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Archive for April 29, 2009

bikram | April 29, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: KEYWORD PLACEMENT PART – I

I hope you have used the break to conduct a keyword research for your website, and if the answer is yes then you must have your keywords ready and you are rearing to go ahead. The next logical step in the process is to learn how to use the selected keywords, and this article will tell you that. But before moving further, let’s keep in mind that the excessive use of keywords, also known as keyword stuffing, will have adverse effect on your website, and the search engines might ban your website if your website because of this. An improper use of keywords may force search engines to outcast your website; hence, a proper use of keyword is very, very important.

As discussed earlier, keywords are the subjects about which the searchers need information, hence content of any page is a natural choice for the keyword placement. Along with using the selected keywords in the content, you can also use keywords in various HTML tags. You can use the following tags to place the keywords. On the cost of repeating, I must say, one should abstain from abusing the tags written below. The tags are:

  • Domain Names
  • Page Names
  • 404 Pages
  • Title Tags
  • Heading Tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.)
  • Description Tags
  • Keyword Tags
  • Alt Tag
  • Link Text
  • Anchor Text
  • Site Maps
  • Navigational Structure

A rule of thumb: place the keywords as early as you can in the content as well as the in the tags described above. Generally, including keywords twice in the first paragraph, and at least once in the last paragraph of the article is considered as a good SEO practice.

The keywords are important, but your sole objective should not be to place keywords within content at equal interval, rather the goal should be to include the keywords within the content as naturally as you can. Keyword placement should neither decrease the readability nor should it look forced. People are coming to your site to get useful information, not to read keyword-stuffed senseless articles. Keep this in mind!

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | April 24, 2009
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Living off the Blog

Blogs, blogs and blogs! This is one of the most talked about Internet terms (contractions) of our time, and everybody seems interested in it. A search in Google with term “blog” will give you an idea about the popularity of this contraction. Upon searching with keyword blog, Google returns 2,900,000,000 results. This astounding figure is a tell tale in itself.

Some people have blogs and some don’t, but almost everyone will want to make some cash, if not a killing, out of it. With so many people on board of the blog-train, is there any seat for me, and can I make money by boarding this train? If this is what you are thinking about then let me tell you, there are many seats vacant for you on the blog-train. This is an organic train, the more people will join it the bigger it will eventually become. The only question you should ask before jumping on or off the train is the question how? How to make money from blogs? This article is an attempt to answer that.

Making money from blog is possible, but making quick money from blog is not possible. Buddy, forget about millions, there isn’t any quick way to earn even hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even just thousands of dollars. Your blog will take some time before it starts making money for you, and if you have time on your side then making money off the blog is not going to be a farfetched dream for you. Along with time, you will also need expertise on the niche (subject) in which you are planning to operate.

An income from a blog can be classified into two broad categories: direct income and indirect income. As the name suggest, direct income refers to the money that you make directly from your blog, whereas, the indirect income mean the income you make as a result of the content you have on your blog. In the later case, your blog will work as a portfolio, or better still, as the medium that will showcase your talent; in this case, your blog will trigger something or someone, and that something or someone will give you work that will fetch money.

Under direct income categories we put income like, income from advertisements, affiliate commissions, link sales, paid posts or reviews, text link ads, and sponsorships, etc., whereas, indirect income constitutes of writing contract, freelancing works, book sales, product sales, designing contract, programming works, e-Book writing works, and researching works etc.

Both the ways are right and which one will work for you will depend upon the nature and purpose of your blog. The best way to find what will be suitable for your blog is to study the competition, and see what monetization policy they are using, and try to emulate them. This strategy has worked for many bloggers and hope this time it will work for you as well.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | April 23, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED – Cool Google Tool

I believe you must be excited by the keyword research tools we discussed in the previous article of the series. You must have noticed my love for Google AdWord Keyword Tool in that article. In this article will talk in detail about how you can use Google AdWord Keyword Tool to your liking, and how other tools like Google Trend, Google Suggest, and Google AdWord Traffic estimator will assist you in doing your job effectively. Google is important, rather very important, as it has arguably become synonymous with the Internet search. Hence, in the course of this article, we will start from Google Suggest and will end our journey at Google Analytics, passing through Google Trend, Google AdWord Keyword and Google AdWord Traffic.

In the last article, we discussed about the art part of the keyword research. If you find yourself stuck, and could not find a list of tentative word for your site, you do not need to worry, Google is here to assist you with its Google Suggest tool. This tool is a good starting point to gather a list of words and phrases related to the keyword entered in the search box. if you type, “marketing books” in the search box of Google.com, a list will drop down with the phrases like, “marketing books online,” “marketing books free,” and “marketing books review” etc. with the number of pages (results) written in green on the extreme left of the drop-down list corresponding to each suggested key phrases. This tool can be helpful in building a primary list of keywords, and it will also help you in finding the combinations that goes with your tentative keyword.

Once the basic list of keywords is ready, you can use Google Trend to check the popularity of any of the keywords from the list. The popularity of a search term is expressed in terms of the proportion of the total searches. Google Trend will also provide you a list of most searched term, and this list is maintained since 2004. Different lists of “most searched” terms are also created for different regions. This tool also let you compare the popularity of one list of search terms with another list of search term. You can also ascertain the nature of the search terms and how and where it is used.

Once the list has been filtered out through Google Trend, you can check the keywords and key phrases from the list in Google AdWord Keyword tool for average traffic details. We have discussed much about this tool in the last article, so I will leave this here only.

Once the keywords has been selected, it is time to check how many clicks an ad related to the chosen keyword will get each day. Google AdWord Traffic Estimator comes handy in this phase. As the name suggest, this will give you an approx estimation of total daily traffic for the chosen keywords, and it will also help you know the approximate daily expenditure on that keyword, if you want to do an AdWord Campaign.

The last tool that we are going to discuss in brief here is Google Analytics. This tool comes handy in analyzing the performance of your website, and to give you the statistics based on many different parameters. This tool is a must for every webmaster to analyze its traffic. In addition to the above written tool, you can also use Google Webmaster tool to make your website Google friendly. This tool is worth exploring as this gives you a complete understanding of how your websites are doing in Google’s search.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | April 17, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: Keyword Research Part – II

In the last three articles on keywords, we have talked about every aspect of keywords and key phrases, about its nature, its length and its uses. As the background is now prepared, we should take our discussion on keywords forward, and finish this four-article long discussion with keyword research, and the art and science of finding keywords suitable for your website.

Before going to the science part of the keyword research, let’s first talk about the art part. As discussed in the last article, competition and volume of searches per day are two major criteria on which the keywords related decisions should be based. But how to find which keyword will be related to which field? Well, the answer my friend is common sense, and common knowledge.

We get common knowledge from the everyday experiences that we have. If you are not some alien visiting earth for the first time then you will not enter physics or anything other than terms related to marketing, if you are looking for websites that deals with marketing books, and other marketing related resources. We start by entering one generic keyword related to the field in which we are planning to build our business. For continuity sake, let’s take “Marketing books” as the keyword around which we want to make a website. But before going further with the search, we should talk about the science part, about the tools that we need to use in order to conduct the keyword research. There are many tools, paid as well as free, available on the Internet that will assist you in finding the right keyword for your website. In this article, I will give you a brief list of five good free keyword research tools. The five free keyword tools that will come handy in your research are:

  1. Google Adword Keyword’s tool
  2. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
  3. KeywordTracker Keywords (Free Version available)
  4. VRE (Virtual Real Estate) Tool bar (Gives Overture output. Overture is Yahoo’s property)
  5. Keyword Discovery (Free Version available)

My personal favourite among all is Google Adword Keyword tool. For this article, we will use Google Adword keyword tool to help us find keywords related to “Marketing books.”

If we enter “Marketing books” in the designated area of Google Adword keyword tool then we will get a list of keywords like “marketing books,” “marketing management book,” “marketing book,” “internet marketing book,” “marketing textbook,”, “marketing ebooks,” etc.

As you can see all the keywords and related suggestions in the result are relevant to the “marketing books” niche. Now, the second step in the process of finalizing keywords is to find out which keyword is better for us. To attain this goal, let’s choose one keyword and see what result Google search is producing for that keyword. I chose “marketing ebooks” for the purpose, and upon search in phrase match mode, Google produces 222,000 results. Hence, the keyword has qualified the competition benchmark test. Now, it’s time to see how it fares on the number of daily searches test. The keyword “marketing ebooks” with the Google Adwrod Keyword tool returns 2900 as a result against average search volume of last 12 months, whereas it says 4400 people searched for the keyword “marketing ebooks” in the month of March. This is confusing, isn’t it? To get a better idea about the search volume, you can also study the search volume trends. This feature can be activated from the drop-down menu beneath the label “Choose columns to display.” Once you are confident with the tool, you can also start digging deeper to get more precise results.

As found, the keyword “marketing ebooks” has around 100 searches per day, and the competition for this niche is also just 222,000. Hence, this keyword qualifies for the future website. We should choose not more than 3 keywords for your website. There are more to keywords, like keyword placing, keyword ranking, etc., and we also need to know the proper way in which the selected keywords or key phrases can be used within the content.

Category: SEO | Tags: , ,
bikram | April 14, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: Keyword Research Part – I

In the last two articles of this series, we talked about what keyword is, how it is used, and how to narrow down your search for the right keyword for your website. This article will take the discussion on keywords forward, and we will discuss how to find the right keywords or key phrases for your web site, before discussing the tools we should use for researching keywords.

Finding a keyword of just one word would be ideal for any website but this is almost never possible, no niche keyword can be of one word. Let’s understand it with the example we discussed in previous article. Suppose we decide to use one word, say “books”, as a keyword for our future website. Now the question arises, is it a right keyword or can we consider it to be a keyword per se? The answer will be no for the first question and yes to the second question.

“Books” is a keyword because people do search this term when looking for information, but this keyword is too generic and optimizing a website for this keyword will fetch no result, hence it cannot be considered a right keyword for any website. To make our website more focused and more useful for the visitors, we need to narrow down our field, as “books” is a generic keyword that describes any and every book. We can narrow down our keyword by adding a modifier to the word “books,” let’s say we add a modifier “marketing” to our existing generic keyword “books.” Now we have a more focused keyword, “marking books.” “Marketing books” is indeed a good keyword and it will fetch many visitors to the website, but let’s try and add one more modifier to this keyword in order to make this keyword more attractive for the visitors, and the modifier we should add is “best.” The new keyword “best marketing books” will be more attractive, and it will fetch many more visitors than a simple keyword, “marketing books” can.

One thing worth reminding here is, we should not go on adding modifier after modifier to our base keyword; it will become useless and the length will become unrealistically long. Generally speaking, we should keep the length of our keywords to maximum three words. There will be time when having a 4-word keyword or key phrase will be better than having 3-word keyword, for example, “Top 10 marketing books”, but always keep the use of 4-or-more-word keywords to the minimum. Do not use too many of them.

There are two more critical criteria on which you should base your decision regarding keywords on; one is the number of searches done by the user per day or per month in “phrase match” mode for the keyword, and another is the competition for the keywords, i.e., the number of pages Google or any other search engine produces for the keyword. The keyword that has in excess of 100 searches per day and less than 600,000 or 500,000 result pages in Google (depending upon the nature of your keyword) can be a good niche keyword.

In order to give you time to think over keywords, I have decided to stop this article here only. In the next article we will discuss about the applications that come handy in conducting a keyword research. We will also discuss about the art and science of keyword research in the next article that will conclude the topic.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | April 7, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: Choosing Keywords

In the last article, we discussed what a keyword is, and how a search engine goes about reading it.  In this article, we will take the discussion on keywords further, and this time the topic will be on choosing the right keywords for your web site.

Choosing keywords sounds like some huge exploration thing, like some giant undertaking.  Undertaking, yes it is, but not of the magnitude that should or can scare you.  If you are bothered by the task of keyword research then it is only because you do not know about it.  Once you come to know about keyword research then the process is a piece of cake (a rather delicious piece of chocolate cake!).

The basic idea for keywords comes from the objective of your web site; the objective further helps in finalizing a domain name for your proposed web site as well.  The objective sets the direction in which you should carry out your work, and it also defines what to look for and why.  Let’s take an example to understand this better.  Suppose, you want to start a web site that will focus on books only, now what are the keywords that the consumers looking for books will enter in the search box?  Books, online books, marketing books, business books, philosophy books, school books, course books, management books, etc.

If we choose the book market then the chances of our losing focus will be very high due to the sheer size of the market, hence we will narrow down our objective to say, serving the school book market.  Now what will be the keywords for this market?  School books, books (generic but still will work), work book, course book, science book for 10th grade, etc. This segment looks actionable.  Let’s try to narrow our focus even further to see what happens.  Let’s focus on say math book for 8th graders, now what will be the keywords for this market, which is highly focused?  Math book, math book for 8th grader, books, etc.

It is time to analyze our example now.  In the above given example, if we took books as a industry to serve (objective for the web site) then our efforts were very thinly spread, thus it’d bring very little result, and if we tightened the focus too much to math book for the 8th grader then our effort would become more concentrated, highly focused, but this segment would not be viable.  Why?  Because the size of the market is too small to be profitable, but if we choose the school books segment then not only is our focus concentrated but the size of the market is also worth the effort.

As a rule of thumb, the narrower you go in defining your market, the more focused your efforts will be, but the less lucrative the market will become.  Hence, we need to achieve equilibrium while defining the market.  We need to have a balance between the concentration of focus we need for a segment and the size of the segment.

It is time for some marketing jargons: when we said the book market we were focusing on a broad market, and when we narrowed our search to school book market, we segmented the market based on the situation of use, which we call a niche market.  But when we further narrowed the search to math book for 8th grader then we were focusing on a micro niche.  Micro niches are a tricky thing, but in our example this micro niche was not actionable.

In the next article of the series, we’ll take the keyword discussion further and we will complete the keyword research section.  Keep following along for some great tips!

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bikram | April 5, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: Basics of Keywords

Let’s start with defining keyword.  According to the University of Colorado:

A keyword is a significant word or phrase in the title, subject headings, contents notes, abstract, or text of a record in an online catalog or database which can be used as a search term in a free-text search to retrieve all the records containing it.

The above written technical definition was given to set the paradigm for this article and subsequent articles on keywords.  Moving further from it, let’s try to understand what a keyword exactly is and what it does.

When we talk about keyword in relation to the search engine then we do not only mean keywords, but we also mean key phrases.  Key phrases are the phrase we enter in the search box to fetch a desired result.

A search engine believes, which is also true, that one particular field can only have a limited number of related words, which a person will feed in the search box when he or she will require information on the subject.  Once you enter one of those words or phrases, the search engine spider crawls through the search engine’s data base of indexed pages and fetches the related information.

This basic list of keywords and key phrases for any subject or niche is not static, rather it evolves with time.  The length and the depth of the list will depend upon the search pattern of users searching for the keywords related information.  The search engine like Google keeps track of what you are entering in the search box and what links you are visiting from the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), and once the data for one keyword reaches a critical mass for any niche, let’s say for “Field-X”, this keyword gets associated with the “Field-X.”  This technique is also followed by the search engine to rank the relevancy and strength of a keyword or key phrase for the subject it is associated with.  There are three ways in which a keyword or key phrase can be used to search any information in a search engine and they are:

  1. Broad match: keyword (no punctuation)

      Ex: If you search for “search engines” in broad match then SERP will have results matching these terms: search engines (the one you entered), search engine (singular of the keyword you entered), searches or engine (result based on one part of the keyword), etc.

    2. If this mode is used for searching, the search engine will fetch not only the pages optimized for the keyword entered, but the search engine also fetches the pages optimized for similar keywords or for relevant variations of the keywords.

  2. Phrase match: “keyword”

    3. In this kind of search, the keyword is written between quotes, and this will fetch only the result matching this exact phrase.

  3. Exact match: [keyword]

    4. If you put the keyword within brackets while searching for it then you are doing an exact match search.  This will fetch results that have exclusive matches for the keywords with brackets.

With this, the article comes to an end; in the next article, on SEO Simplified, we will cover keyword research.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | April 3, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: What is “Search Engine”

We shall begin the second part of the SEO Simplified series with a definition of search engine and an explanation of how it works.  A search engine is any program that searches documents for the keyword entered by the user, but in general, we use the term search engine in association with online portals like, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos etc.  From now onward in the series, whenever we use the term search engine, we will be referring to web search engines, like the ones listed above.

When you enter a keyword in the designated area of any of these search portals, the portal sends a program called spider out on the web to look for as many files with matching keywords as it can, and at the end (when gathering the data is complete), the search engine produces the result on the page, called Search Engine Result Page (SERP).  The result is presented as a list of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that is ranked on the basis of relevance to the keyword searched for.

search-result

The image above shows how a typical search result looks line in SERP.  The result was produced by Google against the keyword search engine.  In the result above you can see that Google has highlighted the keyword search engine wherever it is mentioned.  It has also highlighted the term search because I went for the broad match search option.  If I had gone for phrase match (by putting the keyword(s) within quotes) then only “search engine” would have been highlighted.

The page in the result is optimized for the keyword “search engine,” by using the keyword in proper places like in the title, the URL and in the meta description.  We will discuss these tags later in detail.

From its beginning, in 1993, with the launch of Aliweb to Gezzmo search of 2009, search engines have evolved significantly.  Now the search results are more organic or algorithmic as opposed to the primarily human-input driven search results of the initial days, for example, Aliweb did not used any web spider or web robot to index web pages.  The database of Aliweb was dependent on information provided by the web site administrator himself about the existence of his web site.  Search engine business has come of age with the launch of today’s search Goliath, Google.com, in 1998.

As per the data of searches in February 2009, Google controls more than 60.3 percent of the worldwide search market, second to Google is Yahoo with 20.6 percent market share and with 8.2 percent, MSN is in the third position.  There are some regional search engines (like Baidu in China, Guruji in India, Yandex in Russia, etc.) as well that collectively control a significant portion of the search market.

The 60 percent estimate given above is the most conservative one.  In the actual consumer market Google has a far bigger share (more than 80 percent) of the search pie.  MSN and Yahoo use the power of default to reach the figure estimated above.  If you are a computer newbie that uses the in-built search box of the Internet Explorer and Flock browsers to meet your searching needs then you are using MSN and Yahoo respectively (as they are the default search engines for these browsers).

The actual market is when either a user types a search engines URL to fetch the result he or she wants or if the user is aware of which search engine he or she is using and why.  That is why almost all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities are targeted primarily towards Google.  Search business has gone niche now, but Google is still ruling the roost.

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bikram | April 2, 2009
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SEO SIMPLIFIED: AN OVERVIEW

Web 2.0 – the post-dot-com Internet burst – has demystified the Internet.  The esoteric knowledge that kept the gurus of Web 1.0 in business – the pre-dot-com Internet burst – is no more a mystery to the average surfer.  Creating a web site, designing a stunning banner and having a cool design for the web site are no longer exclusive; every Joe knows the tricks of the trade.  The Internet has leveled the playing field; its tools, techniques, knowhow and expertise are public domain now.

The democratization of media and knowledge is creating some exciting opportunities.  More and more people are going online to meet their financial, social or informational needs.  In the process, many of them also create web sites, blogs, forums, etc.  This indeed is an exciting time for them; creating web sites, managing contents, overlooking design elements and technical parts, these all make them feel in control.  They are in control, indeed, but the control-bubble pricks when they find that despite their best efforts visitors are not pouring in!  They created intuitive designs, original content, and breathtaking graphics, but still no one is coming to appreciate the work.  They understand the fact that it is not possible to call everyone personally and invite each of them to their web site.  But the question still is how to pull the visitors to the web site you have created?  Well, the answer is SEO.  This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in to play.  SEO is so highly spoken of because this is the mechanism, which you can use, to make other know about your web site.

Like other things on the Internet, SEO is also not something to be feared about.  In the bygone days, the things to fear about were Photoshop and HTML and if you have mastered them successfully, you can master anything.  It is just the hoopla around SEO that makes it sound impossible or very tough for the common user.  This series will take you through the entire process of Search Engine Optimization, and in the process we will also bring the so-called gurus down, in the sun, from their air-conditioned suites of the metaphorical Ivory tower.

The process of SEO begins with defining the purpose of your web site.  The objective of your Internet venture should be clear in advance, because the idea of a proper domain name will stem from there only.  The knowledge of the objective of your web site will help you in searching appropriate keywords, for which your web site will be optimized in the later phase.  Once the objective is clear and keywords finalized, the third step in the process is to find a good domain name that should ideally include one of the main keywords.

We will again return to keywords once the domain name is purchased.  This time we will do keyword ranking and write content using the keywords we finalized earlier.  In the process of content creation, we should focus not only on keyword density but also on keyword frequency and keyword proximity.  The next step in the process will be HTML optimization and adding meta tags, and we will conclude our onsite Search Engine Optimization journey by submitting our web site to search engines and various directories.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
sarahwooten | April 1, 2009
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Email Hosting: How, What and Why

If you are reading this blog, then you are exploring the wide, wide world of professional email hosting for your company.

You probably are already internet savvy enough to know that email hosting is an internet service that manages email through an electronic server.  It is mostly used by small to medium businesses that use a custom email address that matches the company’s website domain name.  For example, Joe Smith works for widgets.com and his email is joesmith@widgets.com.

There are a variety of options when choosing an email host; most individuals choose to use a free ISP email host, such as hotmail.com or gmail.com, and that works quite well.  For a business, however, having your own business branded email is essential (regardless of the size of your company).  One way to think about it is that in this electronic age, you should regard your email address as a company letterhead.  If you are Joe Smith, do you want to advertise Yahoo! to your customers, or do you want to sell widgets?

Many web hosts provide email hosting services; just enter a Google search for email hosting, and you will come up with hundreds of web hosts wanting to sell you their email host service.  What is a small business owner to do?

Let me share some tips that can help you get started.  When shopping for an email host, keep in mind that a variety of options are available to create and manage your internal email addresses, such as spam and virus protection, secure authentication, and convenient webmail access, so that you can access your email when you’re not at your computer.  Check with the provider to see which of these options they offer and at what cost.  Decide whether you want to leave your emails on the server for the long term, or if you want to download your messages frequently from the server; you should do this before talking with a provider, because your choice will influence the type of service that they will recommend to you.  When shopping, check the megabyte storage that each web host provides; some give more than others!  Make sure your hosting package comes with secure POP (short for post office protocol) access, so that all the popular desktop email clients (like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Eudora) are supported.  Most email applications use the POP protocol, although many can use IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).  Before purchasing services, make sure you know which email clients and servers the web host supports!

In short, for small businesses, using the services of a professional email host is a good investment.  Just do your research before you make a purchase.

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