Internet Marketing Strategies and Techniques

Tips for Building SEO in Social Media

2011-11-10T23:28:00.000-08:00

Twitter
- Post every day. You can comment on industry news, link to your blog, high-five someone else's comment, retweet someone's blog post, ask for help with something, provide help to someone else....the list goes on.
- Engage in conversation with customers and anyone else who mentions your company or your product. Thank people, ask questions, solicit feedback, etc.
- Search Twitter for mentions of your competitors and their competing products, to learn which words people are using. Now you start using these words, too. It will help you when people search for what you're offering.
- For bonus points, you can use the hash tag - # - in front of an important keyword. This is how many people mark out and search topics in Twitter. For example, you might tweet "Read how @StephanieH improved her time with #WideRunningShoes on our blog" and include a link.
- Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly for links to save characters...140 isn't as much as you think.
- If you see someone who could use what you sell complaining about a competitor, offer to help them somehow - but don't disparage your competitor, or his product.
- Find the people who are influential in your target market, and follow them.
- Thank people individually for following you. Do NOT use an autoresponder. It's a pity for someone's first interaction with you to feel canned - and believe me, experienced Twitter users can smell an autoresponse a mile away.

Facebook
- Post every day. You can post the same things on Facebook that you do on Twitter, with the added benefit of being able to include a photo and a much longer comment.
- Invite engagement by asking people what they think about something you've posted. Comments are noticed by search engines. In fact, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive found a correlation between comments on a company's Facebook page and high rankings in search engine results.
- Search Facebook for mentions of your competitors and their competing products. That will tell you which words people use when they're looking for what you sell. Now you start using these words, too, so you'll pop up in product searches.
- If you see someone complaining about a competitor, you can send an offer of practical help - or even a coupon! - to that person. Don't disparage your competitor or their product...that's not good etiquette.
- Give people a reason to "like" your Facebook page. You might want to offer access to special deals or coupons, or to some other benefit, such as a "fans only" video page.

LinkedIn
- Join groups specific to your industry and to your target customers.
- Post interesting articles and news to these groups. Be careful not to promote your product or company too hard. Some groups will kick you out for being overly self-promotional. Make sure you read the terms for each group.
- Answer questions people post in your groups.
- Write recommendations for people you've done business with.
- Ask your good customers to write recommendations for you.

Your blog
- Post about industry trends and issues.
- Post about business issues that aren't specific to your industry, but interesting to other business people who may be reading your blog.
- Post about your own company's news and developments. Your blog can be the modern-day press room - just make sure you tag news announcements appropriately, so company news can be found.
- Offer insights and advice based on things you learn in the course of business, even if you aren't talking directly about your own product.
- If you have something thoughtful to say about someone else's blog that is too long for a comment, write a post on your blog, linking to the post you are commenting on. You'll be noticed by the blogger, and he or she may choose to link to your blog, too.

Other people's blogs
- Comment on people's posts, but avoid generic comments like "great post." Try to add something unique and interesting to the discussion. See the section above for when you have a lot to say about someone's post.
- Ask if you may guest post if you think you have something to contribute. Many bloggers are happy to have guest authors post, if they're adding value.

News sites
- Comment on news stories that are relevant to your industry and your business. Don't be snarky - be thoughtful. You can also share these news stories in your social accounts by linking to them. If people read the comments, they'll probably notice yours.

Are meta tags really dead?

2010-03-03T19:51:00.000-08:00

There are multiple openions and school of thoughts whether to add meta tags on your web page since major search engines have changed the algorithm for ranking websites. The reason being, the title and other meta tags have been misused by webmasters as avenues of stuffing the keywords in order to get higher ranking is search engines.

Now since ranking critiea of major search engines have changed but still title and meta tags have relevance in search engine ranking.

Please be informed that Title tag is actually not the meta tag and holds a lot of weight with Google and other engines.

While Google no longer consider description tag for ranking purposes, it is still an important element to include on every page. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that, just because this tag no longer holds ranking value, it shouldn’t contain keyphrases. By all means, it should.

The keyword tag hasn’t been used since the mid-1990s. It doesn’t hurt to put a few phrases in this tag, including perhaps some common misspellings, but it won’t help your rankings one bit.

Google simplifies multiple owners verification in webmaster

2010-03-03T19:17:00.000-08:00

Google has simpliied the owership of the verified site in webmaster tool.
Now there is new Add a user tool on the site verification page, which on filling will provide complete access of the website and webmaster tool previleges to the new owner.

Dont ignore your videos, optimize them to rank in SERP

2010-02-25T20:43:00.000-08:00

Blended search is getting popular day by day and you can see videos, news, maps and other related content are now displayed along the standard search results.

Thus if you are not optimizing your videos, start it now -

Insert keywords into your video filenames.
Host your videos on YouTube, and embed these YouTube videos into your website pages. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
Optimize your YouTube videos by inserting important key-phrases into the videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.
Creating a video library on your site is a good idea. Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

Please share your experiences with me. If you have optimized your videos, which tactics did you use and which have worked best for you?

Long tail Vs Short Search Queries: Which is best

2010-02-24T20:29:00.000-08:00

This topic is actually in the debate from a long time and still bothering the advertizer to decide which search queries to target, long tail or short tail.

By the way, there is a difference between keywords & search queires - While keywords are the inventory any advertiser buys, search queries are the actual key-phrases people type into a search engine.

Based on the analysis of the google adwords accounts, researchers have come to a conclusion that long tail search queries drives more targetted clicks than the short tail. Also long tail queires consume more PPC budget and generate more conversions with less cost per click (CPC).

Thus its important to note that:

long tail search queries have enormous value
to achieve high ROI, it’s important to aggressively mine negative keywords and to effectively target more specific search queries.

So, always keep this thumb rule in mind, "Broad Match Keywods + Negative Keywords = Profitable Long Tail"

Keyword Research - How to

2009-11-24T06:22:00.000-08:00

Source: SEOmoz by Randfish on February 24th, 2008

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Through the detective work of puzzling out your market's keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated - with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are already actively seeking. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually every niche - not taking advantage is practically criminal.

How to Judge the Value of a Keyword

Every search phrase that's typed into an engine is recorded in one way or another, and keyword research tools like those described below allow us to retrieve this information. However, those tools cannot show us (directly) how valuable or important it might be to rank for and receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, we need to research further, make some hypotheses, test, and iterate - the classic web marketing formula.

The following is a basic, but valuable process for determining a keyword's value:

Ask yourself - is the keyword relevant to the content your website offers? Will searchers who find your site through this term find the likely answer to their implied question(s)? And will this traffic result in financial rewards (or other organizational goals) directly or indirectly? If the answer to all of these questions is a clear "Yes!," proceed...
Search for the term/phrase in the major engines - are there search advertisements running along the top and right-hand side of the organic results? Typically, many search ads means a high value keyword, and multiple search ads above the organic results often means a highly lucrative and directly conversion-prone keyword.
Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at Google AdWords and/or Yahoo! Search Marketing. Choose "exact match" and point the traffic to the most relevant page on your website. Measure the traffic to your site, and track impressions and conversion rate over the course of at least 2-300 clicks (this may take only a day or two with highly trafficked terms, or several weeks with keyword in lesser demand).
Using the data you've collected, make an educated guess about the value of a single visitor to your site with the given search term or phrase. For example, if, in the past 24 hours, your search ad has generated 5,000 impressions, of which 100 visitors have come to your site and 3 have converted for total profit (not revenue!) of $300, then a single visitor for that keyword is worth approx. $3 to your business. Those 5,000 impressions in 24 hours could probably generate a click-through rate of between 30-40% with a #1 ranking (see the leaked AOL data mining for more on potential click-through-rates), which would mean 1500-2000 visits per day, at $3 each, or ~$1.75 million dollars per year. No wonder businesses love search marketing!

Of course, even the best estimates of value fall flat against the hands-on process of optimizing and calculating ROI. Remember that the time and money you invest in a search marketing campaign must be weighed against any returns, and even though SEO is typically one of the highest return marketing investments, measuring success is still critical to the process.

Understanding the Long Tail of the Keyword Demand Curve

It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these "popular" search terms actually make up less than 30% of the overall searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what's commonly called the "long tail" of search. The tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day (or even only once, ever!), but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world's demand for information through search engines.

Understanding the search demand curve is critical, because it stresses the importance of "long-tail" targeted content - pages with information not directed at any particular single, popular query, but rather simply exposing the myriad of human thought, research, and opinion to the spiders of the search engines. As an example, below I've copied a chart of SEOmoz's own keyword traffic, illustrating the small number of queries sending larger amounts of traffic alongside the plethora of rarely-searched terms and phrases that bring the bulk of our search referrals:

In the graph above (courtesy of Enquisite's amazing long tail KW referral tracking), you can see that the bright green terms in the head make up only a tiny fraction of the overall traffic, while the mid and dark blue areas comprise a considerable majority, and yet contain terms that have only brought 1-2 visits to the site. The numerical chart below shows this in greater detail - note that our top phrases bring in only a minuscule percent of our total search traffic.

Ignore the long tail at your peril - search marketing and web site content strategies must allow for this "impossible to predict" form of visits or risk losing out to a more expository and prolific competitor.

Keyword Research Sources

Where do we get all of this knowledge about keyword demand and keyword referrals? From research sources like these:

Here's an example of mining keyword research data from Google's AdWords Estimator Tool:

We can see that Google is predicting both the cost for running campaigns for these terms as well as estimates of the number of clicks a campaign might receive. You can use these latter numbers (under the "estimated clicks/day" column) to get a rough idea of how popular a particular keyword or phrase is in comparison to another. The green, horizontal bar in the "search volume" column can also help to show comparative estimates of demand.

Other, less popular sources for keyword information exist, as do tools with more advanced data, and these are covered excellently in Rebecca's Professional's Guide to Keyword Research.

Keyword Difficulty

In order to know which keywords to target now (and which to pursue later), it's essential to not only understand the demand for a given term or phrase, but the work required to achieve those rankings. If mighty competitors block the top 10 results and you're just starting out on the web, the uphill battle for rankings can take months or years of effort bearing little to no fruit. This is why it's essential to understand keyword difficulty.

To get a rough idea of the level of competition faced for a particular term or phrase, the following metrics are all valuable:

Search Demand Volume (how many people are searching for this keyword)
Number of Advertising Competitors
Strength (age, link power, targeting, and relevance) of the Top 10 Results
Number of Search Results (it can be valuable to use advanced operators like "exact search" or the allintitle, allinurl operators here as well - see more on using these specialized searches for keyword research here)

Of course, if you'd like to save time, SEOmoz's own Keyword Difficulty Tool does a good job collecting all of these metrics and providing a comparative score for any given search term or phrase.

In-house Salary Survey Results

2009-11-24T04:49:00.000-08:00

Source: Search Engine Land, Nov 23, 2009 by Chris Sherman:

Want to make a recession-resistant career move? Consider going to work as an in-house search marketer. According to the second annual SEMPO in-house salary survey, compensation for search marketers working on behalf of a single organization actually increased during the past year, despite a turbulent economy that took a toll on many other types of online marketing.

“With the economy in the longest recession of decades, it’s heartening for our annual in-house salary survey to substantiate that search engine marketing is the employment bright spot in sales and marketing,” said SEMPO President Sara Holoubek.

SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional’s Organization, surveyed more than 600 in-house SEO professionals during the second quarter of this year. Among the key findings:

2009 yearly salaries for an individual contributor with 1-3 years relevant experience range from $40,000 to $80,000; senior manager salaries range $70,000 to $120,000; and vice presidents with responsibilities for large SEM campaigns or a team of specialists earn from $160,000 to $250,000.

In-house SEM budgets are mostly below $50K or above $250K with few in the in-between area.

The majority of respondents are working to maintain or increase the ROI from search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns with flat or restrained budgets for the remainder of 2009.

Practitioners also are responsible for a broadening spectrum of online marketing activities including: organic SEO and SEM programs, social media campaigns, email marketing, graphical ad campaigns, paid inclusion programs, vertical search engine targeting, affiliate marketing programs, and shopping engines.

Another interesting finding is that search marketing is now clearly perceived as a marketing function rather than as an IT/programming function:

Essential Checklist before you launch the website

2009-04-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

This article contains some of the very important check list bef

Check this link - http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/04/08/15-essential-checks-before-launching-your-website/

Estimated Growth in Search Engine Marketing until 2013

2009-03-03T22:02:00.000-08:00

SEO budgets will increase in the next five years, while paid search budgets will decline relative to the overall marketing budgets for companies.

MediaPost reports the growth for SEO campaigns will increase from 17.7% in 2009 to 20.3% in 2013.

At the same time, growth for paid search campaigns will decline from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013. Growth for both SEO and paid search both will decline between 2008 and 2009, due to the economy.

Search marketing will continue to grow over the years, reaching $23.4 billion by 2013, up from 12.2 billion in 2008.

SEO spend will grow from 1.5 billion in 2008 to 3.85 billion in 2013, while paid search will grow from 7.7 billion in 2008 to 14.7 billion in 2013.

By 2013, SEO will account for more than contextual ads, which will be earning just 3.6 billion, compared to SEO at 3.85 billion.

SEO Interview Questions?

2008-04-18T01:43:00.000-07:00

There is a very nice post on Search Engine Land containing the questions to be asked while interviewing candidates for SEO position.

Here is the link to the post.

Robots.txt - Standards

2008-03-31T01:13:00.000-07:00

Hi friends,

Today I came across a very nice article about robots.txt on SEO Chat by James.

It covers topics of ranging how to create robots.txt for your web site, use of various syntax to allow and disallow various robots, search engine spiders to crawl your web site, internal directories and specific files, adding sitemaps auto-discovery, crawl-delay and adding comments in the robots.txt file.

Here is the link to the article.

TrustRank and factors responsible for increasing TrustRank

2008-03-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has introduced TrustRank phenomenon. It is a link analysis technique done manually by the experts that separates the useful web pages from the spam pages.

Like you trust web sites to choose products you buy and services you avail, similarly search engines decide which web site pages to include in their index.

Following are some of the important factors which search engines consider to gain and increase the TrustRank of web sites pages:

SSL Certificate
Hackers Safe Services and Logo
Long time registered domain name (10 years)
Street mailing address and contact info
Privacy Policy
Inbound links from major membership sites and authority sites.

Source: Elliance, an eMarketing firm

Reputation Monitoring Now Easy

2008-03-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

In ordert to check the comments & views about your brand, products, services and url on world wide web, you can save the custom rss feeds on variety of sources below:

Bloglines
Technorati
Google News
Google Blog Search
BlogPulse and
Icerocket

You can use My Yahoo, My MSN and google reader to subscribe to any or all your rss feeds.

You must know about iGoogle, google's new service which alllows you to save various rss feeds on the iGoogle home page.

Also google alerts sends you email alerts about your interest on a daily basis. You can also use google's advanced search feature to search your interest.

You can also use Trackur which provides you reputation monitoring services by paying some dollars on a monthly basis.

Thus by setting up alerts, tracking new search results, and checking discussions across blogs via RSS feeds you can easily monitor views about your company, brand and address any brand damage.

Some interesting facts about Social Media

2008-02-24T22:48:00.000-08:00

62% of MySpace visitors are older than 25 (40% are 35+), and 83% are makíng over $30,000 a year. Nineteen percent (19%) are makíng $100,000 and up...

On Facebook.com 46% are over 25 and 34% are 35+, but they've got deep pockets. Eighty-eight percent (88%) makë more than $30,000 and twenty-three percent (23%) makë $100,000 or more.

Social media giant Facebook is currently ADDING a million 25+ (non-student) adults per week to their rosters. That's 52 million new users a year.

YouTube.com gets over 50 million unique visitors per month. That equals over half a billion a year.

Facebook and MySpace have the equal daily traffic of Google. Experts predict within the next year they will DOUBLE the daily traffic of Google search.

(Source: Easy Web 2.0 Internet Marketing: Strategies for Quickly Building an Audience with Social Media by Gary Smith)

Convert Clicks in to Conversions

2008-02-15T05:21:00.000-08:00

Follow these tips for the landing pages & increase conversion rate of your web site:

Clearly specify the value proposition for the product. Think as a customer as to why would I buy this product.
Identify the goal funnel and make sure the value proposition should be specified through-out the funnel pages. This will help you to retain the customer until he completes the purchase.
The design and the layout of the web site should be simple and easy to navigate:

divide all the pages into different sections for proper site navigation
use appropriate & meaningful graphics
use breadcrumbs to let visitor know where he is
distinguish visited & non-visited links

Use call to actions on pages to drive visitors to cart section. They should be visible without scrolling.
Make sure there shouldnt be horizontal scrolling on pages. Also the height of the page should be too long.
If you have any offer e.g. free shipping, any discount, display it clearly on the web site.
Ask for testimonials from your current customers and highlight them on your web site. This will drive the visitors to purchase your products.

Internet Advertising Scenario in India

2008-02-13T22:15:00.000-08:00

Internet Marketing Facts & Figures

As of the end of 2007's third quarter, Google had almost 25 percent of the U.S. Internet advertising market, up from almost 21 percent in 2006's third quarter, according to IDC. Meanwhile, Yahoo's share during this period dropped to 11.3 percent from 12.3 percent, while Microsoft's declined to 5.2 percent from 5.8 percent, according to IDC.

In search usage, Google held a commanding 62.4 percent of queries worldwide, followed by Yahoo in a very distant second place with 12.8 percent, according to comScore. Microsoft ranked fourth with 2.9 percent, after Baidu (5.2 percent).

Internet Marketing and India

The latest report from CIA Factbook pegs the Indian Internet audience at 50.6 mn, 4th behind the US, China & Japan. The future growth in the Internet audience is expected to be from Brazil, Russsia, India & China (BRIC). Needless to say, the growth in the Internet audience will of course fuel a huge growth in advertising and communication on the Internet.
• The use of the Internet will move from just being a PC phenomenon to accessing the world wide web through other devices like mobiles, smart phones, etc.
• Mobile phone are growing at a very fast pace in India, especially the CDMA segment. This augurs well for the internet access, especially since the access device is beyond the PC.
• The Internet penetration in India is just about 4.5%. Hence, growth potential is huge. In the next five years, India is tipped to be the No. 2 country in terms of Internet Audience, 2nd only to China.
• The Internet audience in India is predominantly a male audience (70% male), 50% + in the 20 to 39 years age group and the largest primary access point is office. All this makes the Indian Internet audience a highly desirable audience for any marketer.
• To put this in perspective, the overall English print readership is around 30 mn and the English print advertising market is about US$ 400 mn. Compared with this the size of the Internet advertising market in 2005 was US$ 26 mn. The growth potential, is therefore, really huge.
• Display advertising is expected to grow at a rate of at least 50% for this year. In 5 years time, display advertising on the net is expected to grow to US$ 128 mn. Adding on search, which is growing at a phenomenal pace ( In the US, search accounts for 40% of the spends on the Internet and this trend is being mirrored elsewhere), the overall advertising spends on the Internet is estimated to be around US$ 214 mn.
• This would be approximately 4.9% of the overall advertising spends in the country. Again, the projections seem quite on track as the Internet spend ratio in the US for 2004 was at 4.8% and for the 2005 at approx. 6.5%.
• If anything, the actual spends may even be higher than the current projections.

Attributes determining Google Adwords Quality Score

2008-02-07T21:54:00.000-08:00

Below are the attributes or the factor (listed as per the order of their importance) which actually determines the quality score of Google Adwords account:

Click-Through Rate: An advertisement’s click-through rate within Google’s search results page.

Ad Text/Keyword Relevance: Static placement of keywords within an advertisement’s body copy and headline.

Historical Performance: An algorithm that collects multiple quality scores for a single keyword in order to determine whether a keyword’s performance is increasing or decreasing.

Landing Page Keyword Relevance: The placement of core keywords on each landing page.

Keyword Bid Price: How much the advertiser is willing to pay per-click.

Overall Ad Group Performance: The tabulation of every keyword’s quality score within an ad group which determines the ad group’s score.

Predictive Performance: A calculation that predicts how a keyword will perform in the future by combining past, current and predicted quality scores.

Keyword Match Type: Using broad, exact and phrase match within your ad group for each keyword.

User Behavior in Relation to other Paid Listings: An algorithm that incorporates the number of paid listings a user visits before they take an action on your landing page.

Human Review: A review conducted by real-live Googlers who review and determine if an advertisement is relevant to a specific search.

Landing Page Conversion Rate: The number of conversions generated directly by a pay-per-click advertisement.

User Behavior in Relation to Organic Listings: An algorithm that incorporates the number of organic listings a user visits before they take an action on your landing page.

Ways to improve traffic to your web site

2008-01-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

Follow these steps and you will see quantum increase in your web site traffic-

Write and submit articles: E.g. ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, articlescity.com etc. E.g. Current Trends In Enterprise Collaboration
Social bookmark each and every pages of your web site, no matter how many pages are there, e.g. http://del.icio.us/syncexims07
Add your web site to important directories no matter you have to pay for it, e.g. http://dir.yahoo.com, business.com etc.
Its worth to submit your web site to www.dmoz.org, although its tricky and time consuming.
Create an impressive email signature containing a link back to your web site and always use it in all your email communications.
Create an RSS feed for your web site, e.g. news, events, products etc and submit it to feed directories. Its worth burning the feed on www.feedburner.com
Set up a social bookmarking site using facebook, linkedIn etc.
Start a blog and once you do it, start commenting about it on other blogs.
Start newsletter campaign and you will be blessed with massive amount of traffic to your web site.
Dont forget to speak about your web site in to magazines, publications etc.

Things You should Know Before Optimizing a Web Site

2007-11-27T04:43:00.000-08:00

In order to make your SEO efforts successful, you should get the answers to the following questions in advance:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffíc, more publicity etc.

2) What is the time-frame for this project?

3) What is the budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questíons will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questíons answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScrípt, Flat HTML etc)
2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)
3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g.
www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing "?" symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).
4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?
5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScrípt drop-down menus?
6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?
7) Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps ?
8) What is the current link popularity of the site?
9) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?
10) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?
11) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?
12) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)
13) What are the site's geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?
14) What are the site's demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)
15) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client's target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?
16) Who are my/my client's major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?
17) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?
18) Do I have access to site traffíc logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?
19) How do I plan on tracking my or my client's conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?
20) What are my/my client's expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?

Your Ad isnt shown on Google - Possible Reasons

2007-10-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

Here is the list of issues which could be the possible reasons behind - your Google Adwords PPC ads aren't shown on google search network:

1. Your ad has been disapproved.

2. The keyword you used to search for your ad is not performing well and has become inactive for search.

3. Your ad rank is not high enough to allow your ad to show on the first page of search results.

4. Your ad is showing, but in a lower position possibly due to a shift in the competitive landscape.

5. Your regionally targeted ad doesn't include the region (e.g. city, state, or country) associated with your computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address.

6. Your ad is targeting a language that's different from the language you've selected for your Google.com preferences.

7. Your daily budget has been exhausted and your ads are no longer showing for the day.

8. Your daily budget is lower than the recommended amount and Google is spacing the delivery of your ads to ensure you receive traffic throughout the day.

9. You're using ad scheduling and your ads are currently not scheduled to run.

10. Your account hasn't been activated.

Recommendations

Please avoid checking your ads on Google.com since it may dilute the overall CTC and account statistics. Rather you should

* Search the keywords on Ad Preview Page Tool in Google Adwords.

* Use Ads Diagnostic tool which will tell you the reasons of your ads not showing up i.e. approval status, cost-per-click (CPC) and budget price settings, ad and keyword performance, ranking status, geo-targeting settings, etc.

* Google Adwords comes up lots of Reports so run any of the report anytime to check the account statistics or you can schedule to run the reports as per your need.

What is RSS

2007-10-24T03:51:00.000-07:00

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.

An RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries i.e. Rich Site Summary allow users to scan the article so that they can decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the topic originating from the website.

Benefits of RSS

1. It gives you the latest updates

2. It saves on surfing time.

3. It gives the power of subscription to the user.

4. It lessens the clutter in your inbox since RSS doesnt use emails to send update.

5. It is spam free.

6. Unsubscribing is hassle-free.

7. Can be used for advertising & marketing

Disadvantages of RSS

1. Some users prefer receiving email updates over an RSS feed.

2. Graphics and photos do not appear in all RSS feeds.

3. The identity of the source website can be confusing. Since RSS feeds do not display the actual URL or name of the website.

4. Publishers cannot determine how many users are subscribed to their feed and the frequency of their visits. Moreover, they would not know the reasons why users unsubscribe which could be important in improving their advertising.

5. RSS feeds create higher traffíc and demands on a server. Most readers still prefer the whole update over a brief summary of the entry, thus they still access the site.

6. Since it is a new technology, many sites still do not support RSS.

List of Social Bookmarking sites

2007-10-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

Guys,

Please review the below URLs containing list of social bookmarking sites:

* Social Bookmarking media
* Social Bookmarking sites with PageRank
* Social Media Sites generating traffic

Trust building elements for your web site.

2007-09-28T04:31:00.000-07:00

. Your website design should be professional and relevant to your business.

. All the pages of the site should be accessible easily i.e. web site should have easy navigation.

. Add your own content on all the pages, don't copy. The content should be grammatically correct.

. Regularly update your web site so as to get repeat visitors.

. There shouldn't be any broken links on the web site,

. Add real testimonials to your web site. This helps attracting new customers.

. Publish case studies about customers you have helped, who use your product, etc.

. Don’t criticize your competitors. If at all its necessary, do a healthy comparison about features and products.

. You focus should always be on building long-terms relation with your customers.

. There should be Make a ‘About Us’ page on your web site which should contains detail about the mission, goal, Philosophy etc. If possible, add photos of the management committee members and a little bio.

. On the ‘Contact’ page, provide corporate email address (not personal), phone number, fax and address of the company.

. Publish your privacy policy & security policy. Add clearly about what you will and will not do with any personal data.

State what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure. Add prominent links to Privacy and Security policy on all the pages.

. Clearly publish guarantee policy. E.g. 100% money-back guarantee. Clearly add refund and returns policy.

. If you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site. If you have a merchant account with a major banks like Citibank , put its logo on your site.

. If you have well-known industry associations, join up and put their logos on your site. Like IBM etc.

. Put images of the credit cards you accept on every page of the order process.

. Use the words ‘secure website’ whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.

. Use a high level of security when processing credit cards. Make sure you make your clients aware of all the steps you are taking.

. If you have pricing on your website, make it transparent.

.Let people know which SSL certificate you are using on your web site, to encrypt their personal information and keep it up to date.

Valid Meta Robot tag Content Values

2007-09-28T01:23:00.000-07:00

Googlebot can interpret following robot ( META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT) values which can be added into the pages:

NOINDEX - prevents any page from being included into search engine index.
NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot to follow any links on that page.
NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
NOODP - blocks the Dmoz (Open Directory Project) description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
NONE - equivalent to "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW".

To learn more about Web robots, please follow this link.

Myths and Facts about Google Search Result Pages

2007-09-27T05:12:00.000-07:00

Guys,

I came across a very nice article by Enzo Chiu i.e. 7 Myths and Facts About Google SERPs, hope this will help you clear most of your doubts about Google search engine rankings.

Optimize your web site for Yahoo!

2007-09-25T01:49:00.000-07:00

Hitwise reported that Yahoo accounts for ~ 22% search traffic and ranks at second place than Google (~64%).

To achieve good ranking in Yahoo, following points needs to be considered:

1. Title Tag: Should be short consist of 4-5 words including important key-phrase

2. Meta Description Tag: Should consist of 16-18 small to medium sized words including important key-phrases.

3. Meta Keywords Tag: Yahoo still gives some weight-age to keywords tag. The maximum size of this tag should be 250 characters.

4. Keywords in URL: Create keyword-based filenames that represent the content within the file.

5. Headings: Heading 1 and 2 tags should be applied on every pages and should contain crtical key-phrases (CKP)

6. Alt text for images: Apply alt-tags on some of the images containing CKPs. Make sure to maintain the keyword density to 3-5%.

7. Site Structure: Yahoo prefers the Linear site structure and ranks well all the web sites which possess this structure.

8. Links: Yahoo prefers quality inbound links.

9. Robots.txt: Allow all the user-agents to crawl your web site.

10. Web site containing fresh content will take some time to get indexed in Yahoo.

Internet Marketing Strategies and Techniques: Tableless Web Site (CSS) - Benefits

2007-09-07T23:18:00.000-07:00

Tableless Web Site (CSS) - Benefits

How to get repeat visitors to your web site?

2007-09-05T05:09:00.000-07:00

Visitors usually leave web site within 10 seconds if they dont find anything relevant. Follow these 10 steps to have repeated visits to your web site:

1. Don't use printed brochure for yor business for your web site's content.

2. Organize the text, picture, and video content into different categories. If you don't have time to develop content, buy them online.

3. Try and see if you can use content management systems (CMS) to develop your website e.g. wordpress. This will help to easily manage your web site.

4. To develop faith among your prospects, you must have a page about your company/business.Also, you should provide a telephone number and an e-mail address for contact.

5. Share your views/experiences about the business you are in. This will help visitors to revisit your web site again.

6. Set up an online forum and let your customers interact among themselves. This will help to know your visitors experiences about your products and services. As a result, you will be able to provide improved products and services.

7. Promptly respond to all your visitors queries.

8. Create RSS feed on your site for the news, services, products sections and keep on adding them.

9. You must have a frequently asked questíons page related to your products and services to help save your visitors' time and effort when they are looking for information on a particular topic related to your website.

10. Advertise your products properly throughout your site e.g. through bannners, call to actions buttons etc. on side bars.

Please be informed that you want repeat visitors to your site. Since the possibility of visitors turning into a paying customers improves when they stick around your site longer.

Tableless Web Site (CSS) - Benefits

2007-09-04T04:55:00.000-07:00

Tableless design is a method of web site design without using HTML tables for a layout purposes. Instead of HTML tables, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.

Following are some of the benefits of tableless layout web site:

1. Cleaner Code: You would be forced to write clean code in the tableless web site. Thus your web site would be W3C guidelines complaint.

2. Faster Load Time: Tableless layout web site loads faster than web sites built using tables. You can reduce size of your web site by 2-5 times by converting into CSS design.

While loading a table layout web site, every time browser has to scan the table twice and then load the content of the page, which apparently increases the load time. On the other hand, CSS files are easily cached in to the browser and CSS layout web site with no td, tr tags loads comparatively faster. Tons of td and tr tags increase the web page size tremendously.

CSS layout web design on the other hand, saves the bandwidth and loads faster.

3. Easy to manage web site: Design your site with CSS and maintain it easily by simply editing one file to make a change throughout the whole site. Thus making changes to a tableless layout is simple since it eliminates the need to manually update the web pages.

4. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits: Search engines gives preference to all the web sites with higher content to code ratio. With CSS layout design, you can organize your important content at the top of the web page and by defining all the content formatting elements in to an external CSS, will help you make your web site highly content based. On the other hand, tableless layout ease and enhance the crawling speed by the search engine crawler or the bot.

5. Screen Resolution Friendliness: Tableless CSS layout web sites fit the browser window on any screen resolution.

6. Wide accessibility: Due to rapid growth in Internet Technologies, it has been necessary for the web content to be accessible to variety of devices e.g. mobile phones. Thus tabless design improves the accessibility of the web content.

How to optimize PDFs

2007-08-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

Friends, you can Optimize PDF files. Yes its true. I am referring optimization in context of search engine optimization.

To verify, how many PDF files are being indexed in the google search engine, type the following command - site:yourdomain.com filetype:pdf

Do you want to update the page title of pdfs which appear as "Untitled"?

Full version of Adobe Acrobat allows you to set all kinds of info in the PDF file i.e. Title, Keywords, Suject, Auther etc, that doesn't show up in the visible part of the file, but it does get read by search engines.

Open your PDF file, click on File > Document Properties > Summary. This will allow you to add title and other info you want to. Click Save and you are done.

This is a very nice article on webpronews by Andy King on Fri, 04/01/2005 mentioning the best practices while creating any PDF files.

What are Metacrawlers and Metasearch Engines

2007-08-29T05:49:00.000-07:00

Metacrawlers don't crawl the world wide web themselves,instead, they allow searches to be sent to several search engines all at once and then compile all the results together onto one page.

Below are some of the important Metacrawlers:

* Mamma - http://www.mamma.com
* SurfWax - http://www.surfwax.com
* Kartoo - http://www.kartoo.com
* Vivisimo - http://vivisimo.com
* Dogpile - http://www.dogpile.com

Offpage Optimization - Tips

2007-08-29T04:50:00.000-07:00

There are number of things you can do "off your web page" to improve your web site's search engine PageRank and increase targeted visitor traffic to your web site. This is known as off-page optimization.

Off-page factors are primarily tied to the site's linking (inbound and outbound) techniques. This is commonly known as link popularity.

Some of the Offpage Optimization factors include,

· which web sites are linking to your site?
· how many web sites are linking to your site?
· what is the Google PageRank (1-10) of each web site that links to your site?
· what is the anchor text of each link to your site?
· what is the page title of the web page that is linking to your site?
· is the link to your site a reciprocal link or a one-way link?
· how many inbound and outbound links are on the web page linking to your site?
· how important is the web site that is linking to your site?
· how important is the web site that is linking to your site?
· whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.

In order to optimize your website for the keyword “Collaboration Solution”, you need to analyze the linking strategy of the top 10 ranked websites for this keyword.

Study what these web sites are doing, by creating a spreadsheet with following columns,

* Linking Website
* Anchor Text used
* Page Rank
* Link Popularity
* Page Title
* Number of Outbound Links

You should create 1 spreadsheet for each of the top 10 websites. In order to find all of the websites that link to any web site,

* Go to Google and enter this search criteria- link:www.yourdomain.com.
* linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com for the Yahoo! search engine

Anchor Text is the actual text used within the link linking to the specified website.

Page Rank is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage or web site. In order to see the Google Page Rank, you’ll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free from: http://toolbar.google.org.

Page Title is the html title of the web page. Does it contain the keyword “collaboration solution”? If so, you should note which links pages those are. You’ll want to approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.

To find the outbound links from any web site, just go to http://www.live.com and enter in "linkfromdomain:YOURSITE.COM". Make sure to not include www or any other subdomain.

Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook.

After collecting all these information, you will have a blue-print of the linking strategy. You have to contact each of these web sites and ask them to provide a link back to your web site.

SEO Friendly Web Design

2007-08-29T04:40:00.000-07:00

Good web-content

Content is the key to web site optimization. Your content should fulfill a need for the visitor; whether this need is for information, merchandise or a service, and it should communicate it clearly.

A good rule of thumb to follow when determining how much content to include is to insert between 200-250 words of keyword rich search engine friendly content on each of your site pages. More words are fine but make sure that users typically don’t appreciate having to scroll down or read all the way across the screen. So break your content up in into columns, bulleted items, headlines, etc.

Make the text readable. Avoid using silly fonts & busy backgrounds. Make your text scannable i.e. use bullets, headlines, and bold text so users can scan your content quickly.

CSS Style sheet: It is good to use CSS style sheet to format your web design because it can standardize the appearance of your website.

Add thematic content with keywords and keep the targeted keyword density between 3% – 5%.

Use header tags (H1, H2 & H3) with targeted primary & secondary keywords.

Avoid using duplicate content to grow & rank your site in all search engines

Go for static html design and keep the size of your site pages under 48K. You must optimize the file size of your images (12 kb or smaller).

Add Alt-tag for images (only 1-2 images per page). Use thematic text for the alt-tags.

Navigation

Design your web page as simple as possible, it will help visitors' to navigate and view the site properly.

Avoid use of frame and re-direct techniques

If you are using JavaScript, e.g. drop-down menus, put it at the end of HTML Body or place into a separate file, e.g. menu.js.

Keep your basic pages like index (home page), about us, contact us, sitemap etc at root level and product category specific pages in folder with category specific name. Create folders up to
maximum three levels from the root.

Your folders and product category pages must be keyword specific. For example if “Collaboration Solution” is one of your services, select your folder name as “collaboration-solution” and its pages collaboraton-solution.htm, collaboration-suite.htm etc.

Website navigation is important for users as well as for web crawlers. Place links of main pages on every page of your website and also give link to home page from every page of your website. You can follow similar technique for level two and level three pages also.

Design keyword content rich sitemap page that has links to the all pages of your website. Don’t make this page as links only page. Insert contextual content to it.

Make sure there shouldn’t be any broken link.

Browser Compatibility

Test what your site looks like in a multitude of different browsers. Try Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Avant, etc.

Proofread for errors

A simple spelling error can drive away users. Proofread your site and fix any mistakes.

Logos or Brand Names

If your site has a logo or brand name, be sure to include this on every page so the user knows exactly where they are at all times.

Pop-ups

Pop-ups are annoying at best. Avoid using them for any reason.

How to increase your web site’s “result and conversion rate"

2007-08-29T04:25:00.000-07:00

* Understand your visitors profile i.e. what kind of people purchase from your web site and what does any person do as part of his buying process on your web site.

Thus is there any element on your web site which proves that You are the right choice over your competition?
* Every page of your web site should be made keeping in view of specific visitors, their possible actions i.e. the questions any prospect would have while landing on your web page and the strategy to be followed to answer these questions
* Write compelling, benefit-oriented web page copy so as to convince people for purchase on your web site
* Use of Call to actions: Highlight leads generating links, and use graphics, buttons on your web site so as to grab visitor’s attention. Make sure to keep the site navigation simple.

Always use “primary responses” (buy/sign-up etc) i.e. call to actions to drive visitors to fulfill your primary goals as well as “secondary or backup responses” e.g. have visitors subscribe to your monthly mailing list so that they may fulfill your primary goals later.

Design a web site with professional look and feel that builds trusts within your visitors. Also use testimonials, add privacy policy & disclaimer, show visitors that web site is secured for transaction.

Landing pages components to maximize conversions

Following are the conversion components that should be tested and improved to boost your web site conversion rates
* Headline - Since page headline is the first line that your visitors will read, the headline of your web page offers the biggest opportunity (about 80% of the opportunity) for improvements in conversion rate. Use headlines that clearly state the biggest benefit(s) that your product offers.
* Offer - Since your offer is the “call to action” that asks your visitors to act (purchase, sign up, opt-in), your offer accounts for the second the biggest opportunity for improvements in conversion rate.
* The 1st Paragraph - The first paragraph is the third biggest opportunity for improvements in your conversion rate. The paragraph must be written with strong benefits that capture your visitor’s attention and make them want to read more.
Benefits - The “benefit bullets” (bullet-point format) are the forth biggest opportunity for improvements in conversion rate. List your benefits in the order of your product’s “value” to your target market. That is, state your products strongest benefit first, and its weakest benefit last.
* Images/Graphics - The images you use have a big impact on your conversion rates. The best practice is to use images that clearly portray the biggest benefit your product offers your customer (rather than generic "feel good" stuff like unknown logos and clip art). Studies show that product images work best when placed to the left of your product description (or lead paragraph) since it makes it easier to read your copy from left to right. Plus, people like to reads “captions” under your images almost as much as they read your headlines. So, add powerful captions and make your images clickable to the order/sign up page.
* "Look & Feel" - According to a recent study by Stanford University, 46% of Web sales are lost on web sites that lack the critical elements that build value and trust with website visitors. The number one reason the people indicated why they wouldn't buy from a web site was because it had an unprofessional "look and feel" that lacked credibility and did not "feel" trustworthy. Having a professional look, and trust building tools (such as VeriSign and BBBOnline certifications) help convert significantly more of your web site's qualified visitors into new customers.

Other Important Conversion Elements:

• Buttons – Button text, color, look, etc.
• Testimonials
• Press Quotes
• Pricing
• Formatting and placement of page elements, images and copy

Other Conversion Best Practices and Tips:

• Add a Logo and a powerful “Value Proposition” to the top left
• Reduce your “bail out” rate by optimizing your web pages to download within 5 seconds on a 56k modem
• Instead of letting visitors click off your landing page, put all your information on one page (This tactic alone increased the conversions of a landing page by 55%)
• Add a 1-800-Number and Call to Action above the fold (top of the page)
• Use colors that fit your target customer’s personality

Onpage Optimization - Tips

2007-08-29T03:15:00.000-07:00

In order to make your web site easier for search engines to follow and index, Onpage optimization efforts are deemed necessary.

Onpage optimization is not difficult. It does however take time to make sure all the pieces are in place. This kind of optimization should occur not only on the main web page of a web site, but on every single content page within that site.

Check your web-design

In your web site, there can be potential design issues you should address in order to improve your web site's ranking in search engines.
* Pages that use Frames, Flash, JavaScript, URL Redirects, Image Maps, or Dynamic URLs might not be recognized by the search engine.
* It doesn't matter for which purposes you use JavaScript, e.g. drop-down menus, put it at the end of HTML Body or place into a separate file, e.g. menu.js. This will move the important content closer to the beginning of this page and improve its keyword prominence. I
* Make site with clear hierarchy and text links. Check for broken links.

Keyword Selection

Choosing the right keywords is essential to get a high ranking in search engines and directories. Before beginning, determine the keyword phrases you will use according to your business and industry and begin adding them to your page.

Points to consider when choosing keywords:
* When choosing your keywords, try to think like your target audience. What would THEY search for, when looking for the page online?
* Make a list of two or three keywords for each page on your Web site.
* Try using phrases (two or more words) that you think people might enter into a search engine when looking for your site.

For example, Instead of "painting," add the more descriptive phrase "professional interior home painter."

* Investigate your competition. Conduct sample searches using keywords that you would prefer to use, and then identify which phrases other companies are using.

Hint: To see which keywords a competitor has used for a particular Web page, follow these steps to view the HTML source code for the page:
* Open the page in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
* On the View menu, click Source or Page Source.
* Find and view the keywords within the < META > tag sections of code.

Create a descriptive Title tag

The title tag should be the first meta tag directly after the Head tag.
Points to consider when creating your title tag:
* Make sure that your title tag is 60-75 characters long, including spaces.
* Include 1-2 of your most important keyword phrases in the title tag.
* Don't just list keywords in your title tag; by doing so, you risk being viewed as spamming the engines and directories.
* Each page on your Web site should have its own title tag.

To edit your title tag:
* Open the HTML source code for your page in a text editor or Web authoring program.
* Make sure your title tag is placed correctly. It should appear between two HEAD tags within the HTML that makes up your page.

Create effective Meta tags

Meta tags are the words written in the HEAD section of the HTML code for your web page. Search engines and directories use them to flag your site, so well-selected meta tags can help improve your site listings.

Points to consider when creating description & keyword tag:
* This is how you will enter a description meta tag into your HTML code. This meta tag should not exceed 150 characters, including spaces:
* Include meta description tag, directly after the TITLE tag
* The keywords meta tag should include 3-4 of your most important keyword phrases and should not exceed 280 characters, including spaces. Here's how you create one:
* Think of common misspellings. For example, the same travel site might include "Caribean", the common misspelling for "Caribbean”.
* If your site has content of interest to a specific geographic location, be sure to include this information (city, state, country, and so on) in your keyword meta tag.
* Be careful not to repeat the same word more than five times.
* Avoid using stop words. Some common stop words are a", "of", "the", "I", "it", "you", and "and.

Optimize your web page copy

The actual text on your web site, your page copy, is very important. Search engines use the text on your page to optimize search engine results, just as they do with your title tag. Points to consider when writing your page copy:
* Make sure that each page of text you submit contains at least 300 words. Search engines like text!
* Include your most important keyword phrases within the text, but make sure that your copy remains logical and easy to read. Put your keyword where it is most appropriate so that it appears 3-5 times on this page.
* The keyword phrases should be present at the beginning of the page i.e. the first 25 words of the visible text of the page.
* It would be helpful if some keyword phrases in the page copy are bold and underlined.
* Your page will be more relevant if your keyword appears at the end of the visible text. Try to put it in the last paragraph of your copy.
* Do not use font size one (1) text as the default text size. Many search engines consider Tiny text to be spam. It's OK to use some font size one text.
* Add additional copy-filled pages to your site (for example, add how-to articles, tips, or tutorials).

Use "alt" attribute for images

The "alt" attribute allows you to add a keyword phrase that relates to an image. Search engines look at these too when trying to find a matching page. Here is an example of how to use the "alt" image attribute:
* To add the "alt" attribute to any image, make the following change to your image tag HTML code:
* Write a brief sentence or two to describe each image.
* Incorporate the keywords phrase used in your page copy, title tag, and your meta description.
* Avoid adding more than 2-3 keywords to your alt description.

Optimize text hyperlinks

Some search engines seek keywords in hyperlinks and any text that immediately surrounds the hyperlinks. If possible, include your most important keyword phrases in hyperlinks and the surrounding text.

Points to remember when optimizing text hyperlinks:
* Include your most important keyword phrases within the hyperlink.
* Include your most important keyword phrases in the text that immediately precedes or follows the hyperlink.
* After adding phrases, make sure that your links and surrounding text are still clear and concise.

Optimize the heading tags

The important HTML heading tags are h1, h2, h3, and h4.

* Reformat your page to create more headings. Break copy into separate sections. Add a heading to each section.
* Include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags

Robots File

Several search engine spiders rely on the existence of a file in the root folder in order to continue with the crawling and indexing process for a website.
* Create a robots.txt file in the root folder
* robots.txt file will contain –
User-agent: *
Disallow

Naming Rule

It is critical to name the filenames appropriately, since these will be indexed by spiders. If a domain-name, directory, file & image are named using an important keyword, it will add more keyword weight when linked from the one page to another.
* Use keywords to name Directories
* Use keywords for Filenames and Images when possible
* Use keywords for Anchors
* Use keywords for images
* Use keywords for Link text
* Use hyphen ( -) or underscore ( _ ) as a separator while naming directories and files.

Domain Registration

Register a domain name with the exact keyword phrase you wish to target, using hyphens to separate the keywords. For example, if the keyword phrase is "search engine rankings," then register: search-engine-rankings.com
If the domain you want is unavailable, either try a different extension, such as .NET, .INFO, or .US, or add a keyword to the end (preferential) or beginning of the domain

Pages & Directory Levels

Keep your pages as close to the root domain as possible. Do not set up more than 3 directory levels. For example:
* www.yoursite.com/index.html (1st level - excellent)
* www.yoursite.com/html/index.html (2nd level - Good)
* www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/index.html (3rd level - OK)
* www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/search/index.html (Too many levels down - search engines will find it difficult to find and index pages this far down)

Site Map

Include a site map with links to all your pages. This will help search engines find and index all your pages.
* Limit the number of links on a web page to 50.
* If you have more than 50 links, limit your links to your most important pages.
* Include text on the page as some search engines, such as AltaVista, have been known to kick out links only pages

Avoid spamming

To prevent search engines from identifying your site as one that's capable of "spamming," adhere to the following tips:
* List keywords only in your meta tag. Avoid long lists of keywords in your text.
* Make sure there is no 'hidden text' (text that is the same color as the background) on your page.
* Use only one title tag.
* Submit each page only once within 24 hours.
* Use keywords in your keywords meta tag that directly relate to the content of your page.

What is 301 redirects & Why 301 redirects?

2007-08-29T02:48:00.000-07:00

Do you understand the different between a 301 and 302 redirect?

A 301 redirect means any page has moved to a new location, permanently. A 302 redirect means, the move is temporary or in a webmaster's language, your request to the server to view any page has been completed.

Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location. Use the wrong type of redirects, and the search engines' view of your website can get screwed up, badly.

Why does this matter? If you are moving a web page or an entire web site to a new location, e.g. if you change your domain name and you want visitors to be able to find your site. A redirect causes the user's browser to automatically forward from the old location to the new one.

There aren't too many situations where a 302 is appropriate. How often have you temporarily moved a page? It's much more common to move pages permanently. Nevertheless, it seems easier to create 302 redirects than 301s. You can use Javascript or a meta tag to create a 302.

Below are some of methods to implement 301 URL Redirection:

IIS Redirect

* In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
* Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
* Enter the redirection page
* Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
* Click on 'Apply'

ColdFusion Redirect
<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

ASP Redirect
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com/");
%>

ASP .NET Redirect

JSP (Java) Redirect
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

In order to redirect any domain, you need to do it throug .htaccess file provided you are using Apache webserver.

You can test the redirection using search engine friendly redirect checker.

You can also verify the Server header type of the redirected URLs to confirm the 301 redirects.

Yahoo directory submission - Go or No Go?

2007-08-29T02:18:00.000-07:00

Yahoo- a search engine and a directory both.

Yahoo directory has been recommended by Google. Do you know why? Because this is human edited directory similar to DMOZ unlike millions of SEO friendly directories offering automated listing submissions.

By submitting your site to Yahoo's human-edited directory, you may have a better chance of being found by purely spider-driven engines (such as Google).

You will be surprised to know that there are eight submission options with Yahoo, i.e.:

* free site submission
* free mobile site submission
* free media content submission
* Yahoo search index submission
* sponsored search
* product submission
* travel submission
* Yahoo directory submit
* Yahoo standard submission

Yahoo Directory is not free since you have to pay $299 to have your website reviewed by the Yahoo editors. Although this fee doesn’t guarantee your website listing in Yahoo Directory. It just guarantees that your website will be reviewed by the editors within one week exclusing business holidays and if approved, it will be listed for one year.

Pre-requisites for the web sites to be listed in Yahoo directory:

* Well designed, good content professional web site
* No broken links
* No under construction pages
* Support multiple browsers
* Accessible 24X7

Benefits of being listed in Yahoo Business Directory:

* Effective link popularity
* Effective ranking in Google search

If you can afford to pay the $299, then it is highly recommended to submit your website to Yahoo Directory. The traffic and the strong back link you will get for your website would be worth paying $299 for a year.

Strategies to promote new product in market?

2007-07-05T06:32:00.000-07:00

Its not easy to promote a new product in to the market which has very low competition. No doubt we can discover and promote the unique selling points after comparing with our competitors but what to do, if there are no competitors?