SEO is no longer a technical exercise than can be done in a vacuum which would start generating millions in sales for you overnight. It will have to be done in conjunction with other marketing efforts and it certainly isn’t going to generate overnight results especially if you take a casual approach. Unfortunately a lot of smaller organizations are falling prey to suggestions by third party SEO providers who promise the moon by portraying that SEO will address all their marketing challenges.

Renowned technology blogger Chris Dixon ruffled quite a few feathers in the SEO industry when in a recent blog he suggested that SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups. While Dixon’s extreme position on SEO seems far from accurate, concerns certainly exist for organizations and especially startups when employing SEO as a marketing tool. SEO requires a lot of effort to have a truly meaningful impact on an organization’s sales. Startups are increasingly finding it difficult to find resources to devote to such an increasingly complex task. The nefarious means employed by black hat SEO practitioners means even more competition, more effort and more resources required to reach the top of search engine results. Startups naturally do not have the wherewithal to deal with resource-rich but unethical SEO practitioners.

Search engine algorithms also keep changing in response to the evolving threat from black hat SEO, which further impacts the marketing efforts of those looking at genuine white hat SEO as their marketing prima donna. You could be at the top of search engine results for your chosen keywords and phrases one day and be nowhere in the search results the next, thanks to such dynamism in algorithms forced largely by unethical black hat SEO practices.

Despite this efforts are being made to offer more integrated marketing tools that incorporate other online elements apart from SEO for effective marketing through the Internet. Software platforms are emerging that help organizations use and measure a variety of web-based marketing techniques such as blogging, social media, content management and email.

Unlike what Dixon believes SEO isn’t going to die anytime soon and is in fact garnering more believers from the high echelons of marketing. This is only natural as people don’t only continue to search for products online, but also the tribe of such searchers keeps increasing to already account for a significant portion of humanity. While black hat practitioners may continue to throw billions into gaming SEO, the pressure and walletshare from billions of users searching for genuine content online will be an effective counter to such efforts. In time, the search engine industry is sure to find a permanent solution to this problem.

Related Posts

I am going through lot of forums and looking at the webmaster’s feedback since last one week. I feel that the Panda update is no longer a major update now but it has become part of the core algorithm. Every week lots of websites are affected with very little recovery.

The new trend I am seeing is that the long tail keywords are shrinking. Some of my websites which were ranking for long tail keywords and were able to beat Wikipedia and others in ranking have gone down a lot. These big authority websites are ranking for even long tail keywords even though they might not be that relevant.

Google is Penalizing websites which are not that small but are not big too. Some of my smaller websites had no effect and in fact there traffic increased whereas the websites with 1000 to 100,000 pages are primarily affected. One further indication of these updates are that blogs which are not updated regularly are also penalized.

Now all the above is happening on a daily or to say on a weekly basis. Major and big updates are not happening now but the Panda algorithm is there and a part of Google daily/weekly update. It is nearly impossible to get out of this devaluation of websites and SEOs who are trying for it should look out for long battle with no guarantee that the website could ever recover.

Related Posts

My website has proper internal links. Will it improve my rankings
No. Internal linking is just a small part in your search engine optimization endeavor. However, it is certainly going to give a boost to your website rankings by a small percentage.

Recently I tried to verify the usage of internal links on seo’s firm websites and was horrified to see that their websites were not properly optimized for Internal Links. I saw their main menu links as “Products”, “Services” etc. In place of these one word link texts they could very well use something like “Web Marketing Products” and “SEO Services”. Think of the type of important words they are missing out on.

Meaningful text in links is very important both for search engine optimization and usability of the website. Do consider rewriting all “click here” type of links to something meaningful. It would not only help visitors to browse through your website properly but would also give contextual help to search engine robots.

Some of the important factors to remember for internal link strategy

• Do not loose any reasonable opportunity to link
• Internal link transfers link authority to pages
• Use keyword phrase or meaningful text in your links
• Give importance to linking the most important pages then others

Related Posts

One scheme to get the quality traffic for your business is to make sure that you’re listed in the bigger SEs: Google, Yahoo and Bing. 1st, begin by getting an account with Google. Register with Google and abide by their instructions. When your begin using your account, you will be able to broadcast your business and you’ll begin to show in the Google searches. If you’ve a site or a blog for your business, make certain you login to Google’s webmasters web site and register your site. Your web site will then be affirmed by either uploading an HTML single file that Google supplies to your root directory or by putting in a metatag code that Google supplies into the head part of your index page. When either of these files is uploaded to the site server through ftp, you’ll affirm them with Google and your site is straightaway listed. You had better also have a Google sitemap submitted to Google and if you’ve a blog, there’s an outstanding plugin for building sitemaps. The posts and all other content on your blog could now be indexed and will come out in Google searches.

The next SE you need to register with is Yahoo local. Yahoo also permits you to custom-make your listing and it also approves your listing more in a more accelerated way. Your site could be listed and verified at siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. The verification is alike to Google with either uploading a HTML single file or posting a Meta tag in your header part.

The 3rd SE is Bing.com. Make certain your business is listed with Bing; their verification website for webmaster is bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/.

Now that you’ve registered your business with the biggest 3, go ahead and make your profile with the local listing services on Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local. When you’ve claimed your visibility and verified with a couple of simple steps and a call, you’ll have the advantage over remaining local businesses that have neglected to do so. You’ll be able to also upload images to profile to give your buyers something to associate to. They do not have to be very nice, but make certain they could leave a advantageous effect with your possible buyers.

The succeeding maneuver is to list your online business with the local YellowBook directories. Begin with YellowBook.com,SuperPages.com and YellowPages.com. A lot of the directories have free listings and if it’s in your budget, you’ll be able to buy superior listings to come on ahead of every the other listing. There are more specialized listing services for specific business classes. The finest formula to discover these services is to insert your business class into Google search and then check what turns up in the top 5 listings. Some of the times, specialized listing services for your particular business will display up in the top positions and by adding you’re listing with these services, you’ll be able to discover a lot of business.

Related Posts

There are a lot of marketing formulas and business promoting methods available online to the unfledged business, but among them search engine optimization is among the most unsatisfactory and likely even discouraging because the deficiency of good results is very obvious.

After a lot of weeks of workand sweating, you still do not see any benefit from it and so you wait down there, depressed, considering you as a culprit and questioning what has failed. You believe that all the efforts has been for null and you only blowout from it. It is ended, you abandon and you go on to tell everybody that search engine optimization is a total failure.

This descending spiral is going to only be obstructed the day you receive a call or the day your e-mail pings with a sale from a brand-new client. You and then going to sit up, view the rankings and find out that rather against all the odds, you are top 10 for you main word.

What’s happened? How come has this client just placed an order put “Google” in the “where you found us” textbox?

After all the exercise you have executed, it’s hard to find out which part of the whole process has actually made this thing happened. Many of us always ignore the main and basic aspects of seo and that is the element of “time”. Time is the most crucial part of Seo you have to understand that. Believe me, if you don’t want to wait and you don’t have patience, you are most likely fail in each and every seo campaign that you put up.

You have to understand that consistency and continuous effort over a long period of time always yields result. It is understandable that people don’t want to wait that long or simply they cannot, as they want immediate profits. The best option for them will be ppc instead of seo, because seo will take time and will show results after a very tiring and long effort.

So next time whenever you start feeling that your seo efforts are not bringing fruits and is failing and you are not achieving the results that you desire than all you need to do is take a big healthy meal of patience and make yourself understand that even most authority sites on web today took some time to reach their current position and you can only do that if you wait and perform continuous efforts in your seo.

Related Posts

Calculating PageRank
Google uses an equation to calculate PageRank. This equation is as below:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)

In that equation, the values t1 and tn are pages that are linked to the page whose rank is being calculated. The value C represents all outbound links on that page while‘d’ is the damping factor. This is normally calculated as a standard 0.85. Google also uses the term ‘share’ to calculate the final PageRank of a page. This is done by dividing the PageRank value by the outbound links that are on that page. This is the ‘vote’ that other pages have helped cast on the page to increase the rank. Therefore, Google shares out the number of ‘votes’ on that page for all pages that have ‘voted’ for that page so that they all get a point towards their PageRank. Therefore, the less outbound links there are on a page the higher that page will rank and that ‘vote’ will be valued more when linked to other pages.

According to many experts, Google uses an algorithm to calculate PageRank. This algorithm is not known by people other than Google. Like all algorithms, moving from level 1 to 2 will be much easier than moving from level 2 to 3. When calculating PageRank, previous positions do not count in that all other information is discarded and PageRank calculated afresh. If two pages without any other links ‘vote’ for each other, their PageRank values will be calculated based on each others PageRanks. Therefore, one of them will have inaccurate information as it was calculated based on the other’s PageRank, which had not been calculated yet. This will consequently lead to the second one having inaccurate information because it will also be calculated based on inaccurate data.

In order to get to a more accurate PageRank value, Google uses the newly calculated PageRank values to calculate slightly more accurate PageRank values. After repeating the calculations about fifty times, the difference between the results starts becoming negligible and Google gets its values at that point. However, based on this algorithm, it is almost impossible to have 100% accuracy rates for PageRank values. This is because the initial information used was not accurate and subsequent calculations were based on that information. This long process is the reason why PageRank updates take as long as they do.

Related Posts

Search engine marketing involves all activities that can be used to promote a website, a business or earn a website owner income. SEM involves activities such as paid inclusions, which involves paying search engines to make it easier for a website to be found by internet users. For some search engines, this is the only way that websites can get listed. Most website owners prefer paying because it means their sites will be listed sooner than others and internet users will be able to keep track of changes being made on the site. Another aspect of SEM is placing advertisements on the website to market a product or website. Pay per click is another SEM technique used by search engines and website owners to generate traffic for websites. In this case, payment is made per every click of the advertisement.

Both SEO and SEM techniques are drawn towards generating traffic to a website, promoting a product and bringing up profits. One of the biggest differences in these two techniques is the SEM is almost guaranteed and takes place immediately but SEO requires more work, monitoring and patience to yield results. SEM is more expensive because it is a fast and reliable way of promoting a website. SEM mainly gets people to click on a website link. After that website users have a little time to convince users that they can find what they are looking for on that website. This is where SEO comes in. SEO techniques have to be applied to make sure that users get what they are looking for and will come back to that site to look for further information in the future.

The purpose of SEO is to make a website more usable by search engines and internet users. SEO is directly related to SEM because without it, the marketing techniques will not be implemented to achieve the final desired goal. In addition, without SEM, a website would probably never be viewed and that would make all SEO attempts futile. Search engine optimization can be termed as a cheaper and long term answer to increase traffic generation and promote a website. SEM includes the efforts put in to ensure that the website is actually visible to internet users. SEO is a free technique that consumes much more time than SEM and does not offer any guarantees to promote a website.

Related Posts

This information retrieval system is used mainly to capture spam documents that contain many repetitive key phrases but very little useful content. Such pages stuffed with keywords can easily be eliminated this way. This technique has been helpful when searching websites that contain many ‘honeypots’. These are phrases that advertisers use frequently and therefore pay website owners to incorporate in their pages. A page with too much of this offers no real information to internet users and is therefore considered as spam. The phrase based indexing and retrieval system has also been used to detect duplicate content, identify spam and rank pages in terms of popularity hence make more use of pages that users want to use.

Another important role played by phrase based indexing and retrieval system is exploring documents that are on the internet and put together the phrases that appear in the same documents. It searches for the exact keyword and any other common phrases that appear on both or all documents. This technique ensures that search results yielded put together these documents because they more likely than not have related information that users can use. It also determines in what order documents should appear on the results page.

Phrase based indexing and retrieval system may sometimes get mixed up when a term is common in two or more different scenarios. In this case, the search engine will create clusters or groups of documents that are related and will all appear on the search results page although the order in which they appear will be based on the most common context. The system will create different clusters and give them individual cluster names and the documents with the most used phrase in each cluster are displayed on the results page. Google will then determine how the results will be presented and show those in the results page. This gives the internet users a broader results page and ensures that they get what they are looking for. Google’s aim at designing this system was to identify and deal with spam documents as well as ensure users get the most out of their search results.

Related Posts

Choosing the Niche
One way to do this is using the flagship technique. This technique requires users to put in much time to ensure that it works. It entails focusing on a selected number of blogs from a certain niche. This means putting as much time as possible to ensure that the blog is popular and generates as much traffic as possible. This technique attracts direct advertisers to the site because they know that their products will be viewed by internet users. Flagship technique works for people who have the niche knowledge, networking ability and the patience to ensure a blog is well-fed.

Pay Per Post
Another way people can make money from blogging is by using the pay per post technique. It involves creating individual blog pages and building up their PageRank values then submitting them on blog websites that pay users for every blog they post. The amount paid per post will be based on the popularity of the blog and its PageRank value.

Automated Blogging
Automated blogging is another way people use to make money. This involves creating blogs that automatically get content from news sources, search engines and RSS feeds and uses that as content for the blog. Users can include a link back to the original content to avoid infringing copyrights. Website owners make money from Google AdSense and other affiliate programs and should have as many blogs as possible to capitalize on income.

Selling Text Links
Bloggers can also make money by selling text links to websites that are trying to build their Google PageRank. When using this technique, Bloggers need to focus on a particular niche to ensure that building PageRank is the priority. Bloggers can either buy pre-existing links that already have high PageRank to resell or they can build their own PageRank and sell the links. This technique works best for people who have already built their PageRank and have focused on one particular niche and therefore have a reliable and guaranteed audience.

Focus on High Paying Keywords/Topics
Other Bloggers create blogs using expensive keywords and then set up affiliate programs or Google AdSense and lets the blog generate the income automatically. Expensive keywords are not very popularly used but when used, they more often than not generate into sales. In order to get keyword rich content, most Bloggers sub-contract professional writers to provide them with content and therefore reduces the amount of work required to make money on the blog.

Most techniques used to make money on blogs can be used together with others and therefore capitalize on this. However, Bloggers should be careful not to venture into too many money-making techniques as they may lose focus on all of them and therefore make little or no money.

Related Posts

Title and Meta Tags

1. Ignoring the Title Tag
2. Duplicate title tags
3. Auto generated title tags
4. Improper use of Meta Tags or Site without Meta Tags
5. Same/similar meta description on more than one pages

Linking Strategy

1. Links to and from Bad Sites
2. Link Acquisition Speed
3. Broken links
4. Mismanaged internal link juice
5. Exchanging links (if you are not cautious)
6. Poor Use of Internal Anchor Text
7. Similar Anchor Text

URL Structure

1. No Canonical Redirect
2. Page Cloaking
3. Ignoring URLs
4. Bad redirects
5. Dynamic URL

Content

1. Pseudo Duplicate Content
2. Duplicate Content Pages
3. Thin Content Pages
4. Poorly written of Content
5. Content getting buried over time

Design and Usability

1. Invisible Text & Links
2. Invalid HTML
3. Use Crawler Unfriendly Development Methods
4. Ignoring Images
5. Using framesets
6. Picking a Poor Content Management System
7. Poor site usability
8. Having too much Graphics in your page
9. Incorrectly Designed Websites
10. alt tags

Keywords

1. Stuffing Keywords in the content
2. Use of Untargeted Keywords and Phrases
3. Focus on more then 2-3 keywords in a page

Others but important elements

1. Not Starting Early Enough
2. Traffic Generation
3. Shadow Domains
4. robots.txt oops
5. Over-Optimized Pages
6. Neglecting a site map
7. Not Investing in Site Promotion

Related Posts