much emphases of search engine optimization, creating an Air that SEO alone would get you the online business that your business deserves. The hard facts are still to be understood. I had been working on the search engine optimization projects of some clients and had the chance of learning with working. While I did a lot for the websites and helped them gain to search engine ranking, I still got complaints that the clients are not the business they intended to receive from SEO.

My friend, SEO is one medium of the internet marketing. While search engine marketing demands more effort, there are other online marketing mediums that will help you to support your web marketing activities. SEO is one, very broad means of getting the visibility desired by the business entity.

Keyword research and the use of the search terms in SEO

One we target our audience and learn about their search habits (thanks to Google keyword research tool) we can actually come up with the search terms our target market would be using to search for the products and services we are offering. Hence, we need more insights and more knowledge about our targeted audience.

Content

One thing that remains central to every internet marketing activity, especially SEO is the content. We need to write the web copy, we need to build the marketing copy, we also need to create interesting posts on the other social marketing mediums, and hence words play their part. Our written scripts need to be original, intended to educate the web visitors and help them to learn. For sure this content will be optimized for the search engines, yet, these must be customer focused and not search engine focused. Search engine would be your customers; these would be the source of bringing customers to you. If our customers do not understand our written scripts and pass away, we would have wasted our time and our client’s money.

For sure visibility on the search engines brings recognition, bring in popularity, helps in positioning our web pages on the search engine and create a lot of buzz, but we need to backup our SEO activities by other search engine marketing activities like Blogging, Press Release Distribution, Social network marketing, You Tube Videos and Tweeting about our products and services.

SEO Tips for 2013

Hello again. 2013 is here, we are still sitting couched up in our chair staring at our computer screens to see what new SEO stuff is out from the Google’s office. We have seen people dread the time, when Google updates roll out and the shift, the major shift is seen in the website ranking. 2012 was full of suspense and so is the beginning of the 2013 in terms of SEO techniques.

I think things have gone simpler than before. No more heavy SEO techniques to be used. Be natural and get linked naturally with people.

Here are some tips for you to work on to get your SEO working.

Focus on Content – The fresh content that is original, crisp and that can deliver value for the time spent is the one that is liked by the search engine. It will help in creating more readerships, get you more links and help in increasing the social shares for the content that you have uploaded either in your website, in your blog, in forums, in the press releases etc. such content becomes the source of generating qualified web traffic to your website and hence, with the relevant links that you get, you can strengthen your authority, here on the web. Content had previously been and still is the KING.

Hard Core SEO Techniques – Out of the hard core SEO techniques we can maintain our On-Page elements like working with Meta Tags and building effective description tags. The web page content and the marketing messages are the keyword density requirements no longer exist. Naturally built content that could make sense to the website visitor is quite helpful for SEO.

Keyword Research – Keywords are very much there and are the source for SEO but relevance plays an important role. The target must be to use keywords that help in conversion, not to use the keywords so quench the hunger of the search engines.

Going social will help – Social Marketing mediums will help more in the off page SEO. Which means that Social share will help you getting more relevant links for other websites and hence perk up the ranking of your webpage.

Connect with People through Forum Participation

When we think SEO is not working, people are not viewing our web pages because our website is not ranking on the first page, we get discouraged. The red cell for website is the web traffic that could help our business breathe to life. We need to device other means of promoting our website and letting people know that our online business exists. Forums are the places that could make this happen. These are the places where we find interested group of web users conversing about the products and services.

How to connect with your target market?

If this is not a million dollar question, it is an important question that could lead you to successful online business. You need to study, you need to practice, and if you fumble you can walk again without the help of the walking stick.

Find your business niche forum – This is important. You need to knock the right door. If you bark up the wrong tree, you would waste your time. This is place where your target market would be hanging around. Beware; your competition would be there too. You need to step in. Simply sign up and start walking through the forum.

Create Discussions – To get involved you can start my commenting on the posts and join the conversation that people are already engaged in. This will show you presence. But what good your comments are if you fail to lead them to your website. Initially, you need to build trust, so quality commenting would help you to start the buzz. Once in you can start up a fresh topic, talk sense and do something creative and interesting. Encourage other participant to comment and take part in the discussion.

Answering to comments and responding to posts – While you have entered the forum arena do reply to posts, even if you think that the member is pulling your leg or being nasty or complaining, take this commenting as an opportunity to create goodwill and let the other members of the discussion group in particular know that you are serious and mean business.

Catastrophic SEO injuries

If you get injured here, you won’t get compensation for your SEO injury. You are getting inured knowingly and willingly if you are getting involved in unethical SEO practices. Today, the shift in the SEO techniques has forced injuries onto the high ranking websites. Think of smooth sailing, think of getting to the top with organic SEO practices and follow what Matt Cutts leads. If you are able to handle the fast changing SEO scenario you will save yourself and your website from catastrophic SEO injuries.

Duplicate Content – Fine, if you are unable to develop and write the web content for your web pages, get hold of an expert who can do the job for you. It is understood that not every web designer can be an expert writer or an expert author, but stealing someone else’s content is sin and Google makes you to pay for it. BOTs these days hunt for duplicate content and make sure that the website gets penalized for this act.

Un Natural Links – Links have been, always, the best way to anchor your hold on the search engines. But if these are brought or gather unnaturally your website might be in trouble. Organic or natural linking is taken well and is appreciated; else you might suffer a catastrophic SEO injury. Delisting is the penalty that you might have to pay.

Cloaking – Stay away from this form of Black hat technique. Deceiving the search engine has never been good. Before penguin too, this sort of SEO malpractice used to bring catastrophic injuries to the website, but now, it all the more difficult.

It is difficult to get top search engine ranking with the white hat SEO practices, yet the fruits of being original and honest are far sweeter than those we had tried to reap earlier through unethical SEO practices. Users deserve to get authentic sites that could provide value for their time spent and the search engines are well placed to provide them with the same. Save yourself, your time, money and effort and try to build ethical SEO strategy that could save you and your web presence from catastrophic SEO injuries.

Intent Based Search Results

We have been told time and again that the SEO is changing its colors. Ranking for the keywords is going to become difficult and we would see some high ranking site disappear soon. Google has time and again been telling us that they have built the search engine to help the web visitors to find what they are searching for and not the businessmen who want to show off their products, services and the information, which the web users are forced to see now. Google had been building the algorithm to display the results most needed and most suited for the web user’s intent. With the happier web users, Google will be merrier.

Google search results will display different search results. That means the BOTs will have to work harder and think more humanly. That is why artificially intelligent BOTs will be the focal point at the search giant’s labs. Things have started to change. There is much discussion about the intent based search results. There is a lot of hunger in the SEO arena for the information on the algo changes and how it would be possible for the SEO specialists to rank their websites and the client’s websites on the top of the search results.

Isn’t it time that long tail ends would take more weight as these would be closer to the web user’s intent.

SEO has now become more sophisticated. The SEO professionals need to put more of their intelligence, more thought and more time into their SEO strategies. Instead of thinking in terms of BOTs, it time to think in terms of humans. What would the web user think and what words would he use to conduct a search on Google. What are the terms he would use? Difficult to think for others, but that is how the search engines would be working. Search engine optimization, hence has become more challenging.

SEO Today, What does mean for the website

The disturbing news of SEO not working really as well as it used to surrounds the horizon of the web. Just yesterday, the guys of the same block were discussing the news on SEO. Some were worried but some said it’s still working to them.

Too much is happening to fast. Last year we saw too many things happening within a short span of time. We saw the old school SEO diminishing from the scene. We also saw back links lose some weight, especially the ones that were not gained organically or naturally. We saw that content remain to rule the horizon, but the tile of the search engine really went toward the original, quality content that is shared, read and liked by the web visitors. We have also seen that being social has gained importance.

The content that socially buzzed or tweeted, the content that is liked and socially shared and is commented upon get more push on the search engines.

This tells us that SEO still lives. Things have gone tougher and now it is hard to get the ball rolling like the optimizers used to previously. Some of the SEO gurus were also been discussing how to push through and get the desired results. Evil minds eh.

Search Engine Optimization is a serious game now. Though, structuring your website for the search engines, making them search engine friendly, Meta Tag Optimization and building the SEO purpose description tag, still hold its ground, we must change the way in which we structure our web content. The web site content that the web visitors would read when they arrive at our website. It must be build with the intent to satisfy the web visitor’s interest on the website. It must satisfy their intent; it must also trigger the search engines to reply to intent based search query being keyed in by the website visitor.

With the SEO game tilting more towards the web users rather than the search engines. The optimizers must change the way they used to handle SEO.

SEO 2013

Have you read the SEO prediction for 2013? I bet you have. What do you think? Is the SEO game about to end? SEO the SEOs are finally realizing that their hay days are over. No longer will their jargons make the market steer and no longer manipulating the BOTs would work.

I have been researching to see what will be good for SEO in the coming days. The picture for the traditional SEO that we are so used to seems to be dull. But if you are the content guru and have the way with words, if you can build quality, non plagiarized content then you will be well on the path to win the search engine optimization game. More so, the game of getting your web content ranked and getting more traffic to your web pages. Google+ will play a major part, but as the someone on the internet said in its blog, “As big a flop as Google+ was made out to be, Google surely used this "floportunity" to focus on what it does best, Search.”

One word will describe the SEO with content marketing strategy – “QUALITY”. If you are able to present quality researched article on the web and share it with people in your Google+ circles, get comments and feedback. The search engine leader will rank it on the search engine results without having to give the back link a thought. It’s not difficult. But I have read that our friends are already on their way searching for ways of manipulating and cheating the search algorithm. A bad thought, but it’s true.

Good content will be socially shared. Good for the optimizers. Social signals have started to emerge as heavy weights in SEO. The Jigsaw seems to fit

Good quality content will be evaluated, it would be sent out to be read, thus encouraging comments. The social sharing will happen if the content carries weight in terms of quality and information, hence, a step forward towards more people coming to the site and possibly more links.

It’s not easy as it was before, but my friends SEO isn’t going to die, not really in the year 2013.

SEO is not like what it used to be

I have heard many grunts on SEO. Some said it’s not working like it used to. Sure things have changed a lot. Google had pre warned the optimizers through the Penguin and the Panda updates. You need to redress your SEO strategy. The major shift now is that you have to optimize the web pages for the views, get the ball rolling for them to like what you are says. It is not like creating web content, keyword stuff and angled to get the spiders coming to your web pages and ranking them for higher search results. We had seen the sites going down the ranking alley.

So what in with SEO these days? What? I heard someone say that it is dead. Yes certainly it is dead for the person who did hear the call of the day. Honey no. Take a look at the Google home page and check out its ranking. Surprised? It does not rank on the first spot.

Well I am here to tell you that SEO has really come off age, thanks to the search engine algorithm that has forced the optimizers to think in terms of the web users. Keywords still have a role to play, so does the on page optimization. The role of Off Page has changed. Web content still rules but the focus needs to be directed towards the use. Not more article spinning works, no more made up content for the search engine rules.

The crux of SEO now lies in the valuable, original content that gives more to the web user and gets genuine like. More will full content sharing and more social buzz. We can feel the tilt. The idea is to get more people interested and more people to reach your site with intent and favor. People being led to the web pages after arriving through the social shares are the people who know what you are doing and would want to interact with you and your business.

SEO really isn’t dead. It has just changed its face

Getting to Know SEO

Search Engine Optimization – more commonly known as SEO is not alien to many, yet is somewhat new for the people who are still getting their hands on with the web. Website is a fancy tool for some and for other it is waste of time and precious money. The believers in the web marketing yet are few. For those who preach and practice SEO, the skies seem to be dark. Some have come to the point of giving up on the hard core SEO practices, other are still perusing their way around.

SEO today is quite different from what it used to be in the beginning of previous year. The things were rosy for many whose web pages ranked at the top of the search results on the pages of prominent search engines. The game since then has tilted against them. Their keyword stuffed, search engine pleasing pages are not anymore liked by the search engine as these fail to show up for the intent and the purpose for which the user conducts the search.

The present day SEO wants our web pages to deliver the purpose and swing along with the intent of the web surfer. The artificially intelligent search engine BOTs get to know why and how of the search engine friendly pages. They can study the link pattern, whether the links are being gathered naturally or has the optimizer arranged to get the links to perk up the search engine positioning.

We need to know SEO of today. The things done yesterday are not good for today and our aim must be to achieve and improve our visibility for tomorrow as well.

• Isn’t it better to leave the web pages as they are?
• Build the Meta tags with the purpose with the keywords that the user actually use to find the product and services instead of wasting time on the keywords that don’t lead to conversions rather they just aim in getting the 1st position on the SERPs.
• Isn’t it better to build the web content for the web surfers instead of the search engines?
• Why not develop the web page interface to suit the needs of and the usage of the web visitor rather than the search engines.

We need to know what the current SEO demands and twist and turn our SEO strategy to suit the search engine needs of today.

Content continues to rule the SEO scene

Repeatedly we are told that content is the king. To benefit from this phrase, we see a lot of material on the web that signals the efforts of the optimizers to harness the fruits of the SEO through content marketing. I have seen many get frustrated and leave, those who know their trade, thrive.

Content that is crowned to be the king is not the one we usually come across. Loud mouthed jargons that spell the details about the product and force the readers to click and buy, No these are not the ones that we are talking about. We are discussing the quality content that is aimed to benefit the reader and by benefiting the people who are surfer the net, the content developer gets 100 billion chances of being seen on the search engine like Google.  Search engine watch informs us that Google gets 100 billion searches every month. Can we overlook the extent of exposure that can a good quality content can get where people, if led properly can share the content, comment and converse about the content they have come across while their search.

We have also heard in the past few months that blogs and website are getting more traffic from the social networks. True, but how can be neglect 100 billion searches that been conducted every month on Google and not take the benefit of the traffic from the search engine.

Content marketers must not forget that we must:

• Create content that has something for the web visitors, the Content that could give them something, instead of simply taking away their time.
• Content must be focused and not branches off to other linked or linkable issues
• Keyword research is still important. The keywords too, must be focus around your subject, your products and services.
• Encourage the readers to leave comments. This leads to more web traffic and more social shares.

SEO Web Content Writing

Article writing had been in vogue since the day SEO took off. The concept behind were to educate the web visitors about the products and services being offered through the website. The intention was also to tell them that you are not only the seller and the marketers of the product, the service but you are also the expert in your area of business and in the products and services you deal in. This led to the reputation and the authority which also brought in huge web traffic and number of healthy back links. Hence, the juice was that the search engines placed trust, liked your effort and the content and gave a better page rank to your website and also improved the ranking of the web pages along with a better page rank.

In all, the good efforts paid off. The happy scenario did not last long enough for the happy go lucky optimizers who started to pull strings and made the mockery of the search engine algorithm. We saw a lot of keyword stuffed articles on the web. We also saw a lot of spinned articles for SEO purpose. Such articles failed in quality contest. They also lacked the value in the terms of educating the web visitors but actually were quite successful in garnering links, improving the search engine ranking, getting more back links and hence better page rank. Those days were happy days for many SEO’s and the web business owners who thrived by getting the top search engine ranking with these efforts.

The need of the day was good quality original web content that could stand on its own feet. Articles, blogs and other shares that could stand out and were not stuffed with keywords. Our friends started to build content for the search engines. The search engine feeds, frustrated the web visitors who found little or no value in most of the web communications.

The Panda update washed off many expectations of many optimizers and the business owners who found their website disappearing as soon as the update in the algorithm took effect. The low quality over optimized content lost its SEO value and the search engine once again reiterated that quality would remain in the lead. If anyone or any website carried keyword stuffed web content, spun articles that are written for the search engines and not for the reader and those that fail to provide quality information would fail to bring SEO benefits to the websites.

SEO content writing has now become a more serious game where quality and intent rules the SEO world.

SEO tactics for Small Businesses

The fact is not unknown to all. Small businesses are cash starved and dishing out the bundle of green to provide for the optimization of their website is at times is difficult. The point here is to build your visibility. Be smart by thinking out of the box, not just follow the footsteps of other people blindly in the urge of getting top search engine ranking. We have seen that even the good websites with good position on the search engine search results get penalized as the new Google updates refresh their indexing after introducing the updates like Panda and the Penguin.

We are in the ear of intense competition and to hold our ground and further our positioning, we at the other side of the computer must think and device strategies that do not disturb our search engine positioning. Though there are no guarantees that the evolving search engines competition and the frequent changes in their algorithm may not disturb your current visibility, but yet we can try to achieve our ends by being cautious and thoughtful while we build our SEO strategy.

Social signal are important to small business owners. This does not mean that we forget the basic of SEO. The On page optimization and the off-page SEO are very mush there, but the fact is that we must ship our concentration from extensive link building to improving our social presence. The link will come and come in good quantities but slowly and will be the source of authority for your web pages.

Blogs are the best way of getting into the conversation mode with your target market. Blogs are the places where a lot of communication happens in terms of comments and their replies. These are the play grounds where you can show your fitness, not playing hide and seek, but prove that you mean business and cannot be beaten at the game. Help yourself and build authority of your website through blogging.

Leading the visitors through social network participation to your website. I am sure you are on the Facebook with your personal profile. Do you have a business page or the fan page as it is called, if not start working on it now. Get your friends and peers to like you page and get the ball rolling. Tell the members of the social networks that your blog, you press release or your articles are out there and are worth reading.

Let the game begin. Your investment would not be more that your time and the brains to create crafty, intelligent, marketable web content that could help you to gather quality, natural links that none of the search engines could shake and get your website the desired positioning without dishing out the handful of greens.

SEO Website

Our websites are our online showrooms that help us to showcase our products, services and the information. Our sales through online web pages depend on the visibility of the web pages on the search engines. We have repeatedly studied the elements that help us in achieving the online visibility and our efforts are always concentrated around getting a better ROI. Our SEO strategies, therefore, must be directed towards letting our website be found on the web.

The visibility thus can be achieved through:

-    On Page Search engine optimization
-    The Off page optimization
-     Link Building
-    Web content promotion – through articles writing and article posting
-    Blog posting
-    Commenting
-    Press Releases Distribution Online
-    Social networking
-    Social media marketing

Thus collectively, we are aiming for a band to happen on the search engines where the regular surfer get to see the link of our website on the search engine results pages when he/she key in the specific search for the products, services or information for which we have optimized our website for.

Contribution to On-Page SEO today is not just getting the on page elements tweaked. It is about building the intent based content where the company owners’ aim in developing web content targeting the semantic search results. Along with the website content, the Meta Title Tag, the Description tag, the ALT image tag help in preparing the web pages for search engine optimization.

The Off Page Optimization is a tough ask. Here submitting the web pages to the search engine directories, article marketing, blog marketing, social media marketing and other steps are taken to build links and promote the website on the search engines with the aim of strengthening the hold on the search engine ranking and getting to the place where the website is prominent to the web surfers eye balls.

Your site might be good. It might have the best aesthetic appeal. It might have unique content on the web pages, but if it is not optimized for the search engines and not found on the search engines results, it will just be an expensive bill board sitting in your back yard.

Back links v/s Social Signals

Search Engine Optimization, its methods, its techniques, and the search engine algorithm etc have always been in discussion by the focus groups and the optimizers. Matt Cutts receive interview on the issue has given rise to the debate on social signals as the source of achieving high search engine ranking. Indexed Facebook shares prove that search engines do look on the social shares keenly and give weight to good quality content shared by the businessmen and the search engine optimizers.

Our efforts through the optimization of our websites bring greater web traffic to our websites. Our intent is to create awareness, more leads and more conversions.

The heavy weight champion of the search engine optimization – the Back links seem to have been in the back yard since the discussion of the social signals began. The masters of the SEO say that links still hold the same position. These are still important and have a lot of say in the visibility of the web pages, as well as in creating the authority. The tilt, in case of back links, has shifted towards quality and relevance.

Links as the gurus say can be easily manipulated but social signal cannot be given the same treatment. Links can be brought, but social signals, social shares; likes on the shares and the dissemination of such shares come naturally. Manufacturing of likes and sharing the posts can be done, but till now has limited out reach.

SEO is a complicated process with many factors affecting the website ranking including constant upgrades and amendments in the search engine algorithm. We had seen quality back links to be THE source of visibility and ranking in the past years. This is now changing. Social signals are known to be more worthwhile now.

Search Queries – Navigational Search Queries

SEO is done with the purpose of presenting your website on the search engine platter to the viewers with particular intents. Semantic search features have taken the best time away from the SEOs who made their websites appear on the top with the purpose of bringing in more web traffic. Thus the result of more click through, lesser unique visitors and even lesser customers. At many times these websites failed to foster good conversions and the owners of the website questioned the usefulness of the web for business.

We have been discussing the nature of search queries. We have studied the informational search query. We also understand by now that how do customers who are willing to make purchase search. Such transaction search queries mean a lot to the website owner. The SEO strategy must be based on the search query that the web surfer key in.

This means that we must optimize our site to fit the 3 types of search queries:

• The informational search query
• The transactional search query
• The navigational search query

With the power of the search engines to understand the intent, it is most important for the optimizer too, to understand the type and quality of the search results. Thus making sure that the conductor of the search reaches the destination with ease.

Navigational Search Query is the decisive search query that helps the web visitor to reach the destination with one click. If you are a brand, the website visitor is searching using the navigational search query will lead him to the exact website search results. Google we have learnt has reduced the number of search results for navigational search queries. At occasions like these we see the search results on the first page (SERP) reduced to 7 instead of 10.

Owning the navigational search query will help, state the experts, in appearing in the organic search result as well as if we buy the keywords to appear in the sponsored listing.

Search Queries – Learn the types

Just yesterday we were discussing transactional search queries. We know for a fact that serious buyers too, surf the net, though lesser in numbers than the visitors who are there to learn and to retrieve information about the product and services. It is but natural. We are all learners at first before we make the buying decision and get ready to get our credit cards swept.

When we are conducting a broad based search like “cheapest laptops”, “laptop offers” we are actually searching for all types and all brands of laptops available. Here we want to know about the brands, different laptop models and their prices before we actually want to narrow down on one particular brand. These types are informational queries. Here they are not keying in the brand name, or are looking for a particular site i.e.: http://www.dell.com.

Almost all of us go through this phase. Our aim is to be helpful to the web visitors and let them go through their learning curve. The aim of the website owners if to get as many visitors as possible and then skillfully lead them to buy.

What do we do to lead the visitors to our web pages? Take it easy from here. We need to present ourselves as honest, trusting source that provides quality information. We must aim to present ourselves as authorities so that the visitors place more trust in our web content and our web pages. We need to:

• Blog about the products – one at a time, not cram in all the information in one go and make ourselves look miserable
• Business news releases help in steering interest of the web surfer looking for information on the product and marketing offers.
• Educated the buyers about what to look for, about the important features that could help them to buy the good product, a step by step guide would be helpful.
• A video – the how to “YouTube” video would help too in this respect.

Working out on positing ourselves on the internet and the search engine results to get more inquirers coming to our web pages would also lead many buyers to come and relearn. We know for a fact the by providing quality information visible on the search engines, we could force a change in buying decisions.

Conversions – People who transact, how do they search?

It is about time we should study user queries that lead to conversions, that is, queries that lead to transactions. When people are ready to buy, what sort of queries they made, hence, leading to purchase. It’s important isn’t it? While working with SEO the intent based search results do play an important role. This semantic search result will have more say in the coming year.

I asked this question the other day when I met the group of SEO experts. The reply was interesting and I thought it would benefit everyone. So here we go.

“These are called the transactional queries. The purchase decision had either, already been made or the surfer is about to made his or her decision. The intent is there and hence the queries might include the words like buy, order or the exact brand name might be keyed in during the search and the local search might be embedded in the query. We can explain the search for the “cheapest air fare from Virginia to Florida” could explain the intent. If the person is not ready to get is credit card swept right away, he is on the verge of making a decision. These types are transactional queries and carry a greater chance of conversion.”

This explains some facts and it would be easier now for most of us to articulate our web content to help in conversions.

This explanation also leads us to conclude that once we understand the transactional queries, we can do certainly take the big piece of cake by signing up for the sponsored search results. Make use of the real estate alongside the organic queries. The purchaser’s intent is to click through every possible clickable link that can lead to a cheaper and better purchase. He loves his money more than he loves the seller; hence, we can take a chance on this fact and get rolled out in PPC adverts. People, we study, tend to click on the PPC ads if they have decided to buy.