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Archive for SEO

bikram | March 12, 2011
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HQ Content – A New Wave in SEO

The days of auto-blogs, low-quality sites, duplicate content and spun articles are numbered. Starting with the big daddy Google, all the major search engines are delisting the websites that do not add value to customers’ experience of the website.

Becoming the torch-bearer of the new change, Google has made some changes in its algorithm to exclude websites with low-quality content from its SERP. Following suit, a lesser search engine Blekko has banned more than 1.1 million for the same reason. Are we witnessing a new change?

I guess so!

So how SEO will change in this new light?

SEO will significantly change, and content will gain more importance. Thanks to the improved algorithm. So far backlink was all an SEO expert was concerned with. And for him content was evil, which was necessary because in its absence, Google will not rank his or his client’s website. Such SEO experts cared less about people’s experience.

All of this is going to change now. People are going to get high-quality content in return to the keyword phrase they enter in the search box.

Who is going to benefit

In the light of this new change, people with good writing ability are going to benefit. It will be tough time for people who worked as an article production machine. They are the ones responsible for adding up to the trash littered on the Internet.

What will be the new SEO game like?

Backlinks as usual will be important. But backlinks alone will not cut it for poor webmasters. They need to have high-quality content on their website as well. Website design is also equally important – the new Google Instant Preview feature has made it must for a website to look good should it want to be visited.

2011 has brought a set of changes in search algorithm. SEO experts must update their knowledge and include these changes, or else they might go the dinosaur’s way, which leads to extinction.

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bikram | March 7, 2011
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3 Link Building Tips

Links are good, but some links are better than other links, and some links are even better. This is no longer a debate. It was settled long back when Google started making the webmasters dance on its algorithmic tune. But the question is not everyone knows what conclusion has been drawn from the debate on link building? What were the factors that were considered most important? In this article, I will talk about 3 such things

3 Link building Tips

Link should be permanent

Gone are the days when renting high PR link for 3 months would have given you a sudden permanent rise in your ranking. Renting high PR link may give you temporary rise, but the ranking boost you will get from such links will fade away as soon as your rented link is removed. So do not waste time, money, and energy on such links, eye only permanent links.

Mix the keywords in anchor texts

Do all your friends define you using the same word? Do all of them call you by the same name? I doubt they do. This is pretty natural for us to be referred by different names and words. Even search bots know this, and that is why they start discounting the value of a website as soon as they start finding a pattern in anchor texts. If all your links contains same keyword then instead of boosting your ranking it will make them plummet. Keep in mind to mix keywords in anchor texts, and even have some naked links.

Quality of linking site

In every walk of life quality is given more importance over quantity, except democracy where each vote is counted equal. But when it comes to ranking a page Google and other search engines thankfully do not believe in democracy, and it has different value attached to links coming from different sources. It is, therefore, important that you focus on getting links from high-quality websites and not only from any website.

You must keep these three things in mind every time you go out on the Internet to build links for your website. You will see a slow but sure rise in ranking over the period of time, without spending too much of time online.

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bikram | November 27, 2010
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LSI Keywords and Negative Keywords

Taking our keyword discussion forward, we will talk about two different kinds of keywords: LSI and negative keywords.

LSI keywords

LSI keyword stands for latent semantic indexing keywords. These keywords are also known as related keywords, but these keywords are used not for the ranking purpose, but to support the main keyword. For example: LSI keywords for sleeping mattress could be bed, bedroom, pillow, home furnishing, sleep, etc.

LSI keywords are used to build context for your main keywords to function. The logic behind using LSI keyword is this: Search engines assume, and rightly so, that if you are writing on sleeping mattresses then you will talk about sleeping, comfort, pillow, house furnishing, and related things because mattress is related to such things.

Therefore, a legit website that contains such terms can be associated more strongly with a mattress website than the keyword-rich page that talks about mattress, but has related LSI terms missing. This is done to separate wheat from chaff.

Negative keywords

Negative keywords are keyword phrases that you exclude from your list of keywords when building a strategy. Let’s say you are about to run a PPC campaign for your mattress business, and for that you have created a list of keywords that should trigger your PPC ad to appear.

Let’s say you have included words like spring mattress, sleeping mattress, etc., in your list, and decided that whenever a user search for any phrase that contains any of the above phrases your PPC ad should show. This way you hope to get some customers.

After 24 hours of running your campaign, you see that your ad got many clicks, but conversion rate remained zero. To investigate the reason, you see your account only to find that your ad got displayed even when people searched for sleeping mattress wallpaper, or spring mattress video.

You are obviously not targeting these keywords, as none of your buyers will search for terms like wallpaper and video. So, you want to configure your keyword targeting in such a way that your ad do not get displayed when keyword phrases contain these words. To accomplish this, you mark wallpaper and video as negative keywords.

Negative keywords are the keywords or keyword phrases which you do not want to target.

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bikram | November 21, 2010
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Search Growth Trend – More People Using Search Engines

Despite all the noise about social media growth and Facebook replacing Google, search as a category has seen a rise in the month of October. According to comScore qSearch analysis data released by com Score, except for AOL LLC network, search sites of all top 5 search networks namely Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask have seen a growth.

In October 2010, people of the United States have conducted more than 16.6 billion core searches which is a 4% rise on the previous month data, which as 16 billion core searches.

Although the leaderboard has not changed in October — Google is still at number one, Yahoo at number two, and Microsoft on Number 3 — Microsoft sites have shown some promise. It has risen by 7% to touch 1.9 billion explicit core searches in this month. Google has recorded a growth of 4%, and Yahoo grew by 2% (see image for details).

comscore-us-search-engine-by-number-of-queries

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bikram | November 15, 2010
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Local SEO – Fad, Fashion, or Gimmick

Local SEO, Google Map marketing, and Google Places listing are the buzz words, nowadays. Marketers and mentors of small businesses are swearing by this set of new marketing tools. The buzz is so strong that it makes people wonder if the new set of tools is a gimmick or a fad. Will it deliver on the promises it make? This is the question that bothers all. Let’s examine this in the following paragraph.

Why Local SEO?

The Internet has lived off its years of hype, and people at large have started using it for real work — to find the best plumber, a good restaurant, an odd-job doer, painter, etc., in their locality. In a world where local search results are not coughed out by Google against a location specific keyword, people have to waste hours and hours of their time to search for a plumber to fix their kitchen tap.

This is so because of the SEO optimization done by various experts. In a non-local-search-result world, a person searching for plumber in Milwaukee may get the phone number and addresses of a plumber in New York State, which is frustrating for the searcher.

To add up to the searchers’ experience, all major search engines (particularly Google) have come up with a solution. They started offering local listing with names, addresses, and phone numbers of the establishment. In case of Google, Google Places and Google Maps are two tools that enable local listing.

What so special about local listing?

For a business to be able to get listed in Google Places, a website is not required. All a small business needs is to add its name, address, photographs of establishment, contact details, and a small description of the business.

This is phenomenal. Now a small business does not have to have a website to get customers from Google or other search engines. They can get it merely by adding their aforementioned details in Google places, and pointing their location in Google Maps.

What I think of it?

I think local listing and local SEO have given a small business an unprecedented opportunity to get customers without even having a website. For me, Local SEO is neither fad, nor a gimmick. It is a fashion that is going to be there for time to come.

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bikram | November 11, 2010
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SEO Tactics Employed by B2B Marketers

No matter who you are and how big your company is, you have to optimize your website for search engine visibility, if you have anything to do with the Internet — which everyone has one thing or other to with.

To see which tool is used more frequently by B2B marketers to optimize their websites for better search engine ranking MarketingSherpa, a leading online marketing agency, has run a survey for its MarketingShera B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey. For this it took a sample size of 900 B2B marketers. Each one of them was asked about the SEO tactics they use to promote their business online.

Many marketers said that on-page content optimization, Keyword research, and meta data description are the things they care much about. New content development was also seen as a prominent SEO force, but because of its time-taking nature, it is not much used. Blogging, they concluded, was not very effective in B2B market. (See image below for complete data).

B2B-SEO

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bikram | November 7, 2010
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Why Backlinks Are So Important and How to Get Them Effortlessly

Too many people on the Internet talks about backlinks or inbound links. They, more or less, swear by backlinks. They can go to any length to get these demons, and when I say “to any length” I literally mean that.

If you are a blogger or a forum moderator or even a social media user, you will understand what I mean. Because you can find these people plaguing all the available systems with their “mass produced and entirely useless” comment, suggestions, and forum postings. They will even spam your mailboxes (email ones as well as those given by social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others).

Why they are so desperate?

Well, there is a piece of logic behind this madness. You are constantly bombarded with messages, crappy comments, and bogus forum posts because every marketers want to take his or her website to the number one page of Google.

Yes, Google alone. They hardly care about Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, and AOL search — which by the way, are other top four search engines — what to talk about lesser engines.

Then why should “you” chase backlinks?

Because that is the smart thing to do.

Just because someone is misusing the tool does not mean you should abstain from it. Backlinks, no matter how much it give rise to spamming, are still very, very important. This is one thing that can guarantee a top ranking for your website in search engines — including Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, and others.

Besides, a legitimate inbound link works as a doorway through which people, whom you want to pull by getting first page mention in SERPS (search engine result pages) come to see your website. These people are more qualified than those who come from search engines, as these are the people who clicked on one of your inbound links after reading your wise comments, insightful guest post, or eye-opening forum posts.

How you can get it effortlessly

Well, when I said effortlessly I meant little or no work, and for me spamming tens and hundreds of website is more work than sitting tight for 20 minutes and write one good article on my blog, or give 10 minutes to a forum.

The only way, I mean only legitimate way, to get quality backlink effortlessly is to create high-quality content for your blog or website to which people will love to link. You can also take this idea forward and put the same post in your Facebook notes section.

Spamming will never help. It will do no good. It will only make the life of everyone around cluttered.

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bikram | November 6, 2010
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4 Factors to keep in Mind When Building Inbound Links

An Inbound link or a backlink, as it is commonly known, is the most chased after asset on the Internet. People involved in online marketing can walk a very lengthy mile to get high-quality backlinks, which brings us to the question that this article is set to address. What is a high-quality backlink? And how you can tell if the backlink is high quality or not?

These questions come naturally to mind when anyone mentions the term high-quality backlinks. Such question will stop bothering you, once you are through with this article.

Anatomy of a high quality backlink

Relevancy

An inbound link that is relevant to the theme of your website could be considered a high quality backlinks, though it is not the only thing that makes a backlink of high quality. Let’s say you have website about dog collars than a backlink from a website dealing with dog collar or any dog related stuff could be called relevant backlink.

Anchor text

Another factor that you should keep in mind when judging the quality of a backlink is the text used to link back to your web page. A link that has your main keyword in the anchor text has high potential to become a high-quality backlink.

Note: Do not use one keyword in anchor text of all the links that come back to your website because google may blacklist you, as this is not how natural links look like.

Status

All backlink sources are not equal. Some are more valuable, while others are utterly useless. A backlink from a government (.gov) or university website (.edu) is anytime more valuable than a backlink from an article directory. Similarly, a backlink from authority sites like Wikipedia, New York Times, CNN, Problogger, or Copyblogger, etc., are more valuable than a backlink from any other blog.

Page rank

This is the fourth factor that makes a link high-quality. A backlink from a high PR website is anytime more valuable than a backlink from a low PR or no PR website.

Ideally, you should search for a linking source that matches all the criteria I talked about above, but as they are not many such links are hard to get, which make them more valuable. In the absence of links that meet all the above given criteria, you should search for links that at least meet some of the criteria. Just a handful of such links will be enough to take your page to the top of search engine result pages.

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bikram | October 18, 2010
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War of the Search Engines – Google gaining its Lost Ground

All the excitement of Bing is slowing down, and it seems, the honeymoon period is over for Microsoft’s ambitious search engine Bing — MSN turned Live turned Bing. According to a monthly study, comScore qSearch analysis, conducted by comScore, Google has gained market share in the explicit core search market (10,593 explicit queries in September against 10,259 in August) in the United States.

In the studied period (between August 2010 and September 2010), Bing has also gained a bit on total explicit queries (1,791 in September against 1,744 or August), and both of these search engines have grown partly at the expense of Yahoo and partly on AOL’s cost. (See image below).

comscore-us-search-engine-study

In the studied period, Google has grown by 1% in the US explicit core search market to take its market share to 66.1% from 65.4% in August 2010. In the same period, Yahoo has lost 4% to reach 16.7% mark from 17.4% mark in previous month.

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bikram | August 1, 2010
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3 SEO Optimized Title Writing Tips

I do not think there is any need to tell you how important it is to get on the first page of Google SERP (search engine result page), or on the first page of any other search engine for that matter. And I even do not feel inclined towards mentioning the importance of a title and a title tag in pushing your web page to the top slot in the search engine.

We all know the importance of a title tag, at least we claim to know so, but what we do not know is how to write a nearly perfect SEO-optimized title tag every time we set our fingers on the keyboard. This is what I am going to talk about in this blog post.

Write at least 5 variants of the title

The easiest way to write a title is to go with the title that comes first to your mind. This is the easiest way to fail as well, so better avoid it. Instead, write five variants of the same titles for your article and go with the one that has the most power. Do not settle for anything less than “powerful”. Your audience will see power only when you will feel it.

Remove unnecessary words

Some words that are necessary for an on-page title of a web page that are read by humans may not be necessary for title tags that are accessed by search engine bots. Titles of your web pages, blog posts, or articles, therefore, should be different from the title tag.

The article’s title can contain the words like a, an, or, if, etc., for they support other words in expressing the exact meaning of the title. But these and similar words should be kept aside when writing a title tag, for they do nothing but eat up precious real estate in SERP. We should avoid putting any unimportant word in title tag because the space is limited there, and it should be wisely used. Put two or more than two keywords in the title tag, if you have to, but do not insert any useless word.

Make title tag different

When I say make the title tag different I do not intend to suggest that your title tag should be entirely different from your actual title. All I meant to suggest is to write title tag in a way that conveys the entire gist of your title and article without being much different from the “on page” title.

I hope now you know that writing search engine optimized title is not a magic, it is just a skill. You can also acquire this skill if you work on the advices given above for some time.

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