Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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Content is King in SEO?

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

by Junaid Ashraf Mianoor

Seo services are basically performed to make a website visible in the search engine results at high posts. These seo services include further enhancements and development in website portions among which content is counted to be the important one. Its not that content is what on which website complete depends but without wholesome content a website can hardly get into high ranks of the search engines. Content is what that fills up your website, related to your product or service, giving complete know how and information about the product or service. Content makes the website’s position high, its basic purpose is to give the reader audience complete information-such way- that it makes their necessity and desire fulfilled. The best part of a website is when the reader audiences visits frequently and click the link as many times. This directly promotes the sales and the website gains in aspects, the money as well as rank in the search engine directory.

The website content can play the major role in attracting the reader audiences. The content follows some good points; the first good point is simplicity. The simpler the content the more attractive it gets. The simple content makes the website easily crawled in the search engine directory. The use of keywords phrases and tags are all meant to be placed simply in the website pages. The website content in seo services is critical, that is it should be performed smartly and with easy brains. Thinking of using complicated language and rich literature will make the reader run away, rather if the website content is simple, the reader feels like reading it again and again and get convinced for the statement, than of course the content is ideally perfect. Some weak points of content should also be cared, first thing is spellings, no matter if the reader himself is unable to read properly, he would like to have the text properly presented. Minor spelling mistakes, use of impropriate language will make the reader not interested, so it is always recommended to use good language terms and simple words so the reader feels comfortable to go through it.

Content is one part of the website that means a lot to the seo services, it is believed that website design and website content go parallel. Though all the parts are equally treated and all of them have their own values, but content is believed to be the king of seo as it is the most in quantity and quality. Website content has no formula; it is all done with brains. The website content is all extract of good use of keywords, correct knowledge, focused statements and reader audiences’ convenience. Content in seo services is enhances changed and aligned according to the website design. The website content is king of seo because it ranges in variety for changes and improvement. Complete impact on the reader audiences of the website and its product or service is all defined by its content.

The content of a website means a lot to the website owner, an owner usually to make his website perfect hires seo services to get rich content and appear unique. The website content needs to be unique and different from others, simplicity of words doesn’t mean it gets rough and dull; rather it gives a concept of direct and focus approach to the targeted audiences. For better results and higher ranking, contents needs to be treated in calculated intervals and the website must be updated to give the reader audience a fresh page every time he wants to get information.

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Posted in SEO, Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

The truth about duplicate content and Google

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

by Brad Callen

So a concern of many webmasters out there is the idea of duplicate content. With all you read out there today I am sure this has crossed your mind from time to time as it has mine.

The idea of Google being the 800-lb gorilla is a long standing one and thinking that maybe some how and some way they have the ability to screen the internet for duplicate content on the fly sounds CRAZY but we always perpetuate the idea as paranoia is much easier to believe than fact in many cases.

I mean think about this for a second just in terms of computing power:

1. Google shows a cached version of your website and not the actual site listing in its results. This means that Google ACTUALLY STORES information about your sites pages and updates them on the fly.

2. Google’s index likely contains BILLIONS of webpages.

So what this means is that for Google to determine if your site is an exact copy of another persons website than it has to store your pages content and screen that content against its ENTIRE active index…sounds nearly impossible as far as I am concerned. To boot you have to consider this is happening simultaneous to the active crawling and indexing and re-indexing of new pages in Google.

I hope this is putting a little bit of perspective to the situation for you. Let’s further the concept. I will take an article from Ezinearticles.com:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Cocoa-Beans-and-the-Fierce-Competition-in-the-Chocolate-Industry&id=1674880

Now let’s make the assumption that there is a duplicate content filter. If that is the case Google will eliminate all duplications of this article from its index and a phrase match for this article title will only return 1 result, the one it considers to be the best right?

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US304&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=”Cocoa+Beans+and+the+Fierce+Competition+in+the+Chocolate+Industry”

Yet somehow there are 162 results for that title. You can do this for every article title you test. Try it for yourself…it works and it is still the basis for article marketing and why article marketing still works.

Now this comes on the heels of an interesting article from Google which should further dispel any remaining myths you may have:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

As SEO experts have been telling us for years there is NO DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY!

Ok….that is a little bit of a lie.

There are 2 types of duplicate content: external and internal duplicate content. Let’s take the first of the two.

1. External duplicate content.

External duplicate content is very similar to the example I just posted above where you see multiple copies of the same content on DIFFERENT WEBSITES. That last part is very important there as it seperates what could be considered as a penalty but in reality it is just competition.

So how is it that 162 sites can list the exact same article in Google and they allow it?

The quick answer is that they really don’t care. Yeah it may be mudding up the index but if a site or page is still showing in the index it is because they have enough authority or link clout to be there. Pages will be removed from the index if they get stale or have no links pointing to them for example but not for duplicating content.

The real issue becomes how can you soar to the top with a site that has repurposed content? I am inclined to say its not easy and more importantly its just not a good idea. If you are using content to build your website AND to promote it be sure to do this:

1. Your sites content is unique to your website

2. Your promotional content (PR’s, articles, etc…) belong outside of your website

This makes your life a lot easier. IT IS NOT FOR DUPLICATE CONTENT THOUGH. It’s to avoid competition with those with the same content. If you must republish content from another website make sure you add some commentary or additional content around it. This can include images or other variations of media and your doing this for your visitors sake. You need to stand out, not repeat what others are doing.

Bottom line, with external content the site with the most links and authority in Google will always win. Same as with keyword competition.

2. Internal Duplicate Content.

Ok this is as real as it gets but for the same reason. Its a web filter to keep you from competing for yourself but its a lot simpler to handle than you think.

This is important for the following individuals:

a. If your running a CMS out of the box

b. If you are running an eCommerce platform

c. If you are pulling pages and having them autogenerated

These are just a few examples of people who have had issues with internal duplication.

When Google does index your pages it will look at your title tags and meta descriptions and one of the evaluating factors it uses to determine to actually list your pages are the uniqueness of those tags. If my shopping cart system has 10 products which are all “shoes” and that is what I use as my page title for all of them and the meta description for all of them is “tennis shoes” Google will look at all 10 and simply choose the best 1 to list.

This is a big and easy fix and something I would advise for both usability and for regular old good SEO.

Every page NEEDS a unique title tag

Every page SHOULD HAVE a unique description
(or at the vesy least enough unique content to differentiate it from the others pages on your site)

So rest easy. There is NOT a duplicate content penalty from Google. If you site is not ranking I can assure you its because of the lack of links targeting your core keywords so go out and start link building!

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Site Promotion, Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

Finding Quality Keywords Free: How To Do A Keywords Search

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

or people to find your web page, you need high-quality keywords. A high-quality keyword is a keyword that many people are searching for but few other web pages are using. You need to battle past your competitors to get to page one of the search engines, so the fewer the competitors, the better. Once you get there, you want a lot of customers to find you. Here’s how you can find quality keywords.

Go to Google’s keyword tool — just search Google for the phrase “keyword tool” and you’ll find it. You want to find a good keyword for something that you are offering, so start off with some phrases that describe it. Type them in.

Google’s keyword tool will ask you whether it should “use synonyms.” Allow it to. Click the “Get keyword ideas” button and Google will give you a list of keywords with their search frequencies. Download them in “.csv” form so you can load them into a spreadsheet (”.csv” means “comma separated values”). Repeatedly try other phrases and download and merge the spreadsheets.

Suppose you decide to set up a free print-on-demand T-shirt store on the web. It wouldn’t cost you a thing to put a NASA image on a T-shirt. How to make money is less obvious. For that you need to find keywords for the products. What products will you be offering? T-shirts, of course, but how many ways are there to say T-shirt? At least these: T-shirt (which Google translates into “t shirt”), T-shirts, Tshirt, Tshirts, tee shirt, tee shirts, tees (but “tee” often means golf tee). There are other varieties of apparel: tank, spaghetti strap, camisole, baseball jersey, sweatshirt… For that matter, you could generalize: shirt, shirts, apparel, clothing. And there are non-apparel items: BBQ apron, coaster, tote bag, cutting board, mouse pad, or generally, gifts.
Since you are interested in using NASA photos, you need to consider keywords related to space and astronomy. Here are some words people may be using: astronomy, universe, galaxy, cosmos, space, nebula, star (although this is more likely used for movie stars), stellar, solar system, planet, moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, comet, asteroid, … and people may combine those with telescope, Hubble, photo, photograph, image, …

There are a lot of combinations to explore — a lot of work and a lot of opportunity.
When you’re ready to find the high-quality keywords, add another column to your spreadsheet. Label it “Results.” Fill in that column with some huge number, 999,999,999 say. Sort the spreadsheet in decreasing order by the average number of searches. Cut off the rows at the bottom of the spreadsheet which have too few searches to be worth your consideration. If you want at least 50 searches per day, throw away rows with fewer than 1500 average monthly searches.

Go down the spreadsheet looking up each of the keywords in Google. Put quotes around the keyword phrase in the Google search field. If you don’t put in the quotes, you’ll get too huge a number of results to be of interest — potentially every page mentioning any one of the words in the keyword phrase.

Google will tell you “Results 1 – 10 of about NUMBER for KEYWORD” where NUMBER is the estimate of the number of results and KEYWORD is the phrase you typed in. For each of the keywords you look up, you can copy the estimated NUMBER of results back into your spreadsheet into the results column. When Google says “about NUMBER”, it is a crude estimate. When I looked up ‘”galaxy t shirts”‘ the original estimate was 6,480 pages with the keyword phrase. By repeatedly clicking on the highest result page number at the bottom, I came to the end of the list of results and found that there were only 106. If however you get to more than 600 and you get a message, “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 601 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included,” you should suspect Google is trying to discourage you. Maybe you’d better just go with the estimate on page one.
While you are looking at the number of results, you can glance at the first results page and see if the keyword has a special meaning it would make it unsuitable for you. For example, thinking of selling astronomy-related T-shirts, you find “la galaxy t shirts” are related to a sports team, utterly irrelevant to your purpose.

After you have gone far enough down the list, looking up the keywords with sufficient numbers of searches, sort your spreadsheet by increasing numbers in your results column. Among the top keywords in your spreadsheet should be up to three good primary keywords to optimize your page for. (It’s hard to optimize a page for more than three keywords.) They have enough searches to be interesting, and they have the fewest competing pages among the interesting keywords.

Your primary keywords won’t necessarily be the first three. A keyword a little further down the list may have significantly more searches and only a few more competing pages. Or maybe only one or two have few enough competing pages. It should be utterly trivial to get onto page one of Google if there are only five pages competing for the same keyword, it might take a little bit longer if there are 500, longer still if there are 5000, and if there are 5 million, forget about it.
When you get to NASA images of the planet earth, you find something like this; “Planet earth shirt” looks promising: maybe 880 searches a month and 112 competing pages (estimated). In itself, that’s not large. “The planet shirt” has 880 searches/month for 388 competing pages. Together they may be worth some effort.

“Planet shirts” has 1900 searches for 1810 competing pages; “the planet t shirt” has 720 searches for 1900 competing pages; “planet shirt” has 5400 searches for 4320 competing pages. “Planet shirt” and “planet shirts” have an attractive number of searches, but the numbers of competitors make it look difficult to get to page one quickly. “The planet t shirt” may not be worth the effort.

“Planet t shirt” has 2900 searches for 27500 competing pages; “planet t shirts” has 1300 searches for 35300 competing pages. “Planet t shirt” and “planet t shirts” have way too many competitors. It’s nice to know you shouldn’t devote any time to them.

There you have it: a cheap and easy — well, cheap and tedious way to find quality keywords that can bring your page a lot of hits.

This article was adapted from a book by Thomas Christopher on opening online T-shirt stores. Visit his How-To-Shirts web site for information about the book. Dr. Christopher, a former CS Professor, loves to find out how to do something and explain it to others.

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Discover the Secrets of SEO

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

There is so much information floating around out there about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to get some rankings. So much of it is contradictory and confusing. I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the secrets of top rankings.

So, let’s jump right in with the secrets to SEO success….

Search Engine Secret # 1: There are no secrets! The search engines make it all very public and clear what you need to do to get top rankings. The success lies in the details and proper implementation. But there is no top secret, proprietary technique for getting top rankings.

OK, so now we all know there are no secrets, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t information you need to know, such as:

If you don’t optimize your site, you won’t get top rankings. It really is that plain and simple. If the engines can’t spider your site and you don’t have links and strong content, you don’t stand a chance against the sites that do have all that in place. So many people don’t want to spend money on SEO, or are afraid to take the plunge but then they can’t understand why they don’t have rankings. So maybe there is a secret – maybe the secret is take action and get your site optimized!

Your site structure matters! I can’t tell you how often people have said to me “I know my site is a mess, but I don’t want to spend the money fixing it, so can’t you just throw up some keywords and Meta tags and get me some rankings?” Ummmm, no, I can’t. Your site structure is your foundation. You would never build a house without a solid foundation, why would you build an SEO campaign without a solid foundation?

Don’t just focus on small keyword list that is made up of the most popular and competitive keywords. You will be missing out on opportunities for great keyword phrases that convert really well. Expand your list. Include long tail phrases. They may have less traffic but they will convert at a higher rate and if you get enough of these phrases they will likely add up to be better than your original list.

SEO is changing and evolving so staying current on what the engines are looking for is important. Either hire a firm to get you top rankings or find a way to make sure you stay current with information you can trust.
Social media and SEO go hand in hand, so get out there and be social. You can optimize your site without doing social media, and you can do social media without an optimized site. But why would you? The two enhance and compliment each other. The truth is there is a lot of competition out there for website traffic so why not use all the tools at your disposal?

Focusing on SEO without focusing on conversions is a mistake. You are going to work so hard, or pay someone your hard earned money to get you top rankings. You can’t afford to ignore marketing issues. Make sure your site is going to convert all that great new traffic you are going to send to your site.

Google Webmaster Tools and your web stats are a goldmine of information. Make sure you take time to see what words people are actually using to find your site and see what people do once they get to your site. See how many people link to you and which of those sources are driving traffic. Find out if there are errors on your site. There is so much information to be analyzed; you just need to make the time to check it out.

Successful SEO requires time, patience, skill, knowledge, persistence, attention to detail, knowledge of HTML, current information and an understanding of marketing helps too – then you can write the best possible text while using the keywords well, and it will also help you write compelling Title and Description tags….OR – the willingness to invest in a professional firm to get those top rankings for you.

By Jennifer Horowitz

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How Keyword Rich Domain Names Will Increase Google Rankings

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Everyone who wants a website to be hosted on the internet will have a purpose. The common aim for every website owner is to get more visitors to the website. When you run a website for your online business, you have to concentrate more on getting many visitors to your website. Search engine traffic is the highly targeted traffic, but to get visitors from search engines, your website must have high Google rankings. Apart from on page SEO, it is possible to increase search engine rankings by taking advantage of domaining. While buying domain name is an important task for a webmaster, many people ignore the importance of domaining. A domain name which contains the keywords of your website is likely to increase search engine ranking.

Search engines will first look out for URLs containing keywords that the user searched. If the search keyword matches the keyword in the domain name of your website, your website will be displayed in the search engine results increasing the possibility of getting more number of visitors. Your website will get higher increased ranking if it contains keywords in its domain name. Using exact keywords in the domain name is a small change in your domaining plan, but it can give you positive results which you thought were tough to achieve.

Domaining has to be considered before hosting a website. If you have already established a website that has a few visitors, you should not change the domain name because users will remember the website only using the domain name. Though domaining is important for search engine rankings, you cannot expect to increase the ranking of your website only with the help of keyword rich domain names. Lot more steps are involved in search engine optimization and the importance of any of those steps cannot be ignored if you want higher search engine rankings.

While choosing domain names, many webmasters are unable to choose between branding and keyword rich domain names. If your website is aimed at selling products in a niche and if you have a small budget for marketing your website, then keyword rich domaining can greatly help you achieve your goal. Brandable domain names are easy to remember for your repeating visitors. You cannot expect your visitors to search for the same keyword every time to reach your website. Also, search engine ranking is not a constant number and the ranking of your website changes continuously.

With more and websites being hosted on the internet, finding the domain name that you like has become near impossible. Many people buy domain names at lower rates and wait for some time to sell it for a higher price. When you search for domain names, come up with as many names as possible that reflect your business. If you cannot buy domain name that contains exact keywords of your website, you can look for names that describe your website niche. For business websites, hyphens in domain names are to be avoided even though search engine optimization is not affected by the hyphens in the domain names.

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Posted in Domain Names, SEO, Website Development | 2 Comments »

All You Need To Know About Long Tail Keywords

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Have you heard of the 80-20 rule? Well, an Italian economist called Pareto noticed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. His work was taken up by others until it entered mainstream thinking. You’ve probably heard variations of what’s now become known as the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto principle. They go like this: we spend 80% of our time with 20% of our friends, or we wear 20% of our favorite clothes 80% of the time.

More generally, of course, it is a common rule of thumb in business: e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” In business, for example, Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% percent of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.

So far, so good. But what if you found out that – let’s take your website, for instance – the Pareto principle was not so robust? That 80% of your major keywords only account for 20% of your sales? In other words, by focusing on a handful of major keywords you may be missing out on the ‘real’ keywords that prospective customers are actually using to find your product or service.

Most webmasters apply the 80-20 rule: that the top keyword provide 80% of the business, but in practice, this has proved to be the opposite. In other words, the keywords that are most sought after are actually rarely those that provide the most business.

Let me put it another way: your web pages are much more likely to gain more of their search engine referrals via a mixture of low-volume search queries instead of a tight bunch of keywords. And this means that by focusing on identifying the keywords which receive a lower volume of search queries you will increase in the overall amount of prospective customers from, say, Google, to your website.

What are these keywords? And will they actually increase my visitor numbers?

Well, keywords such as this are generally recognised as Long Tail Keywords. “Long Tail” because they are phrases that are usually made up of more than three words. For instance: “Paint” is not long tail, but “Outdoor paint for wooden shed” is long tail. Or, take “shoes”: “Adidas running shoes” is almost there. But “Adidas running shoes for women” is a long tail keyword.

Can you see the difference between “horse training” and “quarter horse training products”? Here is another example: ‘Credit Cards’ is the general keyword but effective long tail keywords within this niche could include: ‘good low cost credit cards for nurses’, ‘credit cards for people with bad credit’, ‘credit cards with low interest’, ‘benefits of corporate credit cards’, and so on.

The fundamental thinking about long tail keywords is that because there is less competition for them, it is far easier to achieve an optimal ranking with the search engines. Moreover, it’s much more likely that people who enter particular long tail keywords are highly likely to be actual customers, rather than web surfers. If you can optimise your web pages while delivering high value, informative content that matches those particular search queries you are highly likely to attract visitors who are actively seeking actual information about products using your long tail keywords and other, similar, phrases.

And there’s no doubt that long tail keywords are a highly effective at attracting traffic. What’s more important, there are thousands and thousands of long tail keywords which no one or very few people are pinpointing so can easily be utilised.

Here, then, are four major reasons why you need to consider the use of long tail keywords to make your web pages user search engine friendly:

First, focusing on long tail keywords will slowly but surely lead to more search engine traffic because you will have many, many web pages indexed and ranked for specific phrases related to your products or services. This means higher visibility and so a greater volume amount of search engine traffic.

Next, long tail keywords lead to higher purchase ratios. Visitors who visit your web site because they have entered long tail search phrases are highly likely to buy your product or service or follow through on affiliate programs. By focusing on these long tail phrases, you are actually zeroing in on a vast market of potential buyers.

Third, long tail keywords lead to higher page ranking because of there is generally far less competition. There is so much more scope for variation when you start digging for the phrases that people actually use when they enter search terms.

Finally, using long tail keywords means that your sites have the potential for greater monetization. People who find your site because they used a search engine such as Google or Yahoo are high value for this reason: they are people who are looking for explicit information. So they are highly likely to follow relevant advertisements or subscribe to your blog feed or ezine.

So here’s the nutshell: more long tail keywords equals more potential customers equals more likely sales. Good luck!

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