Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
« Previous EntriesWhy LSI maybe your ticket to higher SERPs
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008LSI is the latest buzzword these days. In its expanded form it is called Latent Semantic Indexing and is being quickly adopted by the top search engines of today. So if you are just starting out with your website and would like to get noticed faster then LSI techniques can help you immensely.
What is LSI?
LSI is basically a technique whereby the focus of sorting data is based on the content instead of just the keywords. Thus while Google and other top search engines used to primarily lay emphasis on keyword density now they are focusing on LSI more. Thus if a user were to type in the search phrase ‘bark’ it could either refer to a dog’s bark or the bark of a tree. While earlier, search results would be based on the number of times the word bark is found in a site, today you will find more relevant results on search engines. Data across the internet is arranged in the form of clusters and these clusters have a unique association with one another. LSI focuses on sorting and gathering all of these data clusters to arrive at more informed and relevant search results.
So how does it work?
Basically, when a user types in a keyword or phrase, if the search engine was using LSI techniques then it would parse the set of keywords to decide what context of results should be produced. Thus taking the same example as before, for the word ‘bark’, the LSI based search engine would parse through the complete sentence or phrase to decide what the user is actually looking for. Let’s say the user had typed in ‘bark mahogany’. Once the second word is parsed the search engine would know that the user wants more information on the bark of the Mahogany tree. Similar technique is applied to all other search terms keyed in by users.
Why LSI is so great?
LSI is a novel concept in the sense that the work of sorting and gathering information is now the search engine’s onus instead of the user’s. What good is a search engine if it only presents data which you have to again parse through yourself. Often, we find that the real information we need may actually be on the second or third pages of a search engine’s results. No longer can websites rely on simply stressing on their keyword density. Instead, the focus is more on the context of the content being searched for by the user.
How does it help us – the users?
You may have noticed by now that when you type in a search phrase into any of the popular search engines, you are getting more relevant results than what you used to get earlier. The good thing about this is that you spend lesser time navigating through web pages to seek specific information. This saves you precious time and energy. In addition, you get all the information you require within the first few links of a search engine result page!
Why websites need to adopt LSI
If you are running a website your SEO experts may have been guiding you on the importance of keyword density. Hence, your strategy till now would have been to procure the most popular keywords according to the niche industry vertical you operate in. There have been numerous software and tools to help website owners parse through the best keywords online. However, all of these tools and software may soon become obsolete what with the whole keyword density subject becoming more and more redundant. Instead, the next big thing, so to speak is actually going to be LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. It is what all the major search engines are lapping up! So if you want to continue achieving higher SERPs then you need to understand and adopt LSI on your SEO strategy.
How to go about it
There are many tools available these days, using which you can adopt LSI techniques to tweak your content. The main thing is to not repeat the same keyword or keywords over and over again. Instead, you need to make the keywords more natural sounding. In other words, try saying the same keyword in a different way – the way users would interpret it. For example, you could express the keyword ‘soccer’ as ‘football’, ‘rugby’, ‘game’ or any other way users normally would say it. Having such a broad-based approach towards keyword usage in the content is the best way to make use of LSI. This way, search engines would seek you out faster, users would be able to identify and bookmark your site quicker and you will find your site achieving higher SERPs in no time!
Google SEO Tips
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Google SEO Tips – Want to rank higher in Google SERP’s? If you’ve ever worked on a website, you’ve probably stumbled across the term SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the “science” (some might say art form) of writing the text and metadata tags of a website so that search engines like Google will see the site as an authority on whatever subject it covers. It is then listed higher in the list of search results for the subject. There are various ways people use to make their websites as SEO friendly as possible, and some work better than others. Below are some tips for making your website more Google SEO friendly so that it ends up listed on page one rather than page one hundred.
Practical SEO Tips for Google That Work
- Don’t forget the meta tags! Many people forget to include keywords in their meta data because it’s not an obvious thing. When webpage’s were constructed in text editors, all the tags and behind the scenes information had to be entered. Now, however, people can make web pages in programs like Expression or Dreamweaver without ever seeing the code and it’s very easy to forget to enter keyword tags since you don’t ever see them on the actual webpage itself.
- Likewise, make certain to give each webpage a title (the text that appears on the top blue bar in Internet Explorer). Titles, like meta tags, may not contribute to the content on the page but are vital to search engine results.
- Another thing not to forget is to fill in those ALT tags on images. ALT tags contain the text that will appear on a page if your image doesn’t load for some reason, and they are yet another place you can stick in important keywords that describe your website and your content.
- Make sure your site is error-free. Sometimes, errors in XHTML, Flash, or other plug-ins can cause a search engine to misinterpret what your website is about.
- Write more content. A page with only a few sentences won’t be seen as informative by Google’s search software. These pages will be ranked lower than pages with a higher word count. What is considered the optimal word count varies from person to person. Some say you need only around 500 words of text on a page while others claim it’s better to have upwards of 3,000 or so. The more words you have, the likelier you’ll perfectly match a Google query. However, if you find yourself adding in filler content just to make longer pages, you may want to consider how a real person will react to the text. People rarely want to read redundant information.
- Be aware of how many times you use your keywords in the text. Ideally, you want each of your keywords to appear four or five times on a page, but it depends on how long your pages are. If you have 500 words of text, you may not be able to work in all of your keywords five times. On the other hand, if you have 3,000 words, you can probably use keywords eight to ten times and still have natural sounding sentences. Be careful here: if your keyword density is too low, Google won’t pick up on the word as a keyword, but if it’s too high, Google may decide your page is full of SEO spam and penalize it accordingly.
- Use your keywords at least once in the first few sentences of your page. The closer a keyword is to the top of a webpage, the more significant Google sees it.
- Google robots like to see bigger websites. Generally, they believe that a site with more pages has more information and should be ranked higher. Likewise, sites that grow and expand are more favorably ranked over those that never add new pages or content.
- Focus on your main page(homepage) first. This is the page that search engines look at the most, so you want it to contain all of your keywords.
- Google’s search programs can’t read images. This means if you use keywords in buttons or on banners at the top of your page, they will have no effect on the page’s rank. If you use images for your navigation, try to add in actual text links on your page as well. At the very least, make certain you add image ALT text to the buttons and banners.
- Avoid the word “click“. Many spam pages, especially ones that are trying to sell products or get people to join pyramid schemes, use the word “click” excessively. Google tends to rank pages that include this word lower since they are more often than not spam.
- Include descriptive text in your links. If you’re linking to a site, use the site title or a description of it in the anchor link text instead of saying “click here” (plus, this helps you avoid that dirty C-word!).
- Google ranks words in italics, bold, or that are underlined as being more important. Be sure to bold a few keywords here and there on your site. Don’t do this to every keyword, though. Besides looking very odd to humans on your site, search engines will see too much of this as suspicious.
- When it comes to keyword phrases, Google does not notice punctuation. This means that “dog beds” and “dog: beds” are actually seen as the same. Taking advantage of this lets you work in keyword phrases in ways that don’t seem as repetitive.
- Avoid frames if possible. Pages that appear inside frames don’t contain their own title, and often they don’t have links to the other pages on your site since the links are on the frame. Google likes to see links and titles on each page.
- If your page isn’t going to be updated often, consider adding a blog to it. As stated earlier, Google ranks pages that add new content higher than pages that haven’t changed for three years. If your website isn’t going to need new content on a regular basis, add a blog. You can then blog about business specials, conferences you’ve attended recently, review new products related to your site, and more.
Making your site Google SEO friendly isn’t a one-time thing. As time goes by, you’ll need to review your SEO work to see if it still applies. Search engines are evolving, and as their SEO algorithms change, they pick up on different things as SEO-friendly. You’ll regularly need to look at what keywords you’re using, where you are using those keywords, and what content your website has.
Despite all of these tips about keyword writing, there’s one very, very important thing to remember that will seem very contrary: don’t write your webpage’s for Google’s robots. First and foremost, you need to write for the actual human beings who are going to be reading your site, especially if you want them to take some action or buy a product. Search engine rank is important, true, but not so important that you risk alienating your customers. This is why search engine optimization is difficult—you want a page that appeals to both humans and Google robots. It can be a challenge to balance well-written, informative text against text sprinkled with keywords and other Google attention-getting devices. With a little work and use of these google tips, however, you can create well-written webpage’s that will also rank highly on Google.
Hire an SEO Freelancer from India
You may also want to look at the Search Engine Optimization Guide by Google
SEO jobs in India
Thursday, November 6th, 2008Internet has become a rage. In order to survive in the hugely competitive web space, companies are hiring SEO firms. These firms are known to help with all the Search Engine Optimization techniques that raise a site in Google’s ranking ladder. This helps in bringing in visitors and subsequent revenues.
India is a growing IT behemoth. SEO is pulling up socks in India. It has been a late entry in comparison to western countries but now it has become an offshore hub where the western countries are outsourcing a lot of their projects.
This has led to sudden demand of SEO professionals in India. Few companies have stringent norms and do not engage in unethical techniques. They like working through Google pre-set guidelines following the White Hat way.
RankUno is a company that is providing quality SEO jobs in western India. It asks people with some experience and in-depth knowledge of SEO industry to become a part of their team. Remuneration is quite at par with the industry standards. While applying for SEO jobs, position code and position title needs to be mentioned.
The company tackles SEO through logical and mathematical model, challenging Google algorithms. It completely abstains from Black Hat tricks.
SEO Flash
Saturday, November 1st, 2008Flash SEO – Dubious But Redeemable
Flash SEO method has been drawing some serious flak for reducing visibility on the search engine. This is deemed to be true as most of the top search engines cannot connect to interactive images and graphics. They are more or less built on the capability of reading text to comprehend the meaning of pages.
Leading web development tools make the mistake of including flash in web pages with codes that cannot be deciphered by the engines. The right decision might be to leave the default code and use the fundamental HTML content for flash pages. This is a great idea because HTML can be search engine optimized giving an impression as if Flash was never there.
Google has already declared implanting new algorithms that can decipher textual flash content. We can perhaps incorporate a DIV with search engine accessible fundamental text as a Flash SEO method.
Most of the Search engine spiders are not versed with taking care of Flash. They choose to view the elementary text in HTML profile rendering the associated flash a non-issue. This way the SEO flash can be used to exhibit visuals without having to cast out visitors and search engines trained only for text links.
SEO Resume Format
Sunday, October 5th, 2008An SEO Expert Resume must meet the following Basic Criteria for a 0 – 5 Years Experienced Applicant. If you are an experienced SEO Guy, you must have worked with several Web Sites for Search Engine Optimization & Link Building and place them in the portfolio/work experience section of your SEO Resume.
Desired Candidate Profile must pocess the following knowledge;
1. Should possess sound working knowledge of On Page & Off Page Optimization.
2. Monitoring Site through Google Analytics
3. Managing PPC Campaigns such as Google Adwords PPC.
4. Link building (One way Link Building, Reciprocal Link Building).
5. Providing SEO recommendations.
6. Web Page Optimization
7. Keyword analysis, ranking & analysis reports.
8. Basic Knowledge of HTML, CSS & Javascript to assist in SEO Friendly Website Design and Development (Knowledge of PHP, Flash would be an Added Advantage)
9. Strong familiarity with SEO & web culture: Should be working on Blogs, Social Media Sites, Forums, Article Submissions. Should have the passion to discover new sites, tools and Marketing Methodologies.
10. A Basic understanding of the How Search Engines Work, and to keep updated with the Latest Search Engine Trends and Algorithms.
In addition to the above the candidate must have good Communication, Verbal, Time management and Written Skills
Keywords in URL
Thursday, August 21st, 2008I was very curious to know if Keywords in URL would make any difference to your Search Engine Rankings. After a lot of research in various Webmaster Discussion Forums I found that some disagree, but most of them have noticed that Google (Yahoo & MSN too) gives the site a boost, if keywords were a part of the domain name or URL.
Then I went on to try Keyword Inclusion for iwebie.com for different posts and it worked very well compared to most other listed sites. This could be based on various other factors though.
Keywords Occurence in a url may be hyphenated, underscored or conjoined. In 2005, Google’s Matt Cutts wrote and discussed about the underscores vs dashes (hyphens) issue concerning how the keywords must be separated within your URL’s. He concluded in this article that both hyphens as well as underscores would be considered as keyword delimiters in URL’s. After that major search engines like Yahoo & MSN followed the same strategy of not differentiating between the 2 URL forms.
Its a good practice to have your primary keywords as a part of your url.
The best way to include keywords in Wordpress Posts is by using a Custom Permalink . In your Blog Post, your Page Title would usually contain the most relevant and primary keywords for that page. So by using a Custom Permalink such as this we include some of the keywords in the URL which is good.
Keywords in Ecommerce Shopping Cart Domain URL’s
Most Ecommerce Solutions that you use to Create Online Stores are not SEO Friendly. There are so many inherent SEO Problems accompanying them. Since we are focusing on keywords in URL here, lets see what gets included in the URL part of these Shopping Carts. Some of these database driven Shopping carts contain session IDs in the URL in order to track visitors or maintain state information thereby making them not search engine friendly. Hence Search Engines will have trouble indexing your Product Pages as these product page url’s keep changing based on different queries or how you reach the page.
It is important to modify your Shopping cart software to have Search Engine Friendly URL Rewrites . One example would be to use the product title as a part of the URL where each space between the words of the product phrase would be separated by a hyphen.
Here’s a before and after example of a Typical Shopping Cart URL:
Before URL Rewrite:
http://www.host.com/webapp/sports/stores/servlet/StoreView?productId=10001&&langId=1
After URL Rewrite, it makes it a lot more SEO Friendly
http://www.host.com/Sports/cricket-kit
SitePoint itself has an article about URL rewriting with mod_rewrite:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting
But again, Considering other Important factors of SEO, Keywords in domain names are a very small enhancement to your SERP’s.
Avoid : Over Stuffing your keywords in URL page file names / folder names as this could hurt your Rankings if the keywords are not a part of your Content.
Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers
Friday, August 8th, 2008Tips on keyword optimization
- Stuffing the blog-post with SEO keywords does not make it look natural.
- The words ought to be the same that the users are typing in. Plural forms are a better option.
- Use of common keyword mis-spelling is inappropriate.
- Categories that are good keywords should be used. They can be words like – gadgets, hacks, health, webmaster etc. Apart from SEO it promotes usability.
- The keywords are better used in the posts. Since the users don’t see them, Google doesn’t put much importance on the meta description tag.
- Same keywords should not be used within a line, a variant or synonym can be used.
Tips on SEO URL or bloggers
- The blog should not be placed at the root of the domain. It should be put in the subdomain or the subdirectory.
- In the URL, use dashes/hyphens to separate keywords. Google considers underscores as good keyword separators.
- The URLs of the old posts should not be changed to a permanent or a 301 redirect.
- URL extensions like .php, .asp, .cfm, .htm, .html, etc all can be used but not .exe.
- Question marks or hash marks of a dynamic URL are treated as static URL by Google, but the parameter must not exceed three. Google bot cannot crawl if it is beyond three.
- Your own domain name must be used in the FeedBurner feeds.
Tips on accessibility and usability of the blog site
- Always use Alt tags with Images. A full sentence may be used in the Alt tag but it should not exceed three to five words. Irrelevant keywords must be avoided.
- It is better to do a podcast or a video. Matt says, the blogger can submit his picture to hotornot.com and if the rating is above 7, then a video can be a good idea.
- Wordpress must be used for the blog to ensure that the site is crawlable. Today, since a lot of people access sites on their cell phones, it is better not to use frame sets or any other weird stuff, they don’t work well with cell phones.
- The dates of the posts must be shown.
- The use of Akismet comments spam protection will prevent your blog from being spammed. Google Analytics can locate the traffic on your website. Finally, there is no substitute for a great compelling content.
How much to Charge for Freelance SEO Services
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008With Web based business going great guns, SEO services are in high demand. And with people getting interested in building credentials online, freelancing in SEO is also gaining ground.
There are 8 most popular SEO pricing models:
1. Hourly Consulting – The rates vary with the entry level people charging around $40 to $50, the mid-tier consultants charge about $100 to $200 and the high end people charge $300 to $500.
2. Project Based Consulting – A flat fee which can be in chunks during the course of a project is charged. The price is determined on an estimate of time, effort and the number of people involved.
3. Contract Services – Here, a customized single price is offered for a set amount of work.
4. Standard Profit Sharing – They begin work with a relatively small down payment and then charge percentage of revenues from the sales ensued from the website.
5. Modified Profit Sharing – It promises the SEO firm even prior to the setting of any expenses. The modifications could be Pay-Per-Action (PPA) or Pay-Per-Lead.
6. Monthly Retainer – This constitutes a basic monthly retainer with an option of a standard work load package to retain clients for a long period of time.
7. Pay for Rankings – This is a predetermined price offer that changes with every change in position.
8. Pay for Traffic – It is a traffic payment system which is alike to the PPC. The SEO performance though does get measured but the quality of traffic is not.
The principle difficulty before the freelancers is to distinguish itself in the vision of the customers from the crowd who are providing similar freelance services. They need to substantially differentiate themselves. In an environment of intense competition, personal branding is an effective solution. It is easy for corporates to create specific images but freelancers can also do it effectively by promoting uniqueness and to clarify it to potential clients. That will make it easy to determine their worth. This can be done by:
- Specialization – one needs to specialize in a specific area of work. Rather than being a general freelancer, being a specialist can provide good exposure, reputation and help you assess your worth.
- Localize – freelancers usually tend to serve clients all across the world. But this high degree of flexibility might cause one to ignore the viable option to target the local clients. Instead of landing in an indefinite area and competing with each and everyone in the field, if one focuses on becoming the leading service provider in their locality, it can help him to enhance his worth immensely.
- Branding – sensible and honest branding ensures exclusivity. As the reputation and the quality get publicized, the worth too can take an upward surge.
- Demonstration of Expertise – An invaluable asset for a freelancer is his standout portfolio. Clients would naturally prefer those who already have demonstrated their ability and expertise. Maintaining a popular blog can be an effective aid in this respect. The sense of professionalism through meeting the client’s expectation with urgency can justify his high end worth.
Outbound Links
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008Outbound links are links pointing to an external site. You would generally notice less number of outbound links in e-commerce sites which sell things to keep the visitor as much as possible in their site. Outbound links must enhance the site’s existing content. They do not have a direct influence on SEO, but, too many outbound links (more than 100 in a page) is not a good SEO practice.
Outbound Link Guidelines
- The outbound links must be relevant to your web site.
- The links that are pointed to must be helpful to site visitors and thereby add quality to the site.
- Outbound links have no relation to a site’s SERP, but may affect the Site’s Google Pagerank (PR). More number of outbound links from a page can result in, less PR being circulated from that page to other internal pages. To prevent this you can use rel=”nofollow” on your outgoing links and hence not pass PR to external sites.
- Make use of appropriate keywords as anchor text of your out bound links
Outbound Links Checker
Below are my favorite outbound link tools to track outbound links for a given site. These tools also show you the PageRank of each out bound link and the number of outbound links in your site.
Best SEO Software
Saturday, July 26th, 2008There are plenty of SEO software’s available today. It’s a difficult decision to determine which would best suit your SEO requirement.
People say they use only seo software or do it all manually. All the SEO experts I know, use a combination of manual work as well as use seo software.
Besides being best suited for reporting, there are things that seo software can do that will save you time like;
- Create quick Html/pdf SEO reports for your Client
- Automatic Site Submission to a huge number of Search Engines and Directories
- Rank checking tools for multiple search engines etc
Most SEO software is looked down on, since SEO can be done much better manually, but as an user who has considerable SEO experience, i can safely say, SEO software’s makes your life a tad easier.
Some of the well known SEO Software are;
AddWeb
iBusiness Promoter
WebCEO
In my opinion the best seo software is MS Excel, which i use to create spread sheets to track on going SEO work. Besides that, you many need SEO Software for Automatic Site Submission to a huge number of search engines and directories which would otherwise take ages when done manually. I use IBP software for this purpose although Manual submission is still the best for Important Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) & Directories (Dmoz, Yahoo Directory).
It is agreed by now that seo software must just be used to assist you in some tedious jobs. Lets figure out which is the best SEO software used by most seo experts today. Please take the poll.
[poll id="5"]
