Twitter is one of the latest and greatest Web 2.0 apps and it gets tons of traffic. However, from the point of view of a SEO expert, it is more important that Twitter can get you tons of traffic as well. So, if you still don't have an account with Twitter, you'd better open one.
Showing posts with label what is seo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label what is seo. Show all posts
Saturday, 29 June 2013
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Facebook is not the first social network but it is the most popular one. There have been many other social networks before Facebook and while some of them were popular at some point in time, none could reach the popularity of Facebook. In addition to keeping in touch with your friends, Facebook can be (and is) used for business. You can use it to promote your products and services, to acquire new clients, or to get traffic to your site.Tuesday, 25 June 2013
YouTube is one of the most popular sites and in addition to all the fun there, YouTube offers many opportunities for promotion and getting traffic to your site. Similarly to Facebook and Twitter in order to use YouTube successfully for promotion and getting traffic, you need to know the rules for this. Here are some tips how to promote yourself, your site, and your products and how to get free traffic from YouTube:Thursday, 20 June 2013
Guest posts are a great SEO and marketing tool – if used correctly, of course. After the demise of article directories and changes in the search ranking algorithms that made many other ways of getting backlinks obsolete, guest posting on reputable sites remains one of the best ways to make your site visible to the world (and search engines).How You Can Benefit from Guest Posts
Basically, the benefits from guest posts are two. First, you get free exposure in front o
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
Google Adsense is one of the best ways to make money from your site. You might not become a millionaire with your Adsense monetized properties but with some luck, and above all knowledge about what works with Adsense sites and what doesn't, this could become a stable source of income for you.
How Much Can I Make With Google Adsense?
This is a question almost everybody asks before jumping on the Adsense wagon. There isn't a universal answer – some Web masters are making a fulltime income from a single Adsense site, while others with 5 or more sites can't even cover their hosting fees.
How much you will make with Google Adsense depends on many factors. Some of them are outside your control - i.e. the overall state of the economy or what advertisers Google has managed to attract. However, there are also many factors within your control. For instance, obviously, if you have one site with 10 pages only you will make thousands of times less than if you have 10 sites with thousands of pages. Basically, all equal, the more content you have, the more you will make.
1 Choose a Profitable Niche
Friday, 14 June 2013
When it comes to search, Google is, hands down, the king! Google is now much more than a household name, and everyone, who is just about anyone, knows about Google and has used Google. Indeed, Google get more than 3 billion (yes, billion with a ‘B’!) unique search queries in a single day!
It is hence quite obvious from a website-owner’s perspective to do well on Google. This actually means ranking on top of the SERPs for all your keywords, or in simple terms, ranking as high up as possible – ideally on the first couple of pages – on Google.
Websites which adopt and adhere to what Google defines as ‘best practices’ generally tend do to very well, especially after last year’s update to Google’s search engine indexing algorithm, dubbed the ‘Google Panda’. These websites are industry leaders in terms of high SERPs, as well as how quickly their pages get indexed (or added to Google’s directory).
So what exactly are some of the best practices you can adopt in order to rank high up the SERP, and have the pages and posts in your website or blog get indexed within seconds? The following is a list of Google’s search engine indexing criteria, with most of the information coming straight from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, as well as from my own experience as an SEO.
1. Website Design
A few important pointers about your website’s design:
- Hierarchy is important. Google’s webmaster guidelines clearly state that a site should have a clear hierarchy on your website, and that it should be organized into different sections, or pages.
- All pages should be properly named. Furthermore, every page should be reachable from at least one static link on your website.
- All tabs, buttons and items on your website should have proper title attributes, however these should be short and precise.
- Sitemaps are important
2. Website Content
A few content guidelines to consider for your website:
- The content of the website should be useful, informative, unique, not copied or spun or duplicate content. Avoiding duplication in content and pages is important. ‘Unique’ content is the key word here.
- It is imperative that all posts are accompanied with complete and full title and meta description, as this is what Google looks for.
- The content on the website should be there with the aim of providing users with information, rather than with the intention of attaining better search engine ranking. For instance even if you’re running an affiliate business, Google says that your site should provide value, and should have unique content.
- Refrain from putting too many links on any single page or post, and especially avoid putting too many links pointing to the same page.
- Make sure to include your keyword(s) as often as possible in your pages and posts. Your keyword(s) would ideally be words or phrases that people would search for in Google to reach your website.
- Make sure there are no broken links anywhere on your website. Check across your website for this – pages, posts , everywhere! Use tools for this purpose.
- Optimize images for Google as well – properly name your images, for starters. Add caption and description for any and all images on your website under the ‘Alt’ attribute. Make sure to include your keyword(s) here as well, at least once.
3. Website Quality
- Ask yourself one simple question: “would I be doing this if search engines didn’t exist?”
- Once again, design your pages, post, content and your website in general with the purpose of providing useful and quality information to visitors, rather than attaining better search engine rankings.
- Refrain from ‘cloaking’ – a technique whereby you would give different content to search engines than what you’re giving to your users.
- Link schemes should generally be avoided, and it can be particularly harmful for your website if you start getting linked from low-quality or spam websites. This can usually result in your website falling down the rankings or getting completely de-indexed by Google.
- Here’s one that should be pretty obvious: refrain from having malicious content on your website – trojans, viruses, adware, phishing content or any other malware.
4. Stuff that Google Probably Won’t Tell You (At least Directly)
- Inbound links matter. If you’re getting inbound links from websites an’/or blogs that are already very high up Google’s rankings (known as high-PR or high-authority links), you will probably see yourself climb up Google’s rankings pretty quickly. High-PR or authority websites include social networks such as Facebook.
- Google asks you to stay away from link exchange programs, but these are usually a good way to get your website indexed quickly. Just make sure to be smart about it – choose your partners carefully, and check if your sources of referral traffic are legit. But don’t build backlinks too fast.
- Link diversity is important. Getting inbound links from different places like blogs, websites, reviews, forums, videos, images, etc. and from a diverse geographic location set counts as well.
- Maintain a 2-5% keyword density in your content – this means that every hundred words on your website should mention your keyword at least a minimum of 2 times and a maximum of 5.
Concluding Words
So that just a few pointers on what to do (and what not to do) with your website in order to have it indexed by Google and indexed quickly, for that matter. Both on-site and off-site factors matter and are taken into account by Google to determine where your website ends up on the SERPs.
Once you think your website adheres to the best practices defined by Google, you can submit it to Google for indexing.
Also Read:
- 6 Essential Viral Marketing Strategies
- SEO Client Problems and How to Deal With Them
- The Three Pillars Of SEO In 2013: Content, Links, And Social Media
- How to Create an Effective Google AdWords Campaign
- High PageRank (PR) Social Bookmarking Sites
- How to Recover from Google Panda Effect
- Negative SEO: Myths and Facts You Should Be Aware Of
- How to Make Money Blogging
- Matt Cutts: SEO Needs To Focus On Helping Users Not Link Building
- Importance of Social Media in SEO
- Have Google's Panda and Penguin Replaced SEO With Social, PR and Content, or a New Type of Savvy Marketing?
- On Page SEO Guide – How To Rank Higher And Get More Traffic
- 20 Ways to Get More Website Traffic This Year (Ethically!)
- 6 Ways SEO Will Change in 2013
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
What is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing strategies involve the spread of content, in a way that is similar to how a virus spreads – quickly, while infecting many people. Viral marketing gives the potential power, to just about anyone – be it an individual or an organization, to quickly spread their content among a lot of people. Often times, we end up seeing Youtube videos of people’s pets, babies or something else, that have thousands of views, if not millions.
Social mediums such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are synonymous with any viral marketing strategy, and form the basis of viral marketing. Other important aspects in viral marketing include the messenger(s), the content and the timing.
Viral Marketing and SEO
While much of the viral content might be about something interesting that was captured at the right time and place, perhaps due to coincidence or because of sheer luck, and hence might have unintentionally gone viral, a lot of content is being created with the sole purpose of going viral and as part of a wider SEO strategy.
There is simply no denying that going viral almost guarantees a large influx of visitors and traffic to the original source. It can therefore be an excellent and an effect marketing and SEO strategy. Imagine if one of your videos were to go viral, gaining worldwide attention, being featured on a talk-show or being shared millions of times, ending up getting you all sorts of traffic from all sorts of high-PR and authority sources!
‘Kony2012’ would be an apt example here.
Why Viral?
For starters, going viral gives the potential to target thousands of potential customers and potential audience. That precisely is the aim of every SEO strategy, isn’t it: getting targeted traffic. That is exactly what viral marketing does for you; pull in highly-targeted traffic, in large numbers, in a short span of time.
Spreading the word could also come with added advantages from a SEO-perspective such as increased traffic (as explained above), an increased Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Call-To Action (CTA), and a higher conversion rate.
Viral Marketing Strategies
So what exactly can one do to ‘go viral’? As stated above, all three factors, namely the content, the messengers and the timing is extremely important to an effective viral marketing strategy. But here is a six-step viral marketing strategy that could work for you:
- Give stuff for free – freebies, giveaways and promotions which give away stuff for free are a good way to have your content go viral and therefore a guaranteed method of attracting visitors and customers. This could include giving out a free product like a WordPress plugin or an app or even a free domain name or hosting space. Alternatively, offer a service such as a free personal consultation or a coaching session. Do this periodically.
- Give people permission to re-use your content – whether its images, a video, an article or anything else, giving people the permission to re-use it, share it or reprint it on blogs, websites, social mediums, magazines, their own videos or anywhere else is usually a good way to go viral. Just make sure to add a disclaimer that says that this is free to reproduce as long as the person who does that credits the original uploader/creator.
- Offer people an incentive – as easy as it is for someone to click on that share button, why would he or she do it? Offer an incentive so that people are forced to share. Ask people to share, like, retweet, +1, or pin your content. Add a ‘recommend to a friend’ box within your app or plugin. And in return, offer them something extra. Every 5 referrals, or every 50 shares earns you an eBook worth $10 free of cost. Dropbox, the popular cloud-storage software, does this to great effect, by offering additional storage on every referral. You could also do a contest by offering a big prize to anyone who shares your content the most.
- Be funny, use humor – Being funny and humorous is usually a sure-fire way of going viral. This is why we see images like ‘internet memes’ shared by a lot of friends, and Youtube videos showing people and animals doing funny stuff with a very high number of views.
- Choose multiple forms of media – go for videos, images, press releases, and podcasts.
- Choosing who to target – in order for your content to spread like wildfire, you need to ensure that as many people as possible hear about it. Post it on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, GooglePlus, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Submit it on content submission directories like StumbleUpon and Reddit. The more places you put your content on, the merrier. Having your content on multiple mediums not only gives it more chances of exposure, it also increases its chances of being picked up and plugged by someone with a high social networking potential (or SNP).
Being Prepared for an Influx of Traffic
It is vital to know that going viral would probably mean a large influx of visitors and traffic to your blog. Make sure your hosting package will be able to handle that sort of traffic and/or sales. Being prepared usually pays off in the long run.
Optimizing for Conversions
This is not limited to just viral marketing, but also applies to it, as it would apply to any other marketing strategy. All your marketing efforts should be optimized for conversions. Your viral marketing efforts need to have a clear and precise call-to-action – whether it’s to have your viewers like your Facebook page, subscribe to your blog, purchase an item or perform any other action.
Network Marketing
At first glance, this might seem like a completely new and unfamiliar term to you; however network marketing is essentially another word for viral marketing. Network marketing simply refers to networking with people through different online and offline mediums. Connecting with people, especially emotionally, and building contacts is an important aspect of viral marketing. A human being, by nature, is a social animal – use this to your advantage to attain more exposure, traffic and revenue streams.
Concluding Words
Suggestions? Would you like to add something? Leave your comments in the comment section!
Also Read:
- SEO Client Problems and How to Deal With Them
- The Three Pillars Of SEO In 2013: Content, Links, And Social Media
- How to Create an Effective Google AdWords Campaign
- High PageRank (PR) Social Bookmarking Sites
- How to Recover from Google Panda Effect
- Negative SEO: Myths and Facts You Should Be Aware Of
- How to Make Money Blogging
- Matt Cutts: SEO Needs To Focus On Helping Users Not Link Building
- Importance of Social Media in SEO
- Have Google's Panda and Penguin Replaced SEO With Social, PR and Content, or a New Type of Savvy Marketing?
- On Page SEO Guide – How To Rank Higher And Get More Traffic
- 20 Ways to Get More Website Traffic This Year (Ethically!)
- 6 Ways SEO Will Change in 2013
- Penguin 2.0 SEO Update - Google Updates Things Again!
- Top 21 SEO Tips and Tricks to Follow in 2013
- Difference between Google Panda and Google Penguin
- 7 SEO Tasks to Complete Before Even Thinking about Hiring an Agency
- 5 Devastating Local SEO Mistakes—and How to Avoid Them
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
It is usually unintentional but ultimately unavoidable when things go south and not-as-planned during search engine optimization for a client. This especially becomes a problem when you are either behind schedule, have a client who is finding it hard to understand how SEO works, or have seen your website get penalized because of search engine algorithm changes.
Dealing with SEO clients is often considered to be much more difficult than all the SEO work itself. SEO firms, or any other organization for that matter, might often come across and be forced to deal with what are generally known to be ‘difficult’ clients.
As a result, situations may arise which give way to conflict, disagreements and tensions.
Here are 5 common types of problems that I have personally seen SEOs face when dealing with clients:
- Clients fail to understand the work involved and are impatient– especially those who might be new to the concept of search engine optimization. This usually results in clients having unrealistic and often inflated expectations about SEO, especially the scope of work involved. Having unrealistic expectation about SEO is all-too-common, where clients will expect to be ranked no.1 on Google and start getting ten-fold traffic within days.
- Clients understand the work involved a little too well – yes, we’ve all come across those perfectionist clients, who claim to know about SEO, more than you or anyone else. These clients then demand that whatever they say be followed, instead of letting you do your work like you should.
- Clients fail to gauge ‘success’ properly – and automatically assume that success in SEO only means ending up as being the first result on the first page of Google. Yes, SEO is about rankings, but clients are unaware that rankings themselves are dependent on a whole host of internal and external factors. The same also applies to traffic. Getting a large volume to traffic is easy, however getting targeted traffic which results in conversion, a high CTR and a high-revenue is what matters.
- SEOs fail to stick to deadlines, try blacklisted SEO methods and get caught, or a change in search engine algorithm renders their SEO useless.
- The client fails to do as said – most often because of communication issues and barriers. People are busy – clients are busy with their businesses and SEO, as anyone reading this would be well-aware is in itself an extremely time-consuming task, what with all sorts of link-building, working with code, and the whole shebang. Moreover, often times clients are working with multiple SEO consultants or firms, and something recommended by one could potentially conflict with another consultant’s recommendations. Communicating over email when you should’ve called, for instance, or not getting your point across properly results in communication problems.
There are many things you can do to avoid any problems or difficult situations from arising in the first place. However when things do take a turn for the worst, there are ways in which you can deal with your SEO clients and come out of the battle unscathed, with your reputation and relationship with the client intact.
- Be professional – be a pro and prepare a complete scope-of-work and a detailed schedule, with deadlines, contingencies, a plan B, as well as budget and resource details. Use project management software for the purpose. Not only will this give a good impression, it will help avoid many of the problems described above, during the course of the project.
- Be realistic – being realistic from the get-go, with your work, and your client’s expectation, could turn out to be a potential life-saver in the long-run.
- Be honest – work on the project together as a team, and that really is the best bit of advice I can give you here. It might be easier said than done, but it is important to remember at all times that you and your clients are one team and should act like one.
- Avoid finger-pointing – If a problem was your fault, you will need to man up and take full responsibility, while making sure that…
- …You work towards the solution – especially in terms of (a) what exactly you did with respect to damage control, and coming up with a fix, and (b) what preventive measure have you taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
- If the problem was on the client’s end or something totally out of your control (an algorithm update, for instance), be upfront about it as well, so it can be rectified and fixed, if possible.
- Avoid going into denial – because simply put, it won’t do anyone any good at this stage of time. Make sure that you put all your energies, resources and focus on the solution and fix. And make sure the client knows this and is on the same page as well.
- Providing explanation – Selective information or full-disclosure, your call – if you think going into the specifics of the problem won’t do any good and perhaps quite possibly might even be harmful, don’t go there.
- Be solution oriented – if I was an SEO client, this is what I’d be the most interested in. Prove your worth by showing that you are a solution-oriented individual or organization. Speak with your peers, do your research and devise a solution to the problem for your client.
- The Three Pillars Of SEO In 2013: Content, Links, And Social Media
- How to Create an Effective Google AdWords Campaign
- High PageRank (PR) Social Bookmarking Sites
- How to Recover from Google Panda Effect
- Negative SEO: Myths and Facts You Should Be Aware Of
- How to Make Money Blogging
- Matt Cutts: SEO Needs To Focus On Helping Users Not Link Building
- Importance of Social Media in SEO
- Have Google's Panda and Penguin Replaced SEO With Social, PR and Content, or a New Type of Savvy Marketing?
- On Page SEO Guide – How To Rank Higher And Get More Traffic
- 20 Ways to Get More Website Traffic This Year (Ethically!)
- 6 Ways SEO Will Change in 2013
Sunday, 9 June 2013
Useful pay per click campaigns should be viewed as a
useful addition to a current, organic campaign rather than something
that stands on its own with no support. In other words, relying solely
on pay per click campaigns to drive traffic to your website has the
ability to siphon your marketing budget in quick time!
But what if you need customers and you need them now?
Here's how to create an effective Google AdWords campaign that won't
get your accountant off side. But first, a quick look at the benefits of
what an AdWords campaign brings to the table:
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
Usually, you’ll hear that there’s nothing like negative SEO.If Google has to be believed (which you have to, as long as you are fairly Google-dependent), there’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your keyword rankings. Then Google comes up saying that it works really hard to prevent a rival from harming a specific site’s search rankings.
If there’s no such thing as negative SEO, why does Google try to prevent it? This is a question that any inquisitive guy like me would ask.
Moreover, why does someone need a Disavow Links tool?
Right from the day the concept or issue of negative SEO emerged, it’s also been associated with a lot of guesses. Webmasters have been continuously thinking when something like this can happen, how it actually happens and what do once someone’s in trouble due to reverse SEO.
Well, there are both myths and facts.
Though negative SEO is very real (under certain situations), it’s also given rise to plenty of myths. If you lack adequate SEO knowledge, it’s quite easy to give in to the most common myths of negative search engine optimization.
The biggest of these myths is, it can happen easily, with anyone. To tell you the truth, negative or anti-SEO also requires tons of knowledge in order to implement such a campaign with all the effectiveness. Moreover, large businesses or companies are mostly targeted by spammers who try to ruin search rankings by way of creating lots of spammy links pointing back to the competitors’ websites or blogs.
An extreme situation, in this regard, is where you want to blame negative SEO for everything that happens to your site.
Many people think that negative SEO can harm just any website’s rankings, which is not true at all. Most of the time, negative SEO will not do any harm at all to websites that have long been there or established. For example, Rand Fishkin openly invited spammers to do negative SEO to SEOmoz. The more credible an online resource you are, the harder it is to break into.
In any case, it’s vital to increase your knowledge base on the topic of negative SEO if it ever happens (god forbid!) to your own site. This includes making yourself aware of those key tactics that spammer make use of while trying to ruin the search rankings of a site through negative SEO.
Most Common ways for Negative SEO a Website:
Spammy Links – This is commonest one. In order to harm your site’s rankings, the spammers will try to point ‘tons of bad links’ to your domain. The results of this spammy practice will vary depending on the strength of the link profile.Hacking into Your Site – Another form of negative SEO is that where the spammer would try to hack your site first. Once hacked, they’ll most probably stop or block Google from crawling your site’s pages.
Report a Site as Spam – Spammers can also report to Google that your site is packed with spam or indulges in spammy activities. Since Google always welcomes such complaints, spammers benefit from it.
Though there are several other (really hard) ways of doing reverse SEO, the ones you see above are among the commonest.
As you can see, there’s no one single magical solution that you can use to protect your web properties against the evil effects of negative SEO. However, you can definitely bolster up your position in a way that makes it simply unviable to launch a negative SEO attack against your site. Here is a video by Matt Cutts, where he talked about negative SEO:
Conclusion Yes, negative SEO is very very real. If you don’t believe me, you should at least wait till the time some dirty spammer ruins the search engine presence of your own website or one of your friends’. To make it really hard for your rivals to start a negative SEO campaign against your web properties, you should avoid mistakes that would make you vulnerable to such attacks.
At the same time, you need to keep a close watch at the link profile and the overall SEO health of your website or blog, consistently.
Also Read:
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