SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TIP - SEO TIPS

Add +1 to help your site stand out

2011-06-13T22:19:00.000-07:00

Add +1 to help your site stand out: Search results can be more helpful, and more personal, when recommendations from the people you trust are there to guide your way.

The +1 button can help publishers, too. As potential visitors see recommendations from their friends and contacts beneath your Google search results, you could see more, and better qualified, traffic coming from Google.

To get started, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central You’ll be able to configure a small snippet of JavaScript and add it to the pages where you want +1 buttons to appear.

Create a +1 Custom Button

How to Create Meta Tags for Bloggers

2011-05-24T01:31:00.000-07:00

Blogger never add Meta Description & Keyword Tags in all your posts? This will sometime lead to decreasing of yours blog traffic or sometime not index in Google. So to solve this problem you have to change yours template code.

As a search engine crawl your site, it takes the information from the Title & Meta Tags such as Description and Keywords. The Meta description should be used to describe the content of your page honestly and concisely and be 1 or 2 sentences, 3 at most.

For this to happen, you have to add some pieces of code to the template.

First Sign in to Blogger dashboard » Layout » Edit html
Search for <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
Add this code just below that line.

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://bloggertricks.com/"'>
<meta content='DESCRIPTION' name='description'/>
<meta content='KEYWORDS' name='keywords'/> </b:if>

Example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://abc.com"'>
<meta content='Blogger never add Meta tags in all your posts?' name='description'/>
<meta content='meta tag, meta description, meta keyword' name='keywords'/> </b:if>

That’s it! Save and view your work.

After changed of this tag, you’ll see that on post pages, the Meta description and Keyword tag included at the source code of that particular page within the <head> section.

Demo: Check out from here: http://search-engine-optimization-tip.blogspot.com/2011/02/three-common-url-problems.html

Are Shorten URLs SEO friendly?

2011-04-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

Shorten URLs SEO Friendly

Shorten URLs will be used especially at Social Media sites to share web pages and interesting links. People are spending hours and hours in front of Facebook, Twitter etc, so URL Shortener services are increasing day by day. Most of people have this question that whether these short URLs are SEO friendly or not.

Usually shorten URLs will redirect to destination URLs. We need to find out whether these redirections are permanent (301) or temporary (302). We have few free tools on the web to check it. Yes, URL Shorten Services are using permanent 301 redirection which is search engine friendly. Please have a look at the following example for better understanding.

Example:

Checked link: http://bit.ly/fZzYtX

Type of Redirect: 301 Moved

Redirected to: http://search-engine-optimization-tip.blogspot.com/2011/02/change-blogger-title-tags.html

You can check out the redirection from here: http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

Conclusion: Shorten URLs are permanent redirected & they are search engine friendly as well.

Google Farmer Update – How much damage it can do?

2011-03-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

This article on the most recent change to Google’s algorithm, which impacts on websites appear in the organic search. The article says that although Google makes more than 500 changes a year, this change will definitely be noticed.

Last week Google has made the biggest change in its search algorithm. It affected many websites that depend on Google to drive majority of their traffic. This major change is done to rank quality content higher in Google search results. Particularly pulling down the sites, which have low quality / less original content and are of no use to users. The effect is that users will find sites which wrote the original content. Google says in a blog post on Thursday that these tweaks in the algorithm will affect 12% of its search results.

People give funny names to Google’s algorithm update. Be it “Jagger update” or “Hilltop update” This is called the Google “Farmer Update”. Do you know who gives names to Google algorithm updates? Many people in search marketing world don’t know how Google updates get their names. It all started in 2003 from Webmaster World.

In the blog post Google says “Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.”

So quite are the Google’s algorithm changes that few people notice them. But these recent algorithm changes has begun to show effects on various websites. This time “Content Farms” are Google’s target. Matt Cutts wouldn’t say that Algorithm update has targeted the content farms, but Danny Sullivan thinks Google has not targeted the farms so much as it aimed at the low quality content sites.

Who are content farms?

Content farms are websites which publish mass text content targeting top searched keywords on search engines. These text content pages are specially designed to rank high on top searched keywords and generate advertising revenue through visits from search engines. Some sites can be called content farms but have valuation worth of millions of dollars. eg:- ezinearticles.com.

Article directories are being hit particularly by “Farmer update”. Ezinearticles may see 50% drop in their organic traffic by end of this month. Many webmasters on Webmasterworld.com reports of traffic loss overnight and some say that they can’t adapt the algo so quickly. backdraft7 commented :-“Hey Google, this is not fun anymore – YOU’RE KILLING OUR BUSINESSES!”.

Content creators adhere to many legitimate ways to optimize their websites to get higher ranking in Google. But the search giant came cracking down on them as it sees it as inappropriate attempts to do. This update has upset many big players. Demand Media which has a market valuation of $1.9 billion more than New York Times Co already may have experienced fall in traffic according to a study done by a German seo firm as well as data pulled together by Compete.com for BNET.study done

Content Farms are always been controversial to Google as you can find well informative articles on them and some people claim that they amass large amount of content every day only to rank high on Google on as many keywords possible.

Personally I find many valuable articles in EzineArticles.com and other large content sites. There are also many articles I don’t find worth reading. The question is the Algorithm is targeting specific sites or specific pages? But as I read the Google blog I think the words used in the post tell us that this is site specific targeting rather than page specific.

A very important question “How Google will treat news sites & classified sites that have duplicate content?” News sites use PTI source for content, classified sites can have same listing as other classified sites as a advertiser may have posted the same content in more than one classified sites. What will Google do here as these are not illegitimate ways? Matt can you hear me?

As Google states: Any change to Google’s algorithm is a zero-sum game. Some websites win, some lose. Will this algorithm update have a lasting effect on search quality? Anytime Google updates its algorithm to clean its search results, those determined to beat it immediate adjusts.

Change Blogger Title Tags

2011-02-22T04:13:00.000-08:00

Remove the name of your blog from the page title of your posts by swapping blogger titles for better search engine (SEO) implementation and displaying post name instead of blog name. It will helps to increase yours traffic through search engines. Only you need to change yours Blogger title tag html code.

Blogger always adds your blog name to the page title of all your posts? This will sometime lead to decreasing of yours blog traffic or sometime not index in Google. This problem is suffer mainly by those who generally used long URL. So to solve this problem you have to change yours template code.

Generally we change blogger titles after moving to Dashboard -> Setting -> Basic. But this is not enough to increase yours blog traffic for this you have to Edit yours html template.

To do this, go to Layout > Edit HTML in your Dashboard.
Search for <title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>. It should be near the top.
Replace that with this piece of code.

<b:if cond= 'data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

That’s it! Save and view your work.

After changed of this tag, you’ll see that on post pages, the default [blog name] post title format for your post titles in the browser window will be replaced by your post title instead. If you’re in the main page, your page title is your blog name. If you visit one of your posts, the page title would be the post title.

Fix URL Problem

2011-02-14T04:48:00.000-08:00

I have already mentioned 3 Common URL Problems that you can face while running your website in my earlier post. Now I am trying to share that How you can Fix them.

Problem 1:

Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs

There are a couple of things you need to do to fix this:

Decide which URL style you want to use, www or non-www.
Set up a 301 redirect so that any links to your non-preferred URL style will go to the right style. This way you don’t waste link value by splitting it between two URLs.
Set your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools so your search result listings are consistent with your style preference.

Direction: Site Configuration(on right side) -> Settings

Make sure whenever you build links to your site that you use the preferred URL style.

Problem 2:

Duplicate Home Page URLs

The fix here is very similar to the first one. Here are a few tips:

Set your main home page URL to be http://www.mysite.com. 301 redirect everything else to this URL since it is the most basic (If your preferred URL style is non-www, then do http://mysite.com)
If you have to set up different versions for tracking purposes or some other reason, set a canonical tag to show the search engines which version you want showing up in the search results.
Make sure when you build links to your home page that you link to the correct version.

Problem 3:

Dynamic URLs

If possible, make sure that your site is using SEO-friendly base URLs. It’s better to have a base URL that will lead to the content rather than a URL that relies on a parameter. For example: http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html is much better than http://www.mysite.com/category.php?prod=123 where some generic category page is really the base URL.
Set a canonical tag that tells the search engines to use the base version of the URL. That way you can still use parameter URLs like http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html?param1=123&param2=423 to get your data, but the search engines will consider the basic version as the official one.
An even better way to handle this is to capture the data on the server side and then redirect the visitor to the correct URL after you have captured your data. A lot of affiliate networks like ShareASale do it this way, and you can to. The visit basically goes like this: Visitor clicks on links with parameters -> Visitor goes to site, server records parameter data and 301 redirects them to the right landing page – >Visitor barely notices the switch because it happens fast.This way you can get all the data you need, make sure all of the link value goes to the right page, and your visitor still sees what they were after.

These are some steps, one can follow to fix these problems.

Three Common URL Problems

2011-02-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

Problem 1:

Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs

If your site has a non-www and www version of all your URLs, you’re going to be splitting link value for the same content between two URLs. Rather than capturing 100% of the link value on the page you want to rank in the search results, you could be doing a 50/50, 60/40, or some other kind of split between the two URLs.

Problem 2:

Duplicate Home Page URLs

This is a close cousin to Problem 1, but is especially bad because it’s your home page.

It is possible to have a lot of different URLs that all go to your home page content, especially if you haven’t fixed your www and non-www duplication, which can result in a lot of unnecessary duplication.

For example:

• http://www.mysite.com

• http://mysite.com

• http://www.mysite.com/index.html

• http://mysite.com/index.html

These URLs will all lead to the same content. If you have links going to all four of them you will see a four-way split in link value. There are a lot of sites out there that have fixed their non-www and www problems, but I can still find multiple versions of their home page.

I’ve even come across sites with different extensions (.php, .html, .htm, etc.) that bring up the same page as well. This leads to even more duplication and potentially wasted link value.

Problem 3:

Dynamic URLs

This is a fun one that a lot of not-so-SEO-friendly shopping cart programs run into. Once you start including all sorts of variables and parameters in your URLs, the opportunities for duplicate content and wasted link value are endless.

All of the following URLs could lead to the same content:

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111&id=423

Now what if I start rearranging the parameters? Well, they’ll still show the same content. So, as you might imagine, this can create a lot of wasted link value.

There are other causes for the dynamic URL problem. A lot of companies use these parameter-based URLs for statistical purposes.

This problem also happens with sites that give their affiliates a unique ID to use in their links. You could have 100 affiliates linking to the same page, but all of the URLs will be different because each affiliate has their own unique ID.

These are 3 Common URL Problems that you can face while running your website.

But How can you Fix URL problems, covers in the next post.

Dashes versus Underscores

2011-01-25T03:14:00.000-08:00

Is using hyphens in between your keywords more effective than using underscores when naming a Web page?

Lets for Example:

Is internet-marketing.html more readable by search engines than for instance internet_marketing.html?

So the answer of this question is YES because if you have a URL like abc1_abc2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for abc1_abc2 (which almost never happens). If you have a URL like abc1-abc2, that pages can be returned for the searches abc1, abc2, and even “abc1 abc2″.

Reason behind this, please check out from here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Important Points to Remember while Developing a New Website

2011-01-13T01:08:00.000-08:00

Clients usually develop a website by their own designers and outsource the SEO task to some one outside the company. So before the involvement of SEO consultant, the website would be completed and it is very difficult to change the design. So it would be difficult to perform on-page optimization for the Search Engine Optimization consultant. SEO is not an after thought but it should be implemented while designing a new website. For the development of a Search Engine friendly website we need to take care of a few important points. Those are website URL structure, rooms for header tags, usage of flash and other animations etc.

1. We should use header tags

After title tag, the most important tag in your website is H1 tag. So while designing a new website we should put a room for h1 tag in our website. In an SEO point of view h1 tag should be keyword rich in nature and the proper placement is on the top of a web page. It should be near to the top portion of a web page. There should be only one h1 tag on a single web page. Using more than one h1 tag on the same page is not accepted by Google and may treat as spamming. So the important points we need to note in this category are:

i. There should be an h1 tag on a web page

ii. H1 tag should be keyword rich and placed on the top portion of a web page

iii. Should not use more than one h1 tag on a single web page

2. Website URL structure

This is very important point while developing a new website. The home page should be pointed to the exact domain name and not to the index page. Another important point we need to remember is the internal link structure. The links should be keyword rich. It is equally important that we should not spam the links with keywords. Use the optimum number of keywords in the links. We should make sure that the URLs are static and not dynamic in nature. We should avoid any dynamic parameters in internal links. There should be proper internal link structure in your website and major pages in your website should be properly inter-connected. It is advised to put a link to home page from every page in your website. It can boost the Page Rank and Search Engine Result Position of your home page. So the important points to remember in this category are:

i. Avoid dynamic link structure and use static structure

ii. Proper internal link building

iii. Link back to home page

3. Usage of Images

It is better use some images on your websites. We need to make sure that there are proper alternate image texts for images on your web page. It is because search engine spiders cannot read images. One more issue is some people still using text only browsers and they cannot see the images. To overcome this limitation we need to add some alternate text for images. The alternate text should be neat and keyword rich.

4. Usage of flash and animation

It is better reduce the flash works on your website to make your website more search engine friendly. Excess usage of flash on your website can create difficulty for search engine spiders to crawl your website.

So the above points are very important while designing a new business website. If the designer can take care of these simple points, it should be easy for Search Engine Optimization consultant to promote this website in major Search Engines.

Improve Your Website’s Internal Linking Structure

2010-12-23T21:01:00.000-08:00

Internal Linking Structure

A website’s internal linking structure is a crucial part of the overall SEO strategy. Whether it is the end user or the search engines, it is important to optimize a site’s internal structure for maximizing the benefits. If you plan to obtain high rankings in search engines, you need to effectively plan your website’s internal linking structure, also termed as a website’s navigational structure or site architecture. The inner structure of the site must be planned adhering to the usability guidelines as well as the best search engine optimization practices.

Given below are 8 important tips to help you plan an inner structure which conforms to both usability guidelines and SEO.

1. Link Categorization

This site feature is technically termed as ‘navigability’. While developing a website for success, you should pay careful attention to the categories and subcategories that you create. All the internal linking on your site should be ‘relevant’. The link structure should be appropriately optimized, both for people and search engines. Keep the ‘task flow’ alive throughout the site.

2. Anchor Text

The next important thing that you need to consider is the anchor text linking of your website. Today’s users are smarter. Anchor text links like ‘Click Here’ are almost dead. Webmasters should try to use anchor text that entice users to click links. You should use call-to-action anchor text like ‘creating an ad campaign’, ‘improve direct mail response’, ‘designs that really work’ etc.

3. Redundancy

Here, redundancy refers to repetition of links. You should not link the same page double or three times from the same place. For example, placing a ‘Read More’ link under a post title which already links to the corresponding page is redundancy. You should either link the post title (that appears on a list) or provide a ‘Read More’ or ‘Continue Reading’ link at the end of the two- or three-liners. Choose any one of the two options.

4. No-follow Attributes

While setting up the internal structure of a website, you will come across multiple links which are not so important. There may be some page links to which you do not want to pass on page rank. How do you solve this? For the very purpose, you have the no-follow tags available to you. Use these no-follow tags to your benefit and keep the search engines well informed.

5. Sitemap

An important part of a site’s internal link structure is the creation of a well-defined sitemap. A sitemap keeps informed both search engines and people. It is a good idea to create both – a static sitemap (for users) and an XML sitemap (for search engines). Since well-explained sitemaps keep the search engines informed, it also helps obtain higher rankings.

6. Accessibility

Do not bury important web pages in deep links. Both in terms of usability guidelines and SEO, all the important pages on your site should not be more than two clicks away from the homepage. Search engines love to visit pages that are easily accessible from the website’s homepage.

7. Dangling Links

Do not have web pages that prove to be a dead-end for users. Would you like the search engine spider to crawl a page which has ‘nowhere to go’? These links can be termed as dangling links. If you have such pages on your site, you need to optimize them appropriately to improve the inner link structure.

8. Broken Links

Keep a close watch on all the internal links of your website to keep them error-free. Make sure your site does not have any error pages like 404 or ‘Not Found’. There are various tools that you can use to detect such pages on your website. Fix these error pages as soon as you find them.

Website Navigation Design

2010-12-12T22:12:00.000-08:00

Website Navigation

Website navigation structure and behavior affect the ease with which search engine spiders can navigate through the site and index it. Your site navigation should facilitate the uninterrupted movement of crawlers within the site.

Search engines prefer sites which are easy for them to navigate and retrieve information related to the site’s topical information, and consequently rank them higher for the site keywords. Therefore it is very important for the site to have a simple navigation structure that is easy for the spiders to crawl.

There are many types of navigation structure that can make it search engine friendly or not.

1. Simple text-based navigation is the most search engine friendly. Apart from being easily followed by spiders, text-based navigation gives an opportunity to include the keywords in the page content. The keywords included in the navigation are valued by all search engines.

2. JavaScript based navigation: Search engine crawlers can read JavaScript but cannot parse it; hence, they are unable to follow the links embedded in the JavaScript code. Usage of JavaScript based linking would not allow the crawlers to follow the links and crawl/index the sites completely. If the navigation has to be JavaScript based, it should be made sure that in case the scripts are blocked by user settings, they should still be able to navigate through the site. It’s recommended to use the html noscript tag.

Example: Use of the <noscript> tag:

document.write("Hello World!")

</script>

The <noscript> tag is used to provide an alternate content for users that have disabled scripts in their browser or have a browser that doesn’t support client-side scripting. The content inside the noscript element will only be displayed if scripts are not supported, or are disabled in the user’s browser.

3. Flash navigation: Flash is not parsed by search engine crawlers in normal circumstances (unless the text/HTML alternative is provided or unless the flash movie is using deep linking to all the content). The reason for search engines being unable to read flash code is that flash is published in the .swf format which does not contain the code (code is embedded in .fla files) which are not published on the pages. This means that in order for search engines to read the flash embedded content and navigation, they will have to decompile the flash movie, which is not done by search engines at this point. It’s recommended using SWFObject to replace flash video on a webpage, so you can include text.

4. Image based navigation: Often, the site design requires the navigation to be in form of images. Search engines can follow the image links (as long as they are not JavaScript based) but using image based navigation takes away the ability to create keyword targeted navigation. Quite often while embedding rollover or other interactive images for navigation, JavaScript is used for linking. It should be made sure that the links behind the images are not JavaScript based.

Note: It’s recommended to use the Alt attribute whenever an image-based navigation must be used.

5. Sliding/DHTML menus: If the site structure and architecture requires the use of rollover menus. Most often, the sliding menus are implemented on the sites using pure JavaScript for interactivity and functionality of the navigational links. The best practice is to use the CSS/JS hybrid navigation to make sure that the links embedded in the navigation are readable and followed by search engines. In case JavaScript has to be used, it should be made sure that the JavaScript code is placed in external files instead of page code.

Using a drop-down or pull-down menu helps you save on screen space when you have a lot of material that needs to be displayed on your pages, or a complicated multi-level navigational structure. In general it is recommended to use XHTML and CSS style sheets to present drop-down or pull-down menu navigation so that the search engines will still see the href links when indexing your Web page. If you must use drop-down or pull-down menus using JavaScript or a CGI script as your main navigational format, remember to include a secondary form of navigation to allow search engine spiders to follow links to the sections of the web site easily.

Example: footer text links.

Few tips to Index more pages

2010-12-09T04:50:00.000-08:00

Website Indexing

Want to get more pages of your website indexed by search engines? Here are some useful tips:

1. Site structure
Make sure your sub pages are easily accessible by search engine bots. Create a sitemap page that links to all pages of your website and place a link to it from the homepage. If you have a large website, break the sitemap up in several parts and keep the total link number under 100 per page. Link from your homepage to deep pages to get them and the sites around them crawled faster.

2. No session IDs
Get rid of session IDs. Bots rarely index pages with a session IDs because they think that those are different pages (because of the different IDs) with the same content.

3. No variables in the URLs
Avoid variables in the URL. They are indexed slowly and often getting no Page Rank. Use Apache's mod_rewrite feature to convert your dynamic pages to static. Redirect all old pages to the new ones with a 301 redirect. Note however that if you do that for your established website, search engines will need some time to crawl the new static pages.

4. Get links!
Inbound (incoming) links are half of the SEO battle nowadays. Your website needs links from quality, on topic websites. The higher your Page Rank the faster and deeper your website will be crawled by bots. Get links not only to your home page, but also to the deep pages. Make sure the spiders can find your site from different places.

Google Penalty Checklist and Penalty Checker

2010-11-30T21:16:00.000-08:00

Google Penalty Checklist

Some content that point out some of the mistakes through which a website suffers from a Google penalty, They are:

Linking to banned sites

Run a test on all outbound links from your site to see if you are linking to any sites which have themselves been Google banned.

Linking to bad neighborhoods

Check you are not linking to any bad neighborhoods, link farms or doorway pages. Bad neighborhoods include spam sites and doorway pages, whilst link farms are just pages of links to other sites, with no original or useful content.

Over optimization penalties

These can be triggered by poor SEO techniques such as aggressive link building using the same keywords in link anchor text. When managing link building campaigns always vary the link text used and incorporate a variety of different keyword terms. For brand new domains, add no more than 5 new one way backlinks a week and use deep linking to website internal pages, rather than just homepage link building.

Website cross linking & link schemes

If you run more than one website and the Google penalty hits all sites at the same time, check the interlinking (cross linking) between those sites. Extensive interlinking of websites, particularly if they are on the same C Class IP address (same ISP) can be viewed as "link schemes" by Google, breaking their terms of service. The risks are even higher where site A site wide links to site B and site B site wide links back to site A. If you must use site wide links, make sure they are not reciprocal links. Link schemes built around links in the footer of each webpage are particularly risky.

Hidden text or links

Remove any hidden text in your content and remove any hidden keywords. Such content may be hidden from view using CSS or alternatively, text may have been coded to be the same colour as the page background, rendering it invisible. These risky SEO techniques often lead to a Google penalty or web site ban and should be removed immediately.

Keyword stuffing (spamming)

Remove excessive keyword stuffing in your website content (unnatural repetitions of the same phrase in body text). Always use natural, well written web copywriting techniques.

Automated page redirects

The use of automated browser re-directs in any of your pages. Meta Refresh and JavaScript automated re-directs often result in Google penalties as the pages using them are perceived to be doorway pages. This technique is especially dangerous if the refresh time is less than 5 seconds. To avoid Google penalties, use a 301 re-direct or Mod Rewrite technique instead of these methods. This involves setting up an .htaccess file on your web server.

Reciprocal link building campaigns

Excessive reciprocal linking may trigger a Google penalty or cause a SERPS filter to be applied when the same or very similar link anchor text is used over and over again and large numbers of reciprocal links are added in a relatively short time.

The dangers are made worse by adding reciprocal links to low quality sites or websites which have an unrelated theme. This can lead to a backlink over optimization penalty (known as a BLOOP to SEO experts!). A Google Backlink over Optimization Penalty causes sudden drops in SERPS ranking. To avoid this problem, reciprocal link exchange should only be used as part of a more sustainable SEO strategy which also builds quality one way links to original website content.

Thin Affiliates and "Made for Adsense" sites

It's a well known fact that Google dislikes affiliate sites with thin content and the same applies to "made to Adsense" sites. Always make sure affiliate sites have quality original content if you don't want to get them filtered out of the search results when someone completes a Google spam report so don't spend time and money on SEO on such sites without the right content.

Check Google Webmaster Guidelines

Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines and check website compliance in all respects. Since early 2007, Google may alert webmasters via the Google Webmaster Console who they feel might have unknowingly broken their guidelines to advise them that their site has been removed from Google for a set period of time due to breaking one or more of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

However, blatant spam or significant breaches of Google's rules will often result in a site being banned, with no Webmaster Console notification. Where notification of a violation of Google's guidelines is received, it usually encourages the webmaster to correct the problem/s and then issue a re-inclusion request to re-include their site or write to webmaster[at]google.com with the subject line 'reinclusion request'. From my experience, after this is done the website will usually regain its original ranking, having lost no trust.

Google Website Penalty Checker:

If you've used unethical SEO techniques your website could be Google banned and de-indexed. Check for a Google website ban using the free SEO tool at http://tools.seomoves.org/penaltychecker/

Google Banned Checker:

http://www.iwebtool.com/google_banned

Google Penalty Advice

2010-11-24T23:52:00.000-08:00

Google Penalty

To check for Google penalties with any degree of certainty can be difficult. For example, if your website experiences a sudden reduction in ranking for its main keyword terms it can be caused solely by a Google algorithm change or search results (SERP) update.

With any algorithm change or Google SERP update, there are always winners and losers, and when a sudden drop in rankings is experienced Google penalties are often incorrectly blamed.

If you suspect a Google penalty, it first makes sense to check whether any Google algorithm changes have been made which could be the cause of the problem

That said, if your web site suffers sudden and dramatic fall in ranking and no Google algorithm changes have been made, then a Google penalty may be the cause, especially if you have been embarking on activities which might have contravened Google's Webmaster Guidelines. The most severe Google penalties lead to total website de-indexing and where the SEO misdemeanor is serious a site ban may be imposed by Google, accompanied by a Page Rank reduction to 0.

Initial Test For a Penalty

When a penalty is suspected, start by checking with Google the number of URL's it has indexed. This can be accomplished by using the site:yourdomainname command within a Google search window. If no URL's are indexed and no backlinks show up when the link:yourdomain.com is entered then there is a high probability of a Google penalty, especially if your site used to be indexed and used to show backlinks. The exception to this rule is a new website with few backlinks, which may not be Google indexed since it is still waiting to be crawled. Such websites frequently show no backlinks, but this doesn't imply they have received a Google penalty!

To avoid a Google penalty or SERPS filter, take particular care when embarking on any link building program. In particular, avoid reciprocal link exchange becoming the main-stay of your SEO campaign.

If you suspect your website has received a Google penalty, you can contact Google by sending an e-mail to help@google.com to ask for help. They will usually check the spam report queue and offer some form of assistance.

Interestingly, in a recent move by Google, web sites which are in clear violation of Google's webmaster guidelines or terms of service may receive an e-mail from Google advising them to clean up their act, warning of a penalty and website de-indexing. When the breach of Google's terms (e.g. spam or hidden text) is removed from the offending site, Google will usually automatically clear the penalty and re-index the site when the webmaster completes a Google re-inclusion request

If your website has suffered a Google penalty, take some free SEO advice to help identify the cause and solve the problem.

There are different types of penalty and you can suffer from any one of them. Some of them are: Google’s Minus 30 Penalty, Google’s Minus 50 Penalty & so on.

Google’s Minus 30 Penalty also known as the “4 pages back penalty” is not a permanent penalty. It usually results in your website dropping 30 spots lower in Google’s index and like this others are so on.

Note: In my next post, I will mention a Google Penalty Checklist that point out some of the mistakes through which a website suffers from a Google penalty.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing | LSI?

2010-11-17T05:09:00.000-08:00

Latent Semantic Indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.

Role of LSI in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Latent Semantic Indexing not only examines keywords in a single document but takes into account the collection of document for keyword in text analysis. This semantic model gives the search engine a bird's eye view on how closely these documents are related. A set of Documents that are semantically close gives the search engine an idea about how relevant a website is for a particular topic or keywords.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a process of extracting related words or information from your website content. This is very interesting topic in Information Retrieval (IR) System. Top search engines works on the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) based.

If you're searching in a Latent semantic indexing (LSI) indexed database then the search engine looks at similar values it has calculated for every synonyms word and returns the best matched website that will be the best fit to the query. Because latent semantic indexing does not require exact matching words for ranking result.

LSI is a way of getting higher search engine placement with the use of related words instead of keyword density

Some Tips For Video Optimization

2010-11-11T04:47:00.000-08:00

1. Make sure that your video clips are relevant and informative

2. Give your video a Catchy Title

3. Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site.

4. Optimize your video for Important Key Phrases

5. Good old HTML content is still a favorite with the search engines. If you want your video to rank well, you need to give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround your videos with on-page copy that can be indexed by the search engines.

6. Keep your Videos to five minutes or less

7. Make use of a Video Sitemap

8. Tag your Videos

9. Brand your Video with your Logo

10. Remember Inbound Linking Factors

11. Offer the Option to Embed Your Video

12. Add Descriptive Meta Data

13. Allow Users to Rate your Video

14. Syndicate Your Video - Submit your video to RSS.

15. Offer your audio and video content in as many formats as possible.

Bounce Rate | Exit Rate

2010-11-01T22:05:00.001-07:00

Bounce Rate

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs.

One can calculate the Bounce Rate as:

The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page.

Where

Rb = Bounce rate
Tv = Total number of visits viewing one page
Te = Total entries to page

I.e. Rb = Tv/Te

Exit Rate

Exit rate comes into play on the second (form) page after the landing. If you sell the product on the landing and take the information (payment, sign up) on the form page, look at the exit rate. If your landing page bounce rate is low but no one is buying, you might notice a high exit rate on the form page which means there is a problem.

Difference between Keyword Density | Keyword Frequency | Keyword Prominence | Keyword Proximity

2010-10-26T22:10:00.000-07:00

The difference between the following terms & how they affect search engine rankings are as listed below:

1. Keyword Density

Keyword Density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a web page.

I recommend using a keyword density ratio in the range of 3 to 4%

2. Keyword Frequency

Keyword Frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page.

I recommend that you ensure that the most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently use keywords in a web page.

But be careful not to abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.

3. Keyword Prominence

Keyword Prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page.

The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag.

4. Keyword Proximity

Keyword Proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are the better.

Avoid Seven Things - When Looking For Link Partners

2010-10-19T05:48:00.000-07:00

Link Building

Below you will find 7 tips for avoiding the major pitfalls:

Do not link to sites that are irrelevant to yours.
Avoid sites that have a "Links Page" that is hard to find.
Avoid sites that contain more than 25 to 50 links per page. Outbound links not more than 25 to 50.
Do not link to sites with directories that are disorganized. Again, it could be a "Link Farm".
Avoid sites that don't contain valuable information.
Avoid sites that have poor linking strategies and/or are connected to "Link Farms".
Avoid linking to a lot of sites with a low PR. A few are OK, but generally aim for sites with a higher PR than yours.