SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Understanding Search Engines - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:39:00 +0000

The Search Engine ‘Index’

While it is important to know how a search engine ‘reads’ websites and stores them in its ‘index’, it is even more important (or more relevant) to know how to get included in it.

There is only one ‘serious’ way to get included into search engines, and it is this:

Get links from other websites to point to your website.

Submitting to search engine inclusion forms, using software that ‘guarantees’ to get your website included in search engines, paying spammers who offer to get your website indexed in 100+ search engines …

All of that is a waste of time. Avoid any such schemes like the plague, and steer clear of ‘search engine submission forms’.

Why?

Because getting indexed by search engines is a piece of cake IF you know how to do it.

But how do I get links?

There are several ways to easily get links for free pointing to your website (and if you are willing to pay, more
power to you) and you can usually have your website (or at least your site’s front page) indexed in Google in 2-4 days of launch.

Note: Later on in the book you will find a whole chapter on building links for the site launch phase, so do not worry too much now (or skip ahead to that chapter if you wish).

Crawling Frequency

Crawling is a term used to describe the behavior of search engine spiders (also known as ‘bots’ (short for robots) which are computer programs written to ‘read’ websites. These spiders use links to go from one website to the other (hence the need to get links to your website).

Crawling frequency is a measure of how often a website gets ‘read’ by a search engine. This frequency depends on a number of factors but the two main factors you want to worry about are:

• Freshness (how often is the site content updated)
• Site importance (measured by the number of links pointing to that website)

If you get links from a website that is updated daily and has a lot of links pointing to it, you are bound to have the link to your site found quickly and get your website indexed.

Example:

Performancing.com is a very popular online resource for professional bloggers – it is updated daily and has tens of thousands of links pointing to it.

A link from such a website would have the search engine spiders knocking on your website’s proverbial door
very soon.

Another example:

Article directories such as EzineArticles.com are usually updated several times a day (with new articles uploaded every day) and have thousands of links pointing to them as well. Submitting an article to such article directories (if done the right way) will also help you get your website indexed quickly.

Recommended Resource: Article Submitter (http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com)

This is a free program that will submit your articles to hundreds of popular article directories across the internet. Note only will this get you a quality link pointing to your website from the article directory, but many other websites will likely pick up your article and syndicate it on their website, which will lead to many more links pointing to your website!

A paid example:

The Yahoo Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/) is the biggest and most popular online directory. Inclusion costs $299/year, and as such it is not a cheap proposition.

The benefits, however, are often worth the costs. Inclusion in the Yahoo Directory (a process that takes a week’s time as they review your site) will not only guarantee that your website gets indexed in all search engines, your site rankings should also receive a boost (especially in the Yahoo Search index, which mixes directory results in its search results AND gives more importance to sites included in its directory).

These are just a few examples of how you can use high-powered links to get your website indexed quickly.

There is one caveat though – the examples I gave above, and other such sources of ‘power links’ are easy to get, but only if you know HOW to get them. I will explain how later, so for now let us look at the next part of the puzzle – search engine results.

Recommended Resource: Directory Submitter (http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com)

This is another free program that will submit your website to literally thousands of other website directories across the internet. While the Yahoo directory is an excellent, “paid” directory to submit your website to, there are also thousands of completely FREE website directories you can submit to.

Doing this submission manually will take you days and days of time, but using out free Directory Submitter software, you can do this much faster. Directory Submission is something that I highly recommend doing at the time I am writing this post. The more directories you can submit your website to, the more one-way links you’ll get pointing to your website, and the higher you will rank.

Do you think it's easy to understand the search engines ?

Until next time! See you around ;-) ...

Quick Review

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:16:00 +0000

Review

We have covered a lot of basic ideas here, so it is time for a short recap:

What is SEO?

• Identify audience and set targets (research)
• Do on-page and off-page tasks to increase search engine rankings
• Track progress and adjust as necessary

SEO is NOT:

• A short-term solution
• Online advertising or public relations
• Free

Understand How Search Engines Work

To be successful as an SEO, we need to know how search engines work, how they have evolved in the last few years and in which direction they are moving.

Customize your SEO Strategy

Each project and website is different in scale and targets. A non-profit website has different goals than a site
that is geared to earn money from ad clicks. Do your research, and adapt accordingly.

Think Long Term

Long term planning where SEO is concerned allows you to do things once and then not worry about periodic
changes to the search engine algorithms.

Search engines are using time as a variable in evaluating several ranking factors, so expect to be in it for the
long haul.

Think For Yourself

Do not blindly follow what other people tell you – there is a LOT of misinformation spread about SEO, and the funny thing is that no one knows for sure what they are talking about.

SEO is an art, but more importantly, the only thing you can trust is what WORKS (in the long run).

Create a System

Having a system to do your SEO will save you a lot of time as well as help you be more effective.

Prioritize Your Work

Follow the Pareto principle (80-20 rule) and make sure that you do the most important things first.

Rankings Are NOT Everything

Rankings and traffic are not worth much if you cannot convert them to meet your site’s initial targets.
I hope that the ideas presented in the last few pages have helped you understand better what SEO is about and why it helps to approach it with a specific mindset.

This chapter was just the first part in building that SEO mindset. In the next chapter, I will discuss how search
engines work and how you can use that information to streamline your SEO strategies and build a search
engine-friendly plan to dominate search engine rankings.

And once that is done, we will move on to the actual process of doing SEO on a project, from start to end.
Everything we have talked about here – customized approaches, SEO systems, prioritization, long term planning – will show in the processes and strategies that are discussed in this book.

But I am getting ahead of myself – first, we must understand how search engines work.

Think Long Term - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:54:00 +0000

Think For Yourself

Quite often I meet people in the SEO industry who blindly follow what a certain ‘guru’ says, or believe everything that Google says to be gospel.

But as I told you earlier – there is no one way of doing SEO, and there definitely is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. It is all about what tactic is most effective in taking you to the top of the SERPs, and that is all that you should be really focused on.

Blind faith in Google’s idea of SEO, or some guru’s idea of SEO, is usually a bad idea. Listen to all sides of the argument, see the results for yourself and if possible, carry out your own experiments if you have to.

One such example involves paid links. Google has explicitly said that paid links for ranking purposes are not acceptable and will be penalized, where as paid links for traffic purposes are fine. This has caused a lot of debates in the SEO industry on whether paid links are right or wrong vis-à-vis.

Don’t be a slave to Google or what other people tell you about SEO – there is no set pattern on doing SEO and there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ either.

The most successful SEOs I know of publicly question some of Google’s policies and ‘preaching’ when it comes to Search Marketing. That’s not to say that you should go against Google, but that you should keep an open mind and focus on what works and what is guaranteed to be successful in the long run.

Everything else, whether told to you by Google or the SEO gods or me, is irrelevant. Stay on top of the ball as far as developments in the SEO world are concerned; focus on what works, and what your experience tells you works.

Create A System

Having a ‘system’ to accomplish goals is a natural progression for anyone that has to do one type of project more than once. Web designers who put together 10-20 sites every year have a system, programmers working on large projects swear by their ‘system’ of doing things, and so on.

If you do not already, it is time to think of SEO in terms of developing an effective system of activities and processes that will help you bring in targeted traffic to your website from the search engines.

A system is only effective if it can help you achieve your targets each time you do a similar project.

And as I said earlier, makes sure that continue doing that which is most effective in the long run, not what is easy or cheap to do, or what saves time, or what the search engines tell you to do.

Do what works now, and what will work in the future.

Prioritize Your Work

Once you have a basic system to do your SEO activities, you will find it much easier to prioritize which task gets done first.

In SEO, as in real life, there are some key activities that take less time and effort but have a large impact on search engine rankings. Remember the 80-20 rule (the Pareto principle) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_
principle) ? It works quite well in SEO, thank you very much, and it certainly makes life easier for us SEOs.

The most important SEO tasks will take roughly 15-25% of your time, and will yield 70-85% of the benefits associated with search marketing. For example:

• Optimizing your blog’s Title tags takes less than 2 minutes, but it has a major impact on how your web
pages are ranked in SEs.
• Paying for (and submitting) a directory listing in Yahoo takes 5 minutes, but that link is more valuable
than submitting to 100 free directories that have been spammed to death.

Make it a habit to ask yourself the importance of any SEO task before you do it – it will help you save time as
well as refocus you on the more important things in SEO.

Rankings Are NOT Everything!

The hard truth about search engine marketing is that sheer traffic (achieved from page 1 or #1 rankings) does
little good to you if you have no way to use it.

If you have set specific goals for your website, you will also have a clear idea of what audience you are targeting and what exactly they are supposed to do when they arrive at your website.

This could be asking for signups, selling them a product or service, getting them to click on ads, getting RSS
subscriptions, etc.

And if your website is not doing this part of its job properly, those rankings and all that traffic will be wasted.

Bottom line – Search Engine Optimization is great when it works well, but you also need to know how to make best use of that traffic.

Setting Goals - Part III

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:33:00 +0000

You might read the above and think – that’s not SEO!

And you would be right. That’s not traditional SEO.

But in the last couple of years, SEO has radically changed as more and more people realize that it is just one part of the process in building websites that make you money. It is still a separate skill set from web designing or copywriting, but you need to know elements from both of those sectors in order to have a website that brings in search engine traffic AND converts them properly.

After all – what good is free traffic if you have no way to put that to work into making you money?

We will do a more detailed conversion analysis later on, but for now I want you to make a list of:

• What information / pages / functionality your site will provide to its users?
• How does each item in the above list work towards fulfilling your website’s primary and secondary goals?
• What steps do you want your readers to take on these pages?

Once you have all that, it is time to review your website and see where you stand now as opposed to where you should be. If you do not have a site (and are building one), skip to the next section that talks about incorporating this advice into new sites.

Existing Site Analysis

Evaluate your website using the following checklist:

• Does it focus on your audience’s core problem? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix this?
• Does it provide users will all the necessary information? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix this?
• Does each page tie in with your primary / secondary goals? If not, then why is it there? Can you remove it and place the information on a more relevant page?
• Does each internal page have one clear objective? The main page and category pages usually have to ‘share’ attention, but internal pages can focus on and should have one main objective only.

Put yourself in the shoes of a random user, who has just landed on an internal page of your website from a search engine query.

What will you want them to do?

This will depend on the context and purpose of your website, but if you can adopt this mindset for every page, you can have a laser-focused website that not only brings in traffic but converts it as well.

Building a New Site

It is easier to build a new site from scratch focusing on conversion and good on-site SEO than it is to optimize
and improve an already existing website.

On the other hand, existing websites already have a set of backlinks pointing to them, so the link building efforts are definitely easier (plus you already have some search engine visibility).

Incidentally, a site redesign is an excellent time to focus on SEO – you can treat the project as a new website and do SEO, content writing and conversions right from the start.

Success Objectives and Tracking Progress

The flip side of setting goals is that you also need to set success markers and then track their progress.

For example, for a recent site I setup, my success objectives were (for 1 year):

• To reach 5,000 hits / day. The niche I’m working in has room for lots more, but that’s my bare minimum target.
• To reach $1,000 per month. I am using a combination of affiliate programs, direct ad sales and AdSense here.
• To hit page #1 for my main keywords, and top 5 for all second and third tier keywords.
• To build a community (forum) of at least 300-500 active members.

These are very achievable goals, and definitely on the low end of what I would expect to achieve in terms of traffic and revenue if I worked on the website fulltime.

How will you measure your success? For some items – such as AdSense revenue or keyword rankings, your goals could differ drastically based on how competitive your target niche is and how much traffic your keywords get every day. A #1 ranked site for a popular term could easily garner 10,000 hits a day – but then the competition would be equally tough.

You will probably need to do some keyword research and competition analysis before you can have a complete picture of your success objectives, but for now simply focus on completing a picture of what it would mean to accomplish your primary goal.

Once you have set your objectives, monitor them monthly (for traffic and search ranking numbers I will show you a few tools that you can use). Keep working hard at your website and if you see that you’re not making month-to-month progress (i.e. your traffic / rankings go stagnant), it would be time to do a review and figure out what you are doing wrong.

Until next time! See you around ;-) ... D7Y3FH3ZHPU4

Setting Goals - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:24:00 +0000

If you want to be successful, it is far easier and simpler to find a specific type of audience, build your ‘ideal client’ image and then work your socks off in serving that client. Once you are dominating your niche of the market you can afford to spread out and broaden your focus, but till then, it is niche, niche, niche.

Brian (a freelance web developer) talks about his audience:

“I’m targeting serious entrepreneurs and small businesses that need an impressive and quality web presence that helps them achieve their online business goals. I want to target people who place a high value on quality and results.

However, I also know how hard it is for people to pay for quality web design, so I want to provide a low-cost way for people to get started and to teach them the same techniques I use to build websites for my clients.

I want to target web-savvy people with a basic understanding of how websites work. Age is no barrier to entrepreneurship, and thanks to the Internet I have a worldwide audience. However, I will be targeting an English-speaking audience because web design and getting clear requirements from the client is hard enough without getting tangled in language problems.”

In an effort to allow for different (and possibly overlapping) audiences, Brian is using his skills to provide website templates and web design tips on his website. These will in turn get his design skills more exposure so
they benefit him in several different ways.

You need to use your website goals to paint a detailed picture of your audience – web-savvy, English speaking and an understanding for web design. Unfortunately, we realize that Brian’s goals are detailed but not specific enough, and as a result he will have trouble competing in this already-tough niche.

So what does Brian do?

He rethinks his goals and his audience, and decides to narrow down his area of expertise to WordPress (a
popular blogging software) - http://wordpress.org/

That’s a smart move, because more and more people are moving towards WordPress and blogging, and as big companies start to embrace blogging as part of their marketing and branding strategy quality designers like
Brian will always be in demand.

Brian also decides to target local businesses first, so that he can build a local, community-based profile and use that as a launching pad for the future.

You don’t have to ‘go local’, but it’s a good idea to give more attention to your own community / pick a narrow niche to start in. Dominating them is easier, and it gives you the momentum to move up to bigger niches.

What Does Your Site Do?

• How does your website solve the core problem your target audience has?
• What information does it provide to its users?
• What are the steps you want your readers to take on each page, and how do they tie in with your primary
goal?

Keep reading ... our next post will be Setting Goals - Part III

Setting Goals - Part I

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:12:00 +0000

Your SEO efforts will be wasted if you do not have a clear picture of:

• what you want to achieve through your website
• who you are targeting
• what you want them to do
• what your long-term destination is
• what your progress is (from time to time)

In addition, you also need to know what the best method is to reach your audience (what are your best keywords) and how much work you will have to do to be to meet your goals (competition analysis).

The next two posts will look at keyword research and competition analysis – the rest, I am going to discuss
below.

Let us start by making two lists.

What Is Your Website’s Purpose?

The first list will be a collection of points that answer the question posed above – what purpose does your
website serve?

For some people, a website is an extension of their lives / interests / business – it is a means to bring attention
to what they are doing offline.

For others, their website IS their interest / business – and that brings with it a whole new set of priorities.

What are the overall goals for your website? Is it to sell something? Is it to generate leads for your consulting
business? Is it simply to maintain an online presence and use it to provide basic information to your customers?

For some companies, branding will be an important part of their site’s purpose. For others, it could be community building around their products and / or services.

Your goals (or your company’s goals) and business strategy will have a strong impact on how you will setup your website and how you will define its purpose.

To help you out, I am going to give you two examples to help explain how you can pinpoint your site’s purpose – a real-life analysis of an online company, and a fictional situation of an offline business that wants to use their website to generate clients.

Example #1:

For example, consider the situation of popular traffic tracking online service, StatCounter (SC). SC provides an easy-to-use, non-intrusive hit counter for free to its users, but that is the ‘sweetener’ they use to make people test their service before pitching them the paid version of this service (which removes certain restrictions that come with the free version).

So how would we define StatCounter’s primary goal?

Primary Goal: To provide the best paid hit tracking services.

Your site’s primary goal will help you keep grounded and on the right track when you are deciding what to do on the site.

Sometimes, your website may have more than one purpose – in that case you would split them into one primary goal and one (or more) secondary goals.

For StatCounter, their secondary goal is (I’m guessing) something like this:

Secondary Goal: To sell ad space to capitalize on the site’s traffic and popularity and earn a steady second income.

Example #2:

Consider the hypothetical case of a freelance web designer, Brian, who wants to use his website to get design
gigs. He also has a passion for teaching and wants to channel that into sharing his knowledge through his website. In addition, Brian wants the website to earn him a secondary income (apart from the design gigs) so he wants to sell website templates and custom site scripts on his website as well.

Let’s see how that reflects in his website goals:

Primary Goal: To generate leads

Secondary Goal #1: To write about web design techniques and share what he knows
Secondary Goal #2: Make money by selling templates and scripts

What is really good here is that the two secondary goals tie-in and overlap with Brian’s primary goal –his site templates and his articles are just two more ways for Brian to generate more leads.

Ideally, you would want to limit your secondary goals to a maximum of 3 (the fewer, the better). Having a singular focus for your website can help you get laser-focused in your search marketing efforts.

However, sometimes your aims might be grander and there could be more than one thing that you want to make happen through your website. Just make sure that you do not lose focus of the overall picture or muddle up your goals by having too many of them.

Who is your target audience?

Whether you are selling shoes or asking for donations, you need to pin down who your target audience is.

Usually people define their target audience in broad terms:

• someone selling resume writing software could define his audience as people who need new / better
resumes
• A company selling high-end stereo equipment would be targeting for audiophile enthusiasts.

Part II is coming soon ;-) ...

Your SEO Master Plan

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:56:00 +0000

Information without the knowledge and will to use it effectively is useless – if you cannot put it to use, you might as well not have it in the first place.

You are reading this book, so the ‘will’ is not an issue.

However, you still need a plan – and the best plan is one that is flexible yet detailed enough to guide you and allow you to customize it to your own needs.

This introduces / previews the rest of the blog post. There are 4 main phases of this plan.

Why 4 phases, and not 5 or 3? Maybe I like the number 4. Maybe it is because this is the system that works
best for me – and has continued to work for me as a basic template for my SEO campaigns over the last few
years. I am always tweaking it, and so should you. If you find it easier to split the ‘site launch’ phase into two
parts, do so. If you want to combine phases 2 and 3 (site optimization and site launch), do that too.

Customize, but make sure you do the necessary steps.

The rest of the post summarizes what you will be reading and doing in the rest of the entire blog. Skim through, and then get started with the next post.

Part 1: Doing Research

A necessary (and not as boring as you might think) part of SEO.

I’ll admit, I’m not the sort of person who likes to over-elaborate or over-do the planning and research phase.

I follow the ‘ready-fire-aim’ school of thought, so my goal with every website is to just get started and fix things later.

However, there still is that ‘ready’ bit of the whole ready-fire-aim process, and there is some research that you will have to do in order to be ready to conquer your target niche.

But what is your target, really?

• Setting Goals
Understand your targets for the website and profile the ideal audience.

• Keyword Research
Once you know your topic (and have a feel for your audience), find out what keywords they are using.

• Competitive Analysis
Find out who your top competition is, and what they are doing in terms of SEO / online marketing.

Part 2: Building / Optimizing Your Site

This section will vary from project to project depending on whether you are working on a new website or an already established one.

• Keywords & Site Content
How to use your keywords, how to split them between pages and how to organize your website based on them. Using keywords, competitive analysis and site goals to write your site content.

• On-Page SEO
Optimizing your pages – title tags, meta tags, keyword usage and avoiding duplicate content.

• Site Architecture
How you organize your website’s pages (internal linking), search engine friendly site URLs and sitemaps usage.

Part 3: Site Launch

• Link Building Basics
Basic principles behind effective link building, the types of links you will need and how to approach link building on a long-term, day-to-day basis.

• Site Launch Links
A comprehensive look at the type of links you need to procure during site launch to get your site crawled,
your internal pages indexed and your site according the trust and authority necessary to help your pages
get rankings in search engines.

Part 4: Long Term SEO

Search marketing is a long-term, persistent commitment. It involves consistent content building, link building
and monitoring the success of the search campaign (site traffic and site rankings) to fine tune your activities.

• Link Sources
Where do you get links from? This chapter discusses more than 10 different major sources of links and
gives you strategies for finding more.

• Finding Link Partners
How you can use search engines to find potential link partners.

• Link Valuation
How to place a value on links, and how this can help your link building campaign.

• Link Worthy Content
What is link-worthy or quality content and how you can build a habit of creating link worthy content for your sites.

• Campaign Tracking
Using web analytics and search ranking data to refocus and target your link building / SEO campaign.
Let’s get started – you can read through the book in one go, or you can use the table of contents to directly
jump to any specific chapter in the book at any time.

Until next time! See you around ;-) ...

Best SEO Tools

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Here we will list the Best SEO Tools for Ranking High on All Search Engines:

1 - SENUKE

"Now You Can Completely and Utterly
DOMINATE The First 3 Pages of Google Listings
by utilizing the Mind Blowing Power of Web 2.0 Marketing with SENUKE Software!"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

2 - BOOKMARKING DEMON

"Get Unlimited Supply Of
High PR Backlinks And Laser Targeted Traffic
From Major Bookmarking Sites...
All Done In Minutes On Autopilot!"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

3 - IBP - iBUSINESS PROMOTER

How to get top 10 rankings on Google and Yahoo!

The proven SEO software tool!

Internet Business Promoter (IBP) is a multi-award winning website promotion software tool. IBP helps you get high search engine rankings:

Get top 10 rankings on Google, Yahoo, Bing Search and others.
Get more website visitors and increase your revenue.
Outperform your competitors.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

These are the best SEO Tools available at the Market. With them , we are sure you will dominate the search engines in ANY NICHE you want !

FAST and EASY !!!

Search Engine Ranking Factors

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:07:00 +0000

Not all ranking factors are important – some, like PageRank, become important in limited circumstances.

Others, like META tags, are there for usability and getting the small details right instead of having a massive impact on your search engine rankings.

The goal here is to establish what ranking factors we need to look at in order to dominate all 3 search engines effectively. In this post I have included the most important search ranking factors and discussed how each is treated differently by the search engines. In specific posts later, we will look at more factors and examples on how to optimize for them.

It is quite difficult for a website to obtain top rankings on one search engine, let alone 2 or more at the same

time. Webmasters often complain that their sites rank well in Yahoo but are no where to be seen in Google, or that they rank well in Google but have no presence in MSN.

Developing a strategy that can take on Google, Yahoo and MSN all at once (let’s throw in Ask as well for good measure) is difficult, but not impossible.

In the previous posts you saw how each search engine behaved and ranked websites. In this post, I am

going to start off by giving you a brief overview on Ask (the 4th most popular search engine) and then we will

talk about the key searching engine ranking factors that will help you rank high on all search engines.

I will also be talking about the Google Sandbox and PageRank, and why these two are important to understand and how you can benefit from them – yes, once you think about it, there is a definite way to benefit from the ‘Sandbox effect’.

Will you automatically top Google, Yahoo and MSN after following this advice to the letter T? No, you will not.

However, I can assure you that there are different keys to ranking in all three search engines and based on the

principles described in this blog, you can do very well in them.

Top? Cannot say for sure.

Page 1? Very, very possible ;-)

Understanding Search Engines

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:55:00 +0000

Search Engine Optimization is the process of driving targeted traffic from search engines to a website.

Learning this process is not possible without understanding how search engines work. And when I talk about understanding search engines, I am specifically talking about:

• How search engines index (read) websites

• How search engines rank websites

• Why search engines change their ranking algorithms

• How (and when) search engines update their algorithms

Points 1 and 2 are relatively easy to grasp (even if #2 is the main reason SEO is such a thriving industry). There is plenty of misinformation, but if you have the right sources, practice SEO yourself and learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, you will have a pretty good idea of how search engines rank websites (the next chapter gets stuck into ranking factors in detail).

Points 3 and 4 give SEOs a lot of grief, mainly because:

• Changes in the ranking algorithms can cause site rankings to change, and there is the possibility of your

website losing its high rankings.

• Not knowing when search engines update their algorithms (at least until you start seeing significant

changes or someone in the forums notices it) means webmasters never know when their rankings could

be negatively impacted by a search engine.

The unpredictability of search engines (SE) means that if traffic from search engines is your only source of traffic, and your websites are your only source of income, your livelihood hinges on the whims of Google.

That is a very scary thought, and is the primary cause for much of the ‘panicking’ you see (or will see) in SEO forums whenever SE updates are discussed.

Do not place all your bets on one mode of income. If your traffic is primarily from search engines, diversify and get traffic from forums and other websites, as well as building a regular readership. If your income is primarily from running AdSense ads on your websites, diversify into affiliate marketing, creating your own products, etc. You can get more knowledge about making money online reading this interesting blog - Make Money Online Tips.

And if all your bets are hinged on your online income, diversify further and think about making money offline as well.

Smart money-making principles transcend industries and the offline / online divide. Once again:

Do NOT place all your bets on one website, one mode of traffic, one mode of income, or one source of income.

Diversify.

The second important thing to note is this:

If you know what the search engines want, it is easy to plan ahead and shape your SEO campaign as such that each ‘update’ actually benefits your site rankings.

Think about that for a second – usually, search engine algorithms are a time when webmasters scramble to find out whether their sites have lost their #1 rankings or not.

What if you could set up a system that allowed your sites’ search engine rankings to improve every time Google or Yahoo did an algorithm update?

That is going to be a recurring theme throughout this blog, and that is one of the main targets that I have set out to achieve here.

So how do search engines work really? Keep reading this blog to find out.

Think Long Term

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:36:00 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (or, if you want to be technically correct, Search Marketing) is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme nor is it about getting short-term, temporary results at the risk of getting your website banned by the search engines.

Just to make things clear, this is not an ethical concern for me – as far as I am concerned (you might think differently), search engines provide a service, and their guidelines are not ‘the law’, they are just generalized statements on what works best.

Those statements are a bit misleading and do not give a complete picture of what it takes to rank for keywords in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

However, putting your website at risk by actively pursuing optimization policies that openly violate search engine policies and are detectable by search engines is foolishness.

Personally (once again, you are entitled to your opinion) I think there are far better ways to dominate the SERPs without resorting to tricks or anything that will get your website banned from Google or MSN or Yahoo.

So that is one aspect of thinking long term – if you are doing SEO for short term gains, in most cases it is not SEO but tricks to take advantages of a search engine’s limitations.

Another aspect of long term SEO is your SEO strategy itself. SEO is a process that invariably takes time – certain factors used to determine rankings in Google, for example, use time as an element in their calculations.

Concepts such as link-aging, the sandbox (or the trustbox, depending on your perspective), quality filters and domain-aging (do not worry, I will explain these concepts in full detail later on in this blog) mean that you cannot be #1 overnight – at least not in Google.

For the two examples I listed in the previous post - Customize Your SEO Strategy (Site A and Site B):

• Site A would take anywhere between a month and 6 months to get to #1, depending on what you do and

how strong the #1 ranked site really is.

• For Site B, it would take you 6 to 12 months to get to the top, once again depending on how fast you

move and which keywords you are targeting.

Bottom line – SEO takes time to be effective, so whatever you are planning, make sure you plan for the long run and consider long term consequences of your actions.

Until next time! See you around ... ;-)

Customize Your SEO Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:22:00 +0000

The most important thing about SEO is that an ‘out-of-the-box’ formula for achieving top rankings will not work as well as a customized, one-on-one strategy for each project.

Yes, a cookie-cutter approach will work – but it won’t be as effective as a custom-made battle plan for your website. The general principles will always apply to your website, but there’s a significant component of analysis, drawing conclusions and then determining what to do in light of those conclusions.

At the end of the day, it is YOUR SEO plan. You will decide what to focus on, you will be the one doing

competitive analysis and evaluating how difficult or easy it will be for your website to rank for particular

keywords.

Every website has different goals – these goals will in turn determine what type of keywords you will be

targeting, what the composition of your audience will be, the competitiveness of your target market and your willingness to spend money / put in the time and effort.

Here’s an example of how you would customize the SEO process based on your project:

Site A is focused on a very niche topic and is an informational site (as opposed to a product-oriented site).

This has an influence on the keywords targeted for the site. Those keywords (as well as the target niche itself) have weak competition, so it will take less effort and time (and money) to get Site A to rank #1 for its target terms.

Also, Site A will depend exclusively on search engines for traffic.

Based on this information, you would have two choices – you can save money by doing ‘free’ SEO and not

paying for directory submissions and links. Or, you could save time and pay for inclusion in highly trusted directories to give your website’s rankings a kick up the search engine results.

Here’s another example:

Site B is a corporate website of a rapidly-growing company in a fairly competitive industry. This sector is not as competitive online, however – some terms have little competition while others have moderate competition (later on we’ll also define what ‘competition’ really is and how you can determine your top competing websites).

Search engines will only be one aspect of their online marketing strategy. Primarily this site is being set up to highlight their services, which means targeting some top level keywords (which have plenty of competition).

Based on this information, you know that to be #1, you will need to invest both time and money in the project.

Paying for directory submissions is a must and so is spending money on purchasing links. Some of these

keywords will also take a long and concerted spell of link building to allow for page 1 rankings.

In this case, your SEO strategy will also depend on how much freedom you have to spend money and make changes to the website – you may be asked to show results before paying for links (although in my experience paying for directory submissions is usually accepted without hesitation) and making changes to a corporate website is usually a painful experience in dealing with red tape and people afraid of change.

All in all, you’ll have to think for yourself here – I can give you the tools and show you how to do each task, but I cannot be there with you at every step of the way or make decisions for you.

The good thing is – if you stick to the guidelines mentioned in this blog, you will do just fine ;-)

What SEO is NOT ...

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:22:00 +0000

Online advertising (buy advertising for traffic from other websites) is not SEO (it is site promotion, although the advertising links can help your search rankings).

Public relations (press releases, media mentions, blogging coverage) is not SEO (although once again, it is site promotion, which may lead into your site getting links).

Building a website that exploits a loophole in search engine algorithms to rank #1 for select keywords for a short period of time is not SEO (that’s search engine spamming, which we’re not going to discuss here).

SEO is not a gimmick designed to drive X thousand visitors to your website in 24 hours.

SEO is not always free traffic – several very effective SEO techniques will cost you money.

Writing a book and giving it away for free to your site’s visitors is not SEO

The thing about most of these activities is that they CAN be part of your SEO strategy IF you chose to use

them that way. However, as SEO is usually part of an overall strategy designed to promote your site, separating other promotional activities from SEO work is important.

Understand How Search Engines Work

It goes without saying that if you want to rank #1 for your target keywords, you need to understand how search engines work. This means that you must not only know what factors search engines use in ranking websites, but also how they ‘read’ web pages and ‘index’ them (This topic is discussed in detail in the next chapter).

Search engines have evolved considerably in the last few years, and continue to update their ranking algorithms periodically. So apart from learning how search engines work right now, it will also pay if you:

• Understand what each search engine is trying to achieve when ranking websites

• How you can track changes in search engine algorithms

• How you can keep a ‘pulse’ on the latest developments in the search engine world

We will discuss search engine behavior in more detail later – for now, just keep in mind that a key component of your SEO strategy will be to stay on top of developments in the SEO world, especially when it comes to how the search engines are evolving.

Until next time ! See you around :-) ...

What is SEO ?

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:47:00 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Source: Wikipedia

My point of view:

Most people – ok, almost everyone outside the SEO industry – equate SEO with getting the #1 ranking for your website in Google.

But SEO is much more than that. There are 3 main steps in the SEO process:

First, like any business, you need to identify your audience (your target market). Not only are you setting your website’s goals and profiling your audience, at this stage you are also scouting your competition and evaluating what you need to do in order to ‘dominate’ this particular sector.

Second, you take steps to get your website rank as high as possible in the search engines for those keywords that this audience is most likely to use. This involves things you do to the site itself (if you are setting up a new website then you should ensure that it is search engine friendly from the ground up). It also includes off-site activities which are all geared towards the process of having other websites link to yours.

Third, you constantly track your website’s progress in the search engines and make adjustments to your SEO strategy as necessary.

While we define SEO, it is important to also clarify that SEO does not encompass other online activities that are designed to bring traffic to (or promote) your website.

Privacy Policy

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:55:00 +0000

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CONTACT

noreply@blogger.com (SEO Expert Team) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:49:00 +0000

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