Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing

Social Bookmarking – The Best Way to Share Your Valuable Resources

expressseo — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:40:41 +0000

By getting your site bookmarked on various popular social bookmarking sites, you can gain instant access to a large number of audiences around the world. You thus get a big boost in the traffic to your site and improve your sales manyfold!

Social bookmarking service has proved to be a very effective SEO tool. Search engines use the data on these sites by counting the bookmarks as votes & using tags to index & categorize data. Social Bookmarking brings you the following advantages from SEO’s point of view:

Faster indexing
Deep one way links from sites with high page rank
Anchor Text Links
Can have a viral effect if the site has got interesting content.

Thus, it helps to increase your website’s value in the eyes of the search engines, who in turn, give your website more importance, leading to better rankings. The best way to get people start bookmarking your site is to request your friends, other bloggers and eminent experts to visit your site and bookmark it if they like it. Few of the more famous bookmarking tools are:

BookmarkSync
del.icio.us
Digg
Diigo
Furl
Fark
Faves
GiveALink.org
Ma.gnolia
My Web
Netvouz
Newsvine
Reddit
Simpy
SiteBar
StumbleUpon
Thoof

Press Releases – Let Them Know That You Are Here!

expressseo — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:35:48 +0000

Writing a good Press Release and submitting the same to various syndicates can bring in a lot of traffic to your site by creating a positive impression about your services, apart from the much need inbound links. Few things you should keep in mind when writing them:

Press releases are written in block style, so no paragraph indentation is necessary.
Have a friend read your press release and tell you whether he or she would be interested enough to read a newspaper story about it. If not, consider a rewrite.
Send your press release to as many free distribution site as possible. Often, this will turn into a story much faster.
Keep the tone of your release all business. Don’t go into too much personal or non-business related detail or your press release will likely end up in the editor’s circular file.

The distribution source of the release is also an important consideration. For reference, here is a list of wire services for distributing press releases:

Remember, the objective of the press release should not be poetic and dont try to outsmart the reader!

Sitemaps: Guide The Spiders to Your Site

expressseo — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:03:09 +0000

Sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines about your website & the pages on it that are available for crawling. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site, along with additional information about each URL (like when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site). Sitemaps give out all this information to the search engines important so that they can crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

Your site is updated frequently.
Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
Your site is new and has few links to it.
Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can generate sitemaps of your site by use the Google Sitemap Generator.

Site Interlinking – How to Overcome the Monster!

expressseo — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:49:56 +0000

This is one important aspect of Search Engine Optimization which most Experts often overlook because of its complexity. But it is very important to make the Search Engines see your site the way you want to! You should use “No follow” attributes smartly to make sure that pages of your site don’t appear to be reciprocating each other. This is because most Search Engines are now discounting Reciprocal links and are stressing more on One way Links. The following diagrams will give you a better idea.

Site Inter Linking, Link Structure

" data-medium-file="https://expressseo.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/normal-link-structure-of-a-site.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://expressseo.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/normal-link-structure-of-a-site.jpg?w=544" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-18" src="https://expressseo.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/normal-link-structure-of-a-site.jpg?w=300&h=126" alt="Site Inter Linking, Link Structure" />

If you notice, the links from individual pages to the index pages looks like one way link to it, in the site following a proper interlinking structure. The main advantage of this is that you can control the Page Rank being passed on by the index page and thus, help to improve the same.

Title Tags: They play a very important role in your site’s SEO!

expressseo — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:02:57 +0000

Title Tags are the HTML tags which appear on the top line of a Web browser. They are also used by many SE as the title of search listings.

For a page to be optimized properly, the title should ideally be under 70 characters, but it could go up to about 85 if it really has to. Also, try to use as many of the keyword phrases as possible, but at the same time, the Title must describe what is the page about. In addition, it can good be a advertising copy to make people interested.

Here, the most important thing to know here is that most SE only display about 60 characters. So try to keep the important key phrases near the beginning.

Multiple Brand Merger – Be or not to be?

expressseo — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:31:21 +0000

I have recently, come across a lot of queries from my clients, specially the big corporates, asking me about the future SEO strategy and whether they should merge their various brands into one and ride the volume bike.

I searched around a bit to understand the pros and cons of this “merger of sites” from the SEO perspective. This is what I got from a Bill Mickey article at http://www.foliomag.com:

Pros:

1) Critical Mass: A new destination site quickly provides broad, market-spanning coverage that exudes an increased sense of scope and can make your competitors’ sites look ineffectual in comparison.

2) Access: Niche-specific content is represented, but customers have the opportunity to graze content where markets overlap.

3) No More Brand Silos: Corralling content under a broader brand elevates it to a level where more customers can congregate.

Cons:

1) Brand Subordination & Confusion: Sites pulled together under one site may suffer brand dilution. It may also confuse the visitor as to the core service which the company provides.

2) More Work: The new gateway site will be a hungry beast, requiring the constant feeding of new daily content unique to the site.

3) Loss of SEO Advantage: Initially the website will not have a good organic ranking in search engine. We can try to retain current user base and hits as much as possible using permanent redirects and forwarding. This can also be compensated by proper pay-per-click management initially and then toning it down if required.

Tips to make your “Resource Box” work better for you – Ask them to click!

expressseo — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 12:00:05 +0000

Resource Box is the small paragraph, generally at the end of the article, giving the readers a bit of information about the author of the article. Many times, it’s the only place where you are allowed to put a link to a site.

The resource box should be used like the “About Author” section and contain few lines about the Author. Now, you should always consider two aspects while filling a resource box:

– From the readers perspective
– From Search Engines’ prospective

Now here are few things you should always bear in mind while filling up the resource box:

1. Don’t try to advertise too much. Appear plain and simple
2. Put your site’s URL in the resource box.
3. However, us no more than 3 links in the resource box.
4. You can derive the maximum benefit of the resource boxes by puttung in links to the inner pages
5. You can use Anchor Texts here. However, many directories strip out any html elements they find, which then eliminates your link.

By keep this few simple points in mind, you can derive the maximum benefit out of your Article Submission Campaign.

Google Sandbox – A Myth?

expressseo — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:13:34 +0000

For starters, the Sandbox Effect is something where newly formed websites rank very high before being placed in a sandbox (holding area) in the indexes of Google until such time as deemed appropriate before ranking commences again. If you have a newly launched website, which ranked very well when initially indexed by Google and then disappeared all of a sudden, then its most probable that your site has witnessed the “Sandbox” effect. As with Google, no one really knows how long will it take the site to come back in the rankings!

For SEO experts, The Sandbox is actually nothing more than a theory which explains what they have witnessed with their own sites. However, whether or not the so called “sandbox” really exists is actually irrelevant when we witness the effects of its existence.

It happened to many of my clients when they launched new websites. They ranked very well for the first few weeks before going off for a while. They got really scared about the faith of their sites.

So how do you get your site of “Sandbox”? I believe that a site gets sandboxed because Google loses trust in it. By building trust with Google, you can quickly get your site out of the sandbox. You can gain Google’s trust by getting links from other “Trusted” sites, sites which have been indexed and awarded good Page Ranks by Google. By getting such links, they show trust in you, which in turns makes Google trust you & helps you to get out of the sandbox and rank well again in Google. Examples of trusted sites are:

Site Directories
Article Directories
Other Relevant sites.

By getting your site submitted to article & site directories and exchanging links from “Relevant” sites, you can get those much needed trusted links, which will help you get out of the “Sandbox”.

Directory Submission: FAQs

expressseo — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 11:21:52 +0000

There are few questions, which every new client of mine will ask me before placing directory submission orders. Keeping in mind the repetitive nature of these queries, I thought it would be better if I post about them here. So, here are my simple answers to your questions:

Do you think submitting my site to Niche directories is more effective than general directories?

In my opinion, all directories are effective – provided they are well organized and don’t put too many links on one single page. As for the debate between Niche and General, every category in a directory is a sort of niche – so search engines would register the sites included in there as “on topic”. That’s why you should always make sure that your is included is in the most appropriate category.

Should anyone submit to a directory which has PR 0? Will submitting to a PR 0 directories would impact my Page Rank adversely?

No ways! Had that been the case, then giants like Google & Yahoo! would be having a poor rank. Backlinks from any site is always useful (Provided it is not a banned one). Page Rank only helps in determining the weightage the link should get in determining your own Page Rank by Google. Having links from PR 0 directories will not adversely affect your rankings. Rather, they will only help you in achieving higher PR.

I will always submit my sites to PR0 directories as they are usually free directories, sites get listed very quickly and they also might get a PR boost in the next Google update as they are constantly promoting themselves. So, whats 0 today may be 4 or even 5 tomorrow. Thats when your links from these sites will really help you. And they don’t take very long to gain on their PR.

What if after inclusion in a directory, my site changes radically? Will that result in my site being removed from the directories?

Practically speaking, most directories won’t bother to look back at your site once they approve it. I run 5 directories and never bother to look back at sites I have in their. I just carry out an occasional link check to see if the site exists or not. So changing your site’s look and design won’t impact the site’s listing in a particular directory.