SEO Plan

The discovery shortcut: Learning from competitors

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 16:50:00 +0000

The discovery shortcut: Learning from competitors

The discovery shortcut: Learning from competitors
The place to begin your discovery is again by looking at your competitors’ sites. Try putting into Google search terms related to your business, its products and services. For each of the top five results on each search term, select the “View source” or “View page source” option from your browser menu. Make a note of the keywords placed in the <TITLE>, <META NAME=“Description”>, and <META NAME=“Keywords”> tags.
Alternatively, if looking through HTML code (hypertext markup language, the programming language used to create web pages) leaves you cold, visit one of the keyword analysis tools listed on the forum that accompanies this book (www.seo-expertservices.
co.uk). One good example is the Abakus Topword Keyword Check Tool: www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html.
Here you can enter the URLs of your competitors and read off the keywords that they use.
List all of the keywords and keyphrases you find on your competitors’ sites, one after another, in Column A of your spreadsheet. Don’t read me wrong here. This kind of metadata (data about data, in this case a categorization of common terms), particularly in isolation, is not the route to high search engine rankings (as you will see later). However,
sites in the top five on Google have generally undertaken SEO campaigns and have already developed a good idea of what the more popular keywords are for their (and your) niche. As such, their metadata is likely to reflect quality keyword analysis, repeated throughout the site in other ways. This effectively represents a shortcut that gets your campaign off to a flying start.
Search engines provide the modern information scientist with a hugely rich data set of search terms commonly used by people to retrieve the web pages they are looking for. I have coined some terms to help describe these that I use in my business.
CUSPs – commonly used search phrases – are phrases that people tend to use when searching for something and, more importantly, narrowing down the search results returned. There are normally two parts to a CUSP, a “stem phrase” and a “qualifying phrase.”
For example, a stem for Brad might be “business cards” and a qualifier “full color.” Additional qualifiers might be “cheap,” “luxury,” “do it yourself,” and a whole host of other terms.
Sometimes qualifiers are strung together, in terms such as “cheap Caribbean cruises.” And often people will use different synonyms or otherwise semantically similar words to describe the same qualifying phrase.
For example, “discounted” and “inexpensive” are synonyms of “cheap.” However, searchers have learnt that phrases like “last minute” and “special offer” might return similar results. As such, searchers are just as likely to search for “last minute cruises” or “special offer cruises” as “cheap cruises.” I use the acronym SEP (semantically equivalent phrase) to describe both simple synonyms and more intuitive variants, and Google is capable of recognizing both.
When undertaking keyword research, I tend to group CUSPs into SEPs and then group SEPs under the stem to which they relate. For example:
G Stem: Business Cards
• SEP: Cheap Business Cards CUSPs: Inexpensive Business Cards, Discounted
Business Cards, Special Offer Business Cards • SEP: Luxury Business Cards
CUSPs: Premium Business Cards, Quality Business Cards, Handmade Business Cards For speed, I often simply list the search phrases under a stem one after another, separated by commas.
Brad searches for “business card printers” – and a small number of other keyphrases – on Google and takes a long look at the top 10 results for each search. He uses the menu option “View source” in Internet Explorer to look at the keywords used in the page metadata.
He is surprised to find some consistent themes. For example, almost all of the top-ranked sites offer a way for users to upload their artwork or even to design it online. It seems he has not been the only person with this idea! He also finds a huge variety of keywords used and comes up with the following list (grouped under stems) to summarize his discovery efforts:
G Business cards: business cards, cheap business cards, free business cards, affordable business cards, discount business cards, business card design, full color business cards, folded cards, business card, business card printing, CD business cards, CD Rom business cards, caricature business cards, premium business cards, luxury business cards, caricature contact cards, business card magnets
G Letterheads and compliment slips: letterheads, letterhead, letter paper, notepaper, personalised stationery, personalized stationery, personalised stationary, personalized stationary, personalised notepaper, personalized notepaper, custom notepaper, customized notepaper, postcard, postcards, compliments slips, personalized compliment slips G Leaflets and flyers: Leaflet, leaflets, flyers, brochures, brochure, brochure design, flyer design, flyer, presentation folders, newsletters, sales data sheets, folders, promotional material G Address stamps and labels: address labels, address label, label, stickers, address stickers, return address labels, custom labels, address stamp, caricature address labels G Printing: business printers, printing, online design, online printing, online print ordering, online printers, online print order, affordable printing, printing company, printing company Idaho, printing company Boise, printing supplies, printers services, cheap printer, cheap printing, online printer, printing online, digital printing, screen printing, offset printing, custom printing, best printing, printing gift certificates, printing coupons, order printing online, low priced printing, short print runs G Other: advertising film, advertising lettering, book printers, greeting cards, invitation cards, wedding cards, tshirt, tshirts, t shirt, t-shirt, stamp, online creation, online graphics, online design, folding paper, book, books, pdf, copyshop, annual report, magnets, folded cards, note cards, press kit You will note that grouping keywords and keyphrases into categories
is a useful exercise, as it begins to lay the foundations for determining your page structure and navigation later

The D–A–D analysis tool

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:09:00 +0000

The D–A–D analysis tool

The D–A–D analysis tool
Throughout the steps of the D–A–D model, I will refer to a spreadsheetbased tool that always accompanies my keyword analysis. Create a new spreadsheet or table to record your work, with six columns (from left to right):
A Keywords
B Monthly searches
B Raw competition
D Directly competing
E KEI
F KOI
All will become clear later in this chapter.
In the keyword discovery phase, we are focusing on Column A only and trying to compile as large a list of keywords as possible.

Common mistakes in keyword selection 5

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:59:00 +0000

keyword selection

Many webmasters overuse certain keywords on their site (socalled keyword stuffing) and underuse related keywords. Human readers find such pages irritating and Google’s spam filters look for these unnatural patterns and penalize them! Instead, it is much better to make liberal use of synonyms and other words related to your main terms. This process (often involving a thesaurus) is what information professionals call ontological analysis.
The best way to avoid these and other common mistakes is to follow the following maxims:
G Think like your customer and use their language, not yours.
G Put aside your preconceptions of what you wanted to rank for.
G Put aside subjectivity and focus on the facts.
G Consider popularity, competitiveness, and ontology.
In short, you need to make a scientific study of the keywords and keyphrases your customers and competitors actually use, and balance this against what your competitors are doing. I use a three-step approach to keyword analysis (known affectionately as D–A–D): discovery, attractiveness, and deployment.
Keyword discovery, the first step, is the process of finding all the keywords and keyphrases that are most relevant to your website and business proposition.

Common mistakes in keyword selection 4

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:36:00 +0000

keyword selection

People tend to copy their competitors when choosing the words to use, without researching in detail what people actually search for and how many competing sites already carry these terms. Good SEO is all about finding phrases that pay that are relatively popular with searchers but relatively underused by your competitors.

Common mistakes in keyword selection 3

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:36:00 +0000

keyword selection

Many webmasters only want to rank well for single words (rather than chains of words). You may be surprised to hear that (based on research by OneStat.com) 33% of all searches on search engines are for two-word combinations, 26% for three words, and 21% for four or more words. Just 20% of people search on single words. Why does that surprise you, though?
Isn’t that what you do when you’re searching? Even if you start with one word, the results you get are generally not specific enough (so you try adding further words to refine your search).
It is therefore vital that keyword analysis is firmly based on 30 Phrases that pay
objective facts about what people actually search on rather than your own subjective guess about what they use.

Common mistakes in keyword selection 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:37:00 +0000

Common mistakes in keyword selection

Many site owners (particularly in the business-to-business sector) make the mistake of wanting to rank well for very esoteric and supply-side terminology. For example, one client of mine was very happy to be in the top 10 on Google for “specimen trees and shrubs,” because that was the supply-side terminology for his main business (importing wholesale trees and shrubs).
However, fewer than 10 people a month worldwide search using that phrase. My client would have been much better off optimizing for “wholesale plants,” which attracts a much more significant volume of searches. In short, his excellent search engine position was useless to him, as it never resulted in any traffic.

Common mistakes in keyword selection 3

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:37:00 +0000

Common mistakes in keyword selection

Many webmasters only want to rank well for single words (rather than chains of words). You may be surprised to hear that (based on research by OneStat.com) 33% of all searches on search engines are for two-word combinations, 26% for three words, and 21% for four or more words. Just 20% of people search on single words. Why does that surprise you, though?
Isn’t that what you do when you’re searching? Even if you start with one word, the results you get are generally not specific enough (so you try adding further words to refine your search).
It is therefore vital that keyword analysis is firmly based on objective facts about what people actually search on rather than your own subjective guess about what they use.

Common mistakes in keyword selection 4

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:37:00 +0000

Common mistakes in keyword selection

Common mistakes in keyword selection 1

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:17:00 +0000

Common mistakes in keyword selection

Common mistakes in keyword selection
Most people approach SEO with a preconception – or prejudice – about what their best keywords are. They are normally either wholly or partly wrong. This is good for you because you are armed with this book.

There are five key mistakes to avoid when selecting keywords:
1 Many of my customers first approach me with the sole objective of ranking number one on Google for the name of their business.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that this isn’t important. If someone you met at a party or in the street could remember your business name and wanted to use Google to find your site, you should certainly ensure that you appear in the top five. However, your business name is very easy to optimize for and only likely ever to yield traffic from people you have already met or who have heard of your business through a word-of-mouth referral. The real power of a search engine is its ability to deliver quality leads from people who have never heard of your business before. As such, ranking number one for your business name, while it’s an important foundation, is really only of secondary importance in the race to achieve good rankings on the web.

Keyword discovery

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:15:00 +0000

Keyword discovery

Keyword discovery
When a user visits a search engine, they type words into the search box to find what they are looking for. The search terms they type are called keywords and the combinations of keywords are keyphrases.
If you imagine that building an optimized site is like cooking a meal, then keywords are the essential ingredients. Would you attempt to cook a complex new dish without first referring to a recipe? Would you start before you had all the ingredients available and properly prepared?
In our analogy, keywords are your ingredients and the rest of the sevenstep approach is your recipe.
Ideally, you should undertake keyword research well before you choose a domain name, structure your site, and build your content.
However, this is not always possible, as most webmasters only turn to SEO after they’ve built their site.

Even if you have a site already, it is vital to invest significant time and energy on keyword research before starting your SEO campaign.
Although this may astonish you, I would recommend that 20% of all your SEO effort is focused on this activity alone. If you make poor keyword selections, you are likely to waste energy elsewhere in your SEO campaign, pursuing avenues unlikely to yield traffic in sufficient quantity, quality, or both. To return to our analogy, if you select poor ingredients, no matter how good the recipe may be the meal itself will be a disappointment – and no one will want to eat it.
Don’t forget that one source for information about keywords is your own web logs. This helps you avoid undoing what you’re already ranking well for. Google Analytics’ keyword stats can also be particularly useful input to the early stages of an SEO campaign (see page 225 for more on this). I learnt this lesson from a client who ran a local catering business.
She told me that many of her customers had found her via Google, but she couldn’t understand what they were searching on as she could never find her site in the top 50, let alone the top 10. By investigating her Google Analytics stats, we discovered that she was ranking well for “thanksgiving catering” due to some client testimonials and pictures on her site. This explained why so many of her clients were ex-pat
Americans and how they were finding her business; after all, such a search term was pretty niche in South West London, UK!

Where and how will you win?

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:00 +0000

Top

Where and how will you win?
The internet becomes more competitive every day, but it is still a relatively immature medium that is evolving quickly. If you think it’s hard to be on top at the moment, just wait until five years from now! Winning today is more and more about identifying a great niche and then ruthlessly pursuing a dominance in that niche. If you think about things from a business perspective first, your SEO effort will be all the more effective.
In summary (and to use a fishing analogy), look at what the more experienced anglers are doing. Copy what works but don’t follow the crowd: Find a good stream that isn’t overfished; stand where the current runs strongest; and use the right bait. Most importantly, keep the right fish and throw back the tiddlers for someone else to catch.

Who are your competitors and what can you learn from them?

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:06:00 +0000

Who are your competitors and what can you learn from them?

Who are your competitors and what can you learn from them?
No proposition development is complete without an honest assessment of what your competitors are up to. If you are in a locally based clicksand- mortar business like Brad’s, your assessment should take into account both your local and your global competition. Do a search on both your local Google and Google.com. Cross-reference this with data from Alexa .

Focus on
competitors that enjoy both good rankings and high traffic levels.

Ignore the SEO aspects for now and focus on the business ideas contained in your competitors’ sites and how these are presented. A useful tool to use is so-called SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, where you draw four boxes in a 232 table for each competitor. In the first box you note the strengths of the competitor, in the second their weaknesses, in the third their opportunities, and in the fourth their threats. Strengths and weaknesses are things inherent to their business as it operates today (and are generally internal).
Opportunities and threats are things external to the business and are normally forward looking.
Look at each competitor website objectively and put yourself in the minds of your customers. Do you like the look of the website? Can you use it? Does it address each customer group separately, focus on one segment, or try to be all things at once? Is it easy to get information and do business? Before you become too obsessed with the SEO aspects, it is good to take some time out and get ideas from those who are already succeeding online.

Who are your customers and what do they want?

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:06:00 +0000

Who are your customers and what do they want?

Who are your customers and what do they want?
Segmenting your audience is a key part of any marketing or PR strategy and, make no mistake, search engine optimization is essentially a marketing and PR activity (albeit somewhat different to some of the more traditional parts of this field).
Key questions at this stage (most of which will be directly relevant to your SEO campaign) include:
G Are your customers local, national, or international? How might this change in the future? Is language a barrier to them doing business with you?
G Are your customers business-to-business (B2B), business-toconsumer (B2C), or both? Do you need very different treatments for each segment? (The answer is probably yes.)
G Do your customers vary by demographic? Are they mainly of one sex or age bracket? Do they sit in any particular socioeconomic class?
G Do your customers buy predominantly on price or on quality?
Do you want to target upmarket users or appeal to the value end of the market? (Trying to do both at the same time rarely works.)
G Is time a factor for your customers? Do they need to buy quickly? Do they only tend to buy at particular times of the day/week/year or at particular points in their life?
G What is the potential for upselling customers into more expensive products? Or cross-selling them into different product ranges?
G What is the prospect of repeat business? How many of your customers are likely to form a long-term relationship with the business?
Brad undertakes some fairly extensive market research, including telephoning previous customers to find out what motivated them to buy originally and why they did or did not return. He develops a group of five different microsegments who will be the main focus of the new website (and gives each a name, just for fun). These are just two of the five, to give you a flavor:
G Juan Manband. Juan is a business of one, being both an IT contractor and a home-based internet entrepreneur. He has his fingers in lots of different pies and at least eight different business cards in his pocket that carry his name. He orders his business stationery and printing himself. He finds traditional printing firms difficult to deal with as he doesn’t need either logo-design services or large print runs. He is cost conscious but also time poor and tends to trade off the two. He is very willing to order
over the internet and do some of the work himself. He does not need his printer to be local.
G Cara Lotte. Cara is personal assistant and office manager to the managing director of a local business with 50 employees. She handles everything from statutory accounts to payroll to stationery and printing. She prefers the personal touch, local suppliers, and people who keep their promises. She would use the computer for research, but is suspicious of using it to buy products. She looks for value (rather than the lowest price), putting a high emphasis on product quality. She would not expect to do any work herself.
In short, Brad has (like most businesses) identified both a local and a national angle to his online presence. He has also proved that there is indeed demand for printing over the internet on small print runs with rapid delivery. This will be his focus.

What are you selling?

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 15:03:00 +0000

What are you selling?

What are you selling?
The first and most obvious question is whether you are selling a product or a service and the degree to which you can fulfill this online. Some service businesses are, by their very nature, intensely offline, local, and personal. For example, a hairdressing business will struggle to cut hair over the internet!
The best place to start is with what I call goal definition. A goal in this context defines a successful outcome from someone visiting your website and is expressed using a verb and a noun. Examples of possible goals include:
G Download a brochure
G Sign up for a newsletter
G Subscribe to a mailing list
G Request a product sample
G Book a sales consultation
G Purchase a product
G Book a service
Users can be grouped into the four areas of the marketing and sales funnel familiar to traditional marketers: a suspect, a prospect, a lead, and a sale.
Suspects are those who may have a (passive) need for your product and service. A suspect becomes a prospect once they have expressed an active interest in what you are offering. A lead is a prospect who meets the criteria of someone who is “ready to buy.” A sale is “closed” when the lead becomes a customer and buys from you.
The goals in the list above really mark the progress of a user from one area of the funnel to another. Any searcher who finds and visits your site is a suspect. When they download a brochure they become a prospect. When they book a sales consultation they become a lead.
When they purchase a product they become a sale.
As such, while a hairdressing business is unlikely to have “receive a haircut” as an online goal, “book a haircut” or “download example hairstyles” might well be part of its overall business proposition.
The most successful online businesses design a series of “customer journeys” through their site, which take a user from entrance to information to goal completion. Each journey begins with a landing page and ends with a so-called money page, where the user completes a goal. Each site may have several (often intersecting) journeys.
Later, in the section on analytics, I will return to customer journeys and introduce you to funnel analysis, which looks at where users drop out of the journey. Through tweaks and improvements, this “journey leakage” can be reduced over time and the conversion of entrance to goal improved. However, for now I will simply reiterate that you must have a clear idea of what your goals are while developing your proposition.
In our case study, Brad begins with a detailed review of the Chambers Print website. At the moment, there is nothing that users can actually buy online. In fact, the only goal a user can complete is to fill out a contact form in the “contact us” section of the site.
The form requires the user to enter their email address, so at least it provides a list of prospects.
Furthermore, there are no separate landing pages for the different types of products and services Chambers Print offers. Instead, these are grouped together on a “what we offer” page.
Brad decides to construct a series of customer journeys around the key products and services his business currently offers. He also decides to add a new product line whereby users can upload their own artwork or logos to the site, using a series of print templates.
In future, people will be able to order business cards, letterheads, compliment slips, invoices, and purchase-order stationery online.
There are actually a number of elements of Brad’s proposition that we will revisit in subsequent parts of this guide. However, the key point for now is that simply putting up a brochure of all Chambers Print’s products and services is unlikely to be the best strategy. Brad has some specific and focused aims. By thinking about them now (and refining them) he stands a much better chance of success online.

Proposition development

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:28:00 +0000

Proposition development

Proposition development
Many companies start their online business presence by buying a domain name (a name for their website, often one close to their business name) and building a web page that is really little more than a brochure.
Only later do they turn their mind to optimizing their site for both their audience and the way those in their audience find them. Very few take a long, hard look at what their online competitors are doing first or think about what part of their business works best online. And hardly any revisit their entire business model to consider how it might change to take advantage of what the internet offers. Take it from me, the best way to succeed in search engine optimization is to build it into your business development strategy from the very outset.
More importantly, an SEO campaign must be a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is vital to see it in its broader business context:
What sort of visitors will convert well for this business online? Is the ideal visitor budget conscious or seeking luxury items? After all, there is no point in chasing high search volumes only to find that visitors look at one page, then leave the site. And don’t let SEO take over your life – you still have to be out there doing business. It’s easy to become hypnotized by the challenge and forget that SEO is only, at the end of
the day, one part of your marketing effort; which is, in itself, only one part of the total business effort required.
For these reasons and more, before we turn to search phrases and optimization techniques, this guide considers those fundamental questions of what, who, and where.

Tracking and tuning

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 23:01:00 +0000

Tracking and tuning

Tracking and tuning
SEO is not a one-off process but an ongoing competitive struggle. You need to monitor your performance objectively, using reliable data, and feed this back into your campaign. This step shows you how.
G Google Analytics. Discover how to sign up for and use this amazing set of free tools from Google: learn how to monitor your paid and organic search traffic and track goal conversion and campaign return on investment.
G Google Webmaster Tools is the all-in-one interface for managing your crawl, monitoring your search rankings, and checking your backlinks. Google continues to enhance this now invaluable toolset.
G Other useful tools contains a round-up from across the web of tools for tracking PageRank and Traffic Rank, plus how to interpret your own website statistics. The chapter also explains how to use a Google API key, if you have one available.
G Tuning the campaign considers how to use the results of your ongoing monitoring activity to refine your campaign further and tune your site. It also looks at how to monitor what your competitors are up to and learn from them.
The rest of the book is essentially a walk-through of the seven-step approach, illustrated with a case study and punctuated with tools and resources. The longest sections, as you might expect, are those focused on on-page and off-page SEO, where I cover in some depth the key techniques you will need to master.

Making the map

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:44:00 +0000

Making the map

Making the map
As the web gets bigger, so searches become more locally focused. This innovative step shows you how to exploit this by improving your position for locally qualified searches and on local Google instances. It also covers Google Maps and Google Earth.
G Language optimization. If your site is multilingual, it is important that Google knows this. This chapter shows you how to tag pages and individual text blocks for different languages and how to get ranked in local-language searches.
G Geographical optimization. This may surprise you, but users narrow down 35–45% of their searches to sites based in their own country. This chapter covers the key steps required to rank well in these local search instances.
G Google Earth and Google Maps. In this chapter you learn how to rank well in Google Maps and even Google Earth for local searches – a vital piece of futureproofing for the increasingly mobile web.
G Priming for local search. Many people add a place name to their regular search query. This chapter shows you how to factor this into your regular search campaign.

Paying for position

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:36:00 +0000

Paying for position

Paying for position
While 65% of people never click on paid (or sponsored) search results, 35% do. No comprehensive website promotion campaign is therefore complete without a full evaluation of paid search engine marketing.
G Selecting match drivers involves choosing the location, language, and time you want your ads to be searched in and selecting the phrases you wish to pay for (positive matches) and qualifying words you want to exclude (negative matches).
G Ad text optimization is the biggest challenge in copywriting:
compelling a user to click on a link when all you have to work with are 25 characters for a title, 70 for the ad itself, and 35 for the URL. I show you how to achieve this most effectively.
G Landing page optimization. Your cost-per-click and conversion rates both benefit from well-written landing pages that deliver on the promise you made in the ad and channel the user through the rest of your site.
G Bid and campaign management is all about managing your campaigns, budget, day parting, bids, and ad variations to minimize the cost and maximize the return on investment. There’s more to it than you might think!

Landing the links

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:34:00 +0000

Landing the links

Landing the links
Priming your pages is only a small part of the battle to get top rankings.
By landing the links in a well-managed link-building campaign, you can go from also-ran to world champion and establish both the importance and the relevance of your site.
G How Google ranks. One of the most important sections in the book begins with an exploration of the Google algorithm (how sites are ranked or ordered within search results). It also covers PageRank, TrustRank, and text matching.
G Off-page optimization, the longest part of the book, incorporates strategies to build keyword-rich anchor-text links into your pages from other websites, so that the quality and quantity of your links exceed those of your competitors.
G What’s new in Web 2.0 explores how the emergence of hugely popular social networks has shifted the balance of traffic on the internet. The chapter specifically explains how you can use this to your advantage in your search campaign.
G Avoiding penalties is an introduction to the dark side of SEO: how to avoid using methods that could attract a Google penalty, and how to recover from and reverse a penalty if it happens to you.

Making the map

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:33:00 +0000

Making the map

Making the map
As the web gets bigger, so searches become more locally focused. This innovative step shows you how to exploit this by improving your position for locally qualified searches and on local Google instances. It also covers Google Maps and Google Earth.
G Language optimization. If your site is multilingual, it is important that Google knows this. This chapter shows you how to tag pages and individual text blocks for different languages and how to get ranked in local-language searches.
G Geographical optimization. This may surprise you, but users narrow down 35–45% of their searches to sites based in their own country. This chapter covers the key steps required to rank well in these local search instances.
G Google Earth and Google Maps. In this chapter you learn how to rank well in Google Maps and even Google Earth for local searches – a vital piece of futureproofing for the increasingly
mobile web.
G Priming for local search. Many people add a place name to their regular search query.

Priming your pages

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 12:31:00 +0000

Priming your pages

Priming your pages
Priming your pages covers the SEO art of page copywriting and asset optimization. This includes deploying your phrases that pay throughout your site and manipulating Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
G How Google stores. Before you can prime your pages you must understand how Google stores your content in its search index.
This important chapter also covers the dreaded supplemental index and how to avoid it.
G On-page optimization is all about effective SEO copywriting of metadata, tags, page text, and other on-page elements, so that web pages are keyword rich for search engines but still read well for humans.
G Asset optimization. It is vital also to optimize the images, documents, videos, and other assets on your site. This section shows you how.
G SERPs and snippets outlines how Google displays its search results and how to manipulate the link and the snippet for your own pages, so that web surfers are enticed to click on the result and visit your site.

Courting the crawl

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 12:28:00 +0000

Courting the crawl

Courting the crawl
Courting the crawl explains how to help Google to find your pages and index all of them appropriately, through building the right technical foundations and structure for your new or existing website.
G How Google finds. Your first important step in courting the crawl is learning how the Google spider, Googlebot, actually works and how to use sitemaps and robots.txt to initiate, control, and manage its crawl through your site.
G Setting up a new site contains vital information for new webmasters on how and where to host your site and how to select your domain name.
G Managing an existing site explains how to move your site to a new web host and/or move to a new domain without having an adverse impact on your website.
G Site structure and navigation concerns how to structure a site to the right depth and width to facilitate an effective crawl. It includes the optimization of your directory structure, file names, and file extensions.

Phrases that pay

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 12:24:00 +0000

Phrases that pay

Think of SEO as like cooking a meal. Keywords and keyphrases are your ingredients. Discovering phrases that pay is all about finding the right keyphrases for your business proposition, then deploying them for best effect in your site and campaign.
G Proposition development is about working out who your customers or audience are; what you can sell or promote to them online; how they will find your site; and what will convince them to do business with you.
G Keyword discovery is the first of three steps in my D–A–D keyword analysis technique. In discovery, you generate the longest list of possible search words and phrases your customers might use, with your competitors as a guide.
G Keyword attractiveness is the second D–A–D step and involves balancing keyword popularity and keyword competitiveness to determine the overall opportunity, or attractiveness, attached to each word or phrase.
G Keyword deployment is the third and final D–A–D step, where you use the principles of prominence, proximity, and density to work out how to chain, split, and splice together keywords into phrases that pay.

mobile phones: more than phone calls

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 12:05:00 +0000

mobile phones: more than phone calls

mobile phones: more than phone calls

There are three categories of mobile phones.
Basic phones can make voice calls, send and receive SMS messages and make use of USSD services (USSD services are explained further in this chapter).

Featurephones offer features additional to a basic phone, including cameras and increased storage, as well as the ability to access the Internet. Featurephones usually have a standard numeric keypad.
Smartphones offers advanced capabilities and features over featurephones, notably allowing users to add applications to their phones. These phones run a full featured operating system, most have 3G as well as WiFi capabilitities and generally have a QWERTY keypad.
Note that there is not yet an industry standard definition of a smartphone, and many featurephones are now being developed with technology similar to smartphones.
Smartphones tend to have bigger screens than featurephones.

limitations of the mobile phone

noreply@blogger.com (Mahmoud Ahmed AbdElFattah) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:45:00 +0000

limitations of the mobile phone

limitations of the mobile phone
The mobile phone is a feature packed gadget used all around the world by almost half the world’s population. However, as much as the mobile phone has a number of unique benefits, it does come with its own challenges.
The mobile phone is small. This means that it has a small screen and a small keypad.
While some phones have a full QWERTY keypad, many have the standard numeric keypad. When it comes to the mobile web, consider that phones do not have a mouse.
There are a few models that have touchscreens, but for the most part, navigation of the mobile web is through the keypad or scroll buttons on the phone.
Mobile phones are also even less standard than PCs. Not only do phone models present a myriad of screen sizes, there are also several operating systems and browsers that are used by mobile phones.
Use of more advanced features of phones can require an extensive education process.
While mobile phones have a host of features, these devices are for the most part under-used.