SEO optimization Blog

SEO for Ajax - Takling the Javascript First - Part 3

2010-02-10T22:40:00.006+05:00

In this part, we will look into the main building blocks of Ajax and how to optimize them for Search Engine Optimization one by one. In fact, I will not get into details of the working of Ajax itself as it is beyond the scope of this writing. I will try to avoid going too much technical here, rather a simple and clean approach will be used to convey the concept and underlying impacts accordingly. After reading this “SEO for Ajax – part 3”, I hope it would become easier for an SEO expert to implement the items with the coordination of his development team members and architects.

JavaScript Optimization

There is a good amount of use of Javascript in Ajax, you should focus on improving your use of JavaScript to reduce your download footprint. Authors of such javascript libraries do understand the JavaScript bloat problem. They present their code in a standard, completely commented and maintainable version as well as in a minified version. You should have an understanding of minification and how it works. It is possible that there will be code outside your library that will require to be compressed as well.

Remove JavaScript Comments

You can safely get rid of all JavaScript comments that serves no purpose. As these add extra bytes to the code, so eliminate them from your code to reduce the overall size. These are indicated by // or /* */. They also offer no value to the end user and just add to file size. You also need to know the conditional commenting system of IE browser that is frequently used with “includes” or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). You should not remove these conditional comments from your code because you may otherwise unintentionally break your Javascript. Fortunately, many advance tools for page optimization know this criterion, and will not flag that up.

String Constant Macros – A good approach

If you find in your code that their are repeating occurrences of strings or a complete strings over and over again, you can substitute a simple string macro using a global variable remapping can reduce a number of bytes. For example, if you have a number of alert( ) invocations in your program, like this:
alert("Record has been saved successfully");
you could set a global variable, like this:
message=" Record has been saved successfully ";
to serve as a string constant and then replace the recurring strings in the various calls as follows:
alert(message);
You can even show some extended messages based on the original macro as:
alert(message +": Please create a new record now");
There is one care with this technique. It is necessary that you make sure the string is used very often so that macro makes sense

What you need to do with Whitespaces

JavaScript ignores the white spaces so you can easily decrease the whitespace between operators. For example, instead of writing this:
var str = "Row number " +
x +
" has invalid date";

you can write this:

var str=" Row number "+x+" has invalid date";

Be careful when condensing, however. JavaScript treats line breaks as implicit semicolons.
If you do not finish lines with semicolons, you may find yourself in trouble and your code can mess up. For example, the following well formed JavaScript uses implied semicolons:
a=a+1
b=b+1
A simple whitespace remover tool might produce this:
a=a+1b=b+1
This code will throw an error. But if you add in the needed semicolons, the code will work:
x=x+1;y=y+1;

Avoid Constructs - Little reduction in Size

In many conditions, you can get rid of code and syntax constructs without hurting the
code. For example, given chunk of if statements and several loops that contain only a
single statement, you can remove the braces, so this:

if (isActive)
{
alert("You card is Active");
}

becomes this:

if (isActive)
alert("You card is Active");

As another size reduction example, you also can eliminate a return statement with no
argument just before the end of a function. So, this:

function doProcess( )
{
/* code here*/
return;
}

becomes this:

function doProcess ( )
{
/* code here */
}
There are also some good tools available out there that you can employ for byte saving tricks to tune code, but generally this tool is recommended for such things. http://www.w3compiler.com. All above techniques may only save a small portion of the total file size but every byte counts from SEO perspective. In fact, Google will consider loading time and fast response from server a major SEO factor to be considered in search result for year 2010. So never ignore anything which is helpful in reducing the file size on the client machine.

XML vs JSON – Choice is yours

Ajax requests may be tiny as compared to the conventional full post backs, but there definitely are differences with various data formats used with Ajax itself, particularly if you consider the included content vs. the structural markup. For example, consider that when a request is made with simple list of comma separated values, any returned data will be pretty concise:
value1,value2,value3,...value N
If you encoded the same data in XML, it would be much heavier:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<docElement>
<package>Value 1</ package >
< package >Value 2</package>
...
< package >Value N</ package >
</docElement>

In the case of an Ajax based application, the data sent and consumed is often very small and is textual in nature, so it can be HTTP compressed plainly for transmission. XML primarily considered the fundamental part of AJAX is not considered a very good option from one school of developers and they are quite right in making that opinion. First, XML is bulky as compared to other lighter formats. Second, there is the too much DOM code that is required to deal with parsing out the response. Finally, because browsers generally are not behaving as validating XML parsers but instead focus only on well formedness, the semantic value of XML is rather wasted. As a replacement to XML, many Ajax developers favor to use JSON, available at http://www.json.org. JSON is a lightweight data exchange format that is based on a subset of the Javascript. Because it is a subset of Javascript, we can simply convert a JSON response into something that the receiving script can manipulate directly.

For instance, we may return as below, which is a valid JSON array:
["item1","item2","item3","item4"]

Or we may return a JSON object such as:
{"Status": "Active", "Amount" : "$5000" , "Expire" : "15/05/2010" }

If this were found in the responseText property of an XmlHttpRequest object, we might speedily make it accessible for use by means of below mentioned code:
var output = eval(xhr.responseText);

Now you would be able to reference the individual values in the output object as:
var str = "Status of card is " + output.Status + " and transaction amount is "+ output.Amount + ", Card will Expire on " + output.Expire;

OK, that’s enough for now, take a long breath and get ready for 4th and Final Part of this SEO for Ajax series.

Top 20 Social Media Resources

2010-01-31T00:03:00.014+05:00

Social Media is scattered around the whole diversified World Wide Web. Every business has a tendency to dig into it and leverage the true power of this emerging trend. There are many social media sites out there, few general and broad in scope covering almost every aspect of social cloud. Others focused on a specific niche area. This is your little task as to find out the one's which suits your business and social needs well. So these top 20 social media resources contain both type of sites and it is recommended that you visit each of them, leverage your business and harness the potential of becoming social with your customers base. The data has been collected from various platforms, tools and utilities and the factors to rate were like page views, rankings and average growth of a website over a specific period of time etc. Remember always that the days have gone past when only performing few SEO activities were sufficient enough to rank a site higher in search engines, it is now becoming more important to realize that social media optimization is going to play a major role in 2010, as it did to some extent in 2009.

Note: Indexed pages and backlinks are mentioned just for information purpose.

Top 20 Social Media Resources

Facebook is a social application that connects people with friends, colleagues, relatives and classmates.A true social platform.

Indexed pages
813,000,000
Backlinks
85,800,000

Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.

Indexed pages
162,000,000
Backlinks
103,000,000

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world. Huge collection of videos, shared by millions of people.

Indexed pages
115,000,000
Backlinks
62,900,000

Find friends & classmates, meet new people, listen to free music & build playlists, share photos.

Indexed pages
136,000,000
Backlinks
48,700,000

The best news, videos and pictures on the web as voted on by the Digg community. Breaking news on various topics etc.

Indexed pages
93,200,000
Backlinks
325,691

Free web-browser extension which acts as an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing web sites.

Indexed pages
8,480,000
Backlinks
780,000

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

Indexed pages
539,000,000
Backlinks
322,656

LinkedIn strengthens and extends your existing network of trusted contacts.

Indexed pages
219,000,000
Backlinks
116,683

Squidoo. The popular site for creating single web pages on your interests and recommendations.

Indexed pages
10,600,000
Backlinks
49,042

Hi5 is an international social network with a local flavor. It enables members to stay connected and share what's happening around them.
Indexed pages
81,800,000
Backlinks
12,960

User Reviews and Recommendations of Top Restaurants, Shopping, Nightlife, Entertainment, Services and More at Yelp

Indexed pages
59,200,000
Backlinks
12,960

Scribd is a social publishing site, where tens of millions of people share original writings and documents. Scribd's vision is to liberate the written word.
Indexed pages
42,200,000
Backlinks
34,178

An online service to create, customize, and share a social network.

Indexed pages
22,700,000
Backlinks
15,684

Add community to your blog. Check your stats, see what people read and where they went next. Play host to your most recent readers and the returning faithful.
Indexed pages
10,700,000
Backlinks
16,394

Allows you to build a customized feed of made up of content your friends on other collaborative sites have shared, including news articles, photos etc.
Indexed pages
50,800,000
Backlinks
30,380

Register to add a news story, comment or write a column. Open source, community news service.
Indexed pages
2,180,000
Backlinks
58,610

Yuku is a universe of free social networking communities united by people and their passions.

Indexed pages
3,170,000
Backlinks
6,718

Real-time search for user-generated media by tag or keyword. Also provides popularity indexes.

Indexed pages
13,100,000
Backlinks
264,689

User-generated news links. Votes promote stories to the front page.

Indexed pages
4,860,000
Backlinks
175,606

Xanga is a community where you can start your own free weblog, share photos and videos, and meet new friends.

Indexed pages
48,600,000
Backlinks
29,123

What are the top social media resources in your viewpoint? put figures and stats aside and just mention them as you love them. Mention as many as you know, let’s do it for fun !!

Common Issues with Ajax and its impact on SEO–Part 2

2010-01-15T00:28:00.003+05:00

Before we give details about the best practices that you can apply to optimize your Ajax, it is better to first look at some common issues that Ajax based websites encounter. It is likely that you will face the following issues when analyzing and optimizing Ajax for clients:

• Mandatory JavaScript style design effects

— Accessibility problems

— Search engine optimization (SEO) issues caused by lack of indexing by nonJavascript conscious spiders tied with one-page architecture issues

• Perception of browser and code errors by users

• Network effects

— Delays in response time when the user expects immediacy

— Timeouts and data delays because of discontinuous network issues

— Lack of proper network and server error handling

— Data ordering problems

• One Page structural design effects

— Breaking the Back button

— Difficulty with standard web analytics programs

— Index ability issue with deep content by crawlers

Ajax and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Part 1 – Overview

2010-01-07T23:54:00.004+05:00

Ajax is a cross platform set of technologies that facilitates developers to build webpages that act more interactively, like applications. It uses a mixture of CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, and some other data—usually XML or JSON for sending and receiving or in other words parsing the response, so that data can be exchanged asynchronously. This allows partial page updates in reply to user input, reducing server transfer back and forth to a minimum and this also reduces the wait time. Properly coded, Ajax pages change the old full page rendering, click and wait method with efficient partial page redraws, thereby increasing response times and interactivity.

Later on, in next parts of this series of SEO for Ajax, I will start to make a relation with SEO and what impact can Ajax have on SEO. How one should conduct and implement a proper SEO methodology for Ajax technology.

The infrastructure pattern now known as Ajax was created before 2005. Web developers using DHTML, iframes, Applets and Flash Objects had examined with better-off communication forms that resulted in a more desktop like taste of the web application. Eventually, the objective of Ajax is to boost conversion rates through a faster, more user friendly web experience. Unfortunately, un-optimized Ajax can cause performance issues, the appearance of application vulnerability, and user confusion. It can even damage your search engine rankings. The purpose of this series is to help you stay away from these possible pitfalls and harvest the rewards of Ajax.

We will go in much detail in subsequent parts of the series, here I am just going to summarize the best practices for Ajax web applications for performance, reliability and usability:

Ajax and SEO best practices

Applying Ajax correctly to a problem
Using a well created and supported Ajax library – like JQuery
Reducing HTTP request requirements
Choosing the right data format for transmission
Ensuring that network accessibility concerns are addressed
Employing a JavaScript cache
Carefully polling for user input
Providing an alternate approach for search engines when JavaScript is turned off
Saving state

Branding your Business Online – 8 Important Steps

2010-01-04T23:35:00.006+05:00

There are hundreds of thousands of businesses out there trying to create their space online and come struggling to become visible to the world from isolation. Branding is what we think make a business standout from the rest in their competition. Making a brand stronger and popular online is not very difficult but there are certain things one needs to understand and implement accordingly to achieve success in the long run.

Many people in the world are searching online to find the solution of their problems and issues no matter whether it relates to their personal or business domain. A good number of these people, you can say more than 80% search through Google and the rest on few other popular search engines. So if you have business – no matter on which scale and locality, there is always a room for you to let it be visible to the world. You should have online presence and should Re-engineer your business processes and make the most out of this fascinating world. If your business has capability to hit the international market, you are one of the strong candidates to be considered for branding online. Now the question is how to accomplish it, when to go for it and what to do to make your brand stronger. Below are 8 most important steps to Brand your business online. You can also consider this a checklist for you, while you read, check all those apply and see where you are missing on these.

8 Steps to Branding

1. First you should have a unique and appealing logo for your business. It is better if your logo represent what you do. Make it prominent on your website, give it an appearance on the address bar and mention it when you make business correspondence to someone.

2. Make your home page easy to understand and let the visitor grasp your business in no time. Instead of listing down feature of your product or service on the main page, specify what your customers will benefit and how you product or service is going to fulfill their needs.

3. Make active participation in online forums and Blogs in your niche area. Leave comments and make use of your experience and knowledge while commenting that you got in your area. Don’t just say thank you or it’s a nice post. Do appreciate the idea and add your thoughts on it and then leave back a link to your own website. It will not only increase the traffic but will also promote the brand awareness in people which are interested in your business area.

4. Make a Blog for your own website and update it regularly. Write on articles, mention coming soon things, new releases or whatever you may consider will be interesting, informative and beneficial for your customer.

5. Make an active presence in social media. This is very important step that you never ignore. Create an account on Facebook and make a Facebook Fan Page for your business. Market it with proper keywords and get the targeted audience. Facebook Ads are not much expensive, you can get many Fans in few days. Keep your community alive with regular updates. Also create Twitter account and brand it as well with unique look and feel which shows your business accurately. Leave a contact number, business email address and other necessary things in case if someone want to contact you after finding you on twitter. If you have enough time, you should also consider other social media platforms as well to brand your business even more stronger and popular.

6. Make your brand appear in popular magazines or journals. Press releases are sometimes the most effective way to promote your brand and it also gives you the targeted customers. Choose the best magazines in your business area and send press release after every few months.

7. Publish Newsletters and provide your customers an option to subscribe to it. If your business updates are on frequent basis, you may send newsletter on weekly basis otherwise send it after each month.

8. Optimize your website for the primary keyphrases/keywords that you consider to be important for your business. You can also take the services of SEO expert to do this for you. Keep close co-ordination with him during this period and ask what approach he will use to accomplish higher rankings in search engines. You can also understand the concept behind optimization and what needs to be done. Read the article I wrote on SEO optimization and get the idea.

5 Essential Things to Know About SEO

2010-01-01T00:53:00.001+05:00

From the very start of the Internet era, the first and foremost challenge which we all are facing is how to attract qualified visitors to a site. The days has gone past when only populating and stuffing keywords in META tags and Title tags were enough to rank high on the search engines. Massive funding and buying links is not going to work now as well, these all seems old stories now as search engines has grown much mature now. These all practices also sound unethical in true nature of business.

As an SEO lover, with ambitions of experimenting with all possible things and knowing the results has let me to share you with something very beneficial. If you can give more time than money, believe me, you can beat much of the competition in the market and you will stand distinguishable from the others in your area. The outcome of these trial and error techniques sets the foundation of our SEO efforts and the basis for the constant growth of traffic to website.

There are many things, an SEO expert should about, but I will later on present in this article the 5 major and essential things, which are important to consider in making your SEO efforts work. The straightforward fact of the subject is this: skill in any other form of writing in no way qualifies one for the style of writing necessary to optimize a website for the Internet. There are numerous websites which have less than acceptable punctuation, grammar, and even spellings which rank No. 1 in their optimized search keywords. This is not to state that I do not think these things are significant, only that to be found in the searches, they are not of the most important concern.

This is found from many studies that over 80% of all online users utilize search engines to find what they are searching for, whether products or services, or just some information regarding any topic (technical or general).

Here comes the 5 essential SEO Aspects

The following 5 essential points will summarize a methodology or approach to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and what should you know about as an SEO Expert.

1. Content is KING. Professional optimized and quality content is the single most important factor in any SEO promotion. Search engines index sites based on the content found on each and every webpage of the website. With a comprehensive understanding of the language and niche area and with unique content one can achieve higher SERP’s (Search Engine Results Position/Pages), and can move the website up in the competition hierarchy. This will remain the number one factor for someone seriously putting effort to come top on the result pages.

2. The SEO is not 100% predictable. One cannot say that his SEO implementation will make the site come on first page in No. 1 position. If he is doing so, is making a cheat and false promise that even he doesn’t have belief in. No one can guarantee a No. 1 position on Google, or any other search engine. Those who promise will either optimize for long tail keywords and some very unpopular terms whom no one will ever likely look for or they are making a fake claim. Some may even try black hat SEO techniques which will finally result in penalizing the website by Google in the long run and putting the site in the sandbox.

3. Few things are silly which don’t have anything to do with rankings or optimization and are a waste of time. You don't require submitting your website to 10,000 search engines. SEO services which suggest or offer this are in fact fake. As we know Google occupy much of the search engine market, you can say probably more than 80%; rest is fulfilled by Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Askjeeves and few others. So there is no point to make here and you can recognize the quality and credibility of service the company is going to offer.

4. SEO is not PPC. This is another essential point to ponder. While there is no argue to make with the usefulness of getting increased traffic and visits, through a well executed and planned PPC campaign, the fact still remains that the conversion rates are normally low and they stop the moment the "PAY" stops. With a well designed and executed SEO campaign, while outcomes may take a bit longer time, they continue to grow exponentially after a specific period of time say 6-9 months. This is in fact the least period required for a new website to rank well but once achieved with patience and humble, it will give you better ROI and revenue than the paid campaigns.

5. A thought to consider. At risk, in the competition for the top, is the very existence of your site, your business, and perhaps your reputation. Be careful of any shortcuts or less than ethical because there is no shortcut to success and there isn’t any long lasting business without business ethics. When it is all said and done it is you, the enterprise owner, who holds the liability for individual you hire. Try to insist knowing precisely what the plan is and what steps are being performed to apply it for the SEO optimization. There is no secret or rocket science behind SEO activities that a firm can’t disclose, so try asking about what approach will be used, how it will be used and how the budget will be distributed among various activities.

What is Google Analytics Bounce Rate for a Website?

2009-12-20T22:23:00.001+05:00

One of the most important factors to consider while performing SEO activities is to check for the bounce rate of website. I personally consider that this is a very important criterion that can give you the true insight of your visitors. Google Analytics can provide in depth statistics regarding Bounce Rate.

In simple, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who closes your website without browsing any other webpage. So this can give you the clue of what exactly you need to do or incorporate into your website to decrease this rate. There are many entrance paths to your website. One of the most visited and important path is the home or index page of a website. Many visitors come through this path and if they are unable to find information they are looking for, they might simply close your website without browsing any other page and so your bounce rate will start to increase.

In fact, each and every webpage should be optimized in such a manner that when a visitor land on it should find the information that he was looking for. For example, if a visitor come to your site through Google organic search with the keyword of “tic tac toe flash game download” then your landing page should have this download available with other relevant games in the categories if possible. This would definitely increase visitor loyalty to browse more pages of your website and hence will result in the decrease of bounce rate and increase of achievement of your primary goals. Content rich websites should not have bounce rate of more than 60%. There can be varying level of thresholds for different websites out there but it is always good to have this ratio as low as possible.

How to check Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

Follow the steps below:

Login to your Google Analytics account
On the main Dashboard screen, you will see Bounce Rate in the right panel, showing you the overall bounce rate for your website.
You can check the detail stats by clicking on this link. See the screen shot below:

Top 5 Website Success Metrics

2009-12-13T00:41:00.001+05:00

What is your primary criteria in measuring website success? Does it number of visitors per day, Entrance Paths, Subscriptions ?? There are lots of metrics upon which you can test your website but the essential ones that are used to reflect true benchmarks fall into a common group. You should focus on these metrics on the day one of your optimization and keep a watch on them as they show fluctuation with the passage of time. I believe almost all popular website analytic programs have these set of metrics to measure. Below are the top 5 website success metrics that you should always monitor and control.

Metric 1 - Unique visitors

People confuse hits with the number of visitor coming to a website. In fact, one server or one IP address can have many hits to a website from one particular location and may be probably only one unique visitor. So you need to separate Hits or page views from unique visitors. Google Analytics can be used to check for the unique visitors to your site. You need to increase your unique visitors by providing fast, attractive, relevant, and navigable web pages. Tracking recent unique visitors can help you track audience growth of your website.

Metric 2 - Average time on site

This website success metric cannot be ignored at any cost. How long are your visitors sticking to your content and reading it? According to ClickTracks, Average time on site is one of the finest measures of user engagement to your content or what so ever you have to offer them. Again you should have relevant and informative content that is useful and attractive to the visitor in making a purchase to your product.

Metric 3 - Pages per visit

The number of pages that were surfed during a particular visit is a simple measure of user engagement. Average time on site and Pages per visit are the two measures that can point to possible flow states of high engagement.

Metric 4 - Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the proportion of users who left your website without browsing to another page and closed your website instantly or after some time without navigating to any other web page. This is a very important website metric to check the loyalty of your visitor to your website and you should monitor pages with high bounce rates closely for improvement and enhancement to content.

Metric 5 - Conversion rates

The percentage of the number of Goals accomplished (e.g. sales, cart additions, sign ups etc.) when compared to unique audience is your conversion rate. There are a number of ways to optimize conversion rates and different techniques fit for websites with different contents. But the key point here again is the relevancy of content to your niche area. No matter in which primary business are you involved in you should have your landing pages optimized for better conversion rates. Because landing page is the one which search engines will send traffic to and which will get attention if you have launched some campaign through any program like Adwords.

How to Maximize ROI with Professional Website Design

2009-12-07T22:48:00.001+05:00

“First impression is the last impression”. This statement is very true in internet business. Your website is a door way to your visitors if you are unable to delight and attract them with a good and simple look/feel of a website, you lose them instantly. Don’t expect that the visitor will probably come again to visit your site anymore through referrals or visiting directly. So what you need to do to maximize your Return on Investment (ROI) by showing a professional website design to your visitor who is going to become your customer.

First of all check the navigation hierarchy of your website. Put yourself into the shoe of visitor and then see which paths are difficult to reach in your website. Brainstorm to reduce the number of clicks required to reach any web page within your site. Carefully prepare a sitemap of your website and see the flaws in it, then make the hierarchy from top to down listing URLs at different levels. For example, you can list categorize your pages on the basis of number of clicks

Webpages reachable with single click

Webpages reachable with 2 clicks

Webpages reachable with 3 clicks

Webpages reachable with n clicks

Now set your navigation plan so that any web page within your website should be reachable with up to maximum of 3 clicks. Because visitors normally don't go beyond this level and pages under 4th level will not get visitor attention.

The second most important thing is the use of CSS instead of embedded tags for formatting of the content on web page. Present your visitor with a clean and neat content with appropriate and prominent headings and good readable fonts. Don’t use embedded HTML tags like Font Tag etc. to apply formatting. It is a good practice to use external CSS to design your website instead of inner CSS classes.

Make sure that your website is W3C complaint, this will give search engines a clear picture of your website and they will index and crawl easily. It will also increase your credibility in the long run.

You can make use of Flash Content for giving your website a good look with descent animation or attractive content but don’t overuse it. As Crawlers cannot index the text within flash objects, so only make a wise percentage of content to show via Flash.

Also make sure that your website is compatible with major browsers like IE, Firefox and Safari. Your webpages may run flawlessly on one browsers but may present your visitors with lot of bugs in User interface in another browser. So cross check your website compatibility on all major browsers.

Now you may be thinking that how these all things can contribute towards maximizing ROI. Ask yourself, would you go to a grand party with ugly cloths ?? it will definitely hurt your personality. Would you go unprepared to sell your product to a potential customer and you even don’t have answers to defend your product.

Same is the case with websites. They are opening door to your visitors who may become your returning customers. So you should welcome them in such a way that they believe in what you say and what you have to offer them. In first look, your website should look a quality product to your visitors. Remember the small things we ignore are the fundamental parts to success.

Common Web Page Problems that can hinder SEO

2009-11-28T11:12:00.001+05:00

There are some common web page problems that may affect your SEO rankings. As we know HTML, Javascript and CSS makes most part of the web page. If these building blocks of a web page are not handled and implemented properly, they can cause serious rendering problems and delays in the page served to the client. Ultimately it may have an effect on your SEO rankings because slow response is one of the factors that can make your site come lower in SERP (search engine result positioning). Crawlers also love clean and fast response pages. So read the guidelines carefully to avoid such common problems with web pages.

First of all, the size and complexity of the markup determine the initial display speed of a web page. Pages with nested tables and miss positioned CSS and Javascript can cause reasonable delay in serving the page to the client. Therefore the informative content that the user is looking for may be delayed for several seconds. It is normally observed that most users don’t wait for the page that takes more than 10 seconds to load and close it. So you need to make sure this is not happening with your website. You can also check this, if you have configured a Google webmasters account with your site. Below screen shot shows the average response time of my Blog in milliseconds.

As you can clearly see, the average response time is 237ms which is really fast. You should be worried, if it crosses 1000ms mark on average.

Make it your practice to always put CSS at the top of page and the Javascript at the very bottom. It is also better to use external CSS and Javascript but if you cannot use it in this way due to any technical issue like if you have hundreds of web pages that would need to be changed afterwards. Then at least, make sure that you replace all your javascript at the bottom and place CSS at the top of each web page.

According to Steve Souders in his book “High Performance Web Sites”, 80% of web page response time is in the content. Most of this time is spent dealing with the objects that make up a web page. As the number of objects per page increases beyond four, object overhead dominates total web page delay.

It is noticed that majority of the web pages exceeded well past this threshold, with more than 350 Kb in file size and many objects [almost above 20] in the webpage. If you can take these numbers to some descent level in your website, your page response time will definitely increase producing positive results for your SEO and user satisfaction.

Google AdWords Program Setup - Step by Step

2009-11-25T23:26:00.001+05:00

Follow the steps as mentioned below to create and setup an account with Google Adwords. (follow step by step)

1. You can start participating in Google AdWords program by registering an account with them and providing $5 starting fee. It can be done via Credit Card Transaction. The registration process is shown briefly in the following demo:

http://services.google.com/awp/en_us/breeze/2848457/index.html

2. Before starting campaigns, you should conduct a keyword research first. For this purpose you can use the free tools available on the internet like Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. This Research may take about 2-3 days to select the appropriate keywords that have high traffic volume and are appropriate for your website.

3. After keyword research, the next step is to create campaigns for different sections of your website.

4. After creating campaigns, next you will create Ad units for each of the Ad Groups.

5. Image Ads can be made in any tool like Photoshop and there are different variations in size for image ads. Image ads are more attractive than text ads but are served less than text Ads.

6. After creating campaigns and Ad Groups the next step is to assign CPC (Cost per Click) for each Ad unit. Budget for Search and Content networks are handled separately. You can start with an intelligent estimate to assign cost for a keyword from the tool mentioned above.

7. After performing all the above steps and activating all the campaigns, Google will review and approve the Ads and this process may take a bit of time to show our ads for the selected keywords.

8. After the Ads start showing for selected keywords, you can start monitoring the reports to optimize the budget as well as your goals.

Google AdWords Overview and Campaigns Management

2009-11-25T00:04:00.000+05:00

Google AdWords is a powerful online marketing tool. Google can generate high volume of targeted traffic to your website within your specified budget. There are following two major areas where you can advertise your site.

Search Network
Content Network

Search Network

Google Search Network shows Ads on top and right side of Google Search Pages. Your Ads will be seen with targeted keywords on Google Search pages. The Ads placement from top to bottom at right panel of google.com may vary depending on the CPC set for the campaign and with respect to competition on that keyword.

Content Network

Google Content Network includes hundreds of websites on which your Ads will be seen. Google Content Network is very sensitive and only shows Ads relevant to the subject. So your Ads will be shown only on content networks that will match our keywords criteria.

What are Google Adwords Campaigns?

Campaigns are used to advertise the Product or Service through dedicated Ads. One campaign may consist of Multiple Ad Groups. For example, if you have a website on books and authors, you may have separate Campaigns for your Author and Book Stores. In Author Store you can have several Ad Groups for different authors that are most popular. One Ad unit in an Ad Group can be served with different Ad Variations from design point of view. It may include image and text ads with different sizes and styles.

Conducting a Keyword Research

First of all you should conduct a Keyword research, because you will be advertising on the basis of keywords and your Campaign will target those keywords. It is a good practice to brainstorm the Keywords that are relevant to your product or service that you are going to offer to increase traffic and convert that traffic into your desired goals, such as Purchases or Signups. For keyword research, you can use the Google AdWords tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This tool can also suggest keywords based on your website. You can provide your website address to this tool and it can extract a huge list all relevant keywords that you can consider for your Campaign. You can get more accurate estimates of hourly search volume for the particular Keyword from the tool below:
http://www.wordtracker.com
You can also use VRE toolbar along with Fire fox browser to analyze monthly search volumes, CPC (Cost per Click), and maximum and minimum biding for the keyword.

Location and Language for Ads

Geographical targeting is very important for Campaign management. Ads can be targeted based on locations and languages. For example you can make a campaign that you want to launch only in specific places and states of USA.

Controlling Budget

Each Campaign has a specific Budget/day, which can be changed at any time. The Ads are run and displayed by Google at Search network and Content networks with prescribed budget set by Administrator. As far as the Ad units are concerned, you can set budget for them individually, but this budget will fall under the total budget that you have set for the whole Campaign. The Budget can also be set for Content networks and Search networks separately.

Google Adwords and its impact on SEO

It is noted that Google Adwords traffic has a positive impact on SEO. Google Adwords can generate huge volumes of traffic, and this is one sign of website popularity. It flags a green signal to search engines that this website got too many visitors per day and its reliability is high. Even Google may give you little favor in your search rankings for this.

How SMART and SEO works together

2009-11-23T19:17:00.002+05:00

Make your SEO efforts SMART [Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely]

Simple

SEO works great if you have simple goal(s) to start with. By simplicity, I mean that your SEO goal(s) should be very straight forward and specified in couple of plain sentences. Anyone reading it should be able to understand that what you are going to achieve in the future. For example, I am going to launch a brand new site for Cars (Sell and Purchase). My Goal statement can be as follows:

“To make a Car (sell and purchase) website for UK region specifically and achieving 3000 registered website users in next 6 months, and a regular traffic of 500+ visitors/day from search engines at that time.”

This statement is very simple and general in nature. I will definitely plan and devise methods to achieve those goals but technical details should not be the part of Goal statement. I will make my plan revolving around this particular goal that I have made. At this stage, I will list all possible activities that I would need to perform to obtain those figures specified in Goal statement. This is somehow called a Work breakdown structure of activities. I can make two level plans approach here. First level plan will describe only the major activities and the second specifying further details under each major activity.
My first level plan may include the following major activities just to give you an idea:

Professional website Design
Slicing and Publishing of Website
Building quality Content
Website and Search Engine Sitemaps
Discussion Forum
Social Media Marketing
Directory Submissions

Measurable

This is rather a very important criterion for your Goals to be evaluated fairly. In real world, we compare things by features, aesthetics, comfort, design, reliability, durability etc. In SMART methodology, firstly you should have a set of characteristics against which to measure. Once you are clear about those parameters, measure them one by one and in-depth. You can also measure your success by building benchmarking criteria’s. You can measure your position with respect to your competitors. SEO is an activity which starts right with the creation of website. So you cannot delay your measuring process until the deadline, instead you should start measuring your results continuously and make adjustments in the plan if something is going wrong or anything unforeseen happens.
You should always take help from the tools. For example, Google Analytics is one of the tools that you can use to measure your results constantly. There are lot more in the market, but you should use one which best fulfill your needs.

Achievable

The Goal(s) you specify for your SEO campaign should be achievable. You can set the challenging goals but yet they should be achievable on ground realities. Making goals out of bound will make your plans always slip with respect to time, budget and scope. Carefully plan your resources and expenses well ahead of kick start of the SEO project. For instance, If you are an entrepreneur; evaluate your skills, abilities and knowledge from your past history and prior achievements and then estimate your efforts required for the SEO activities. After this, you will be in good position to check whether this project is achievable for you in the given timeframe. Always make adjustments to the plan as you go along with the various stages of your SEO project and put things on track.

Relevant

You should not throw the arrow in the air and then draw your target. Always keep laser focus on the Goal(s) you want to accomplish. Always make sure, all of your SEO activities are revolving around those goals. For instance, let’s consider our above example which we specified in “Simple” for Cars website, suppose we need to build inbound links to our Auto’s website. My first priority should be to get the links from existing Autos websites in the UK region. It would be difficult but it is highly relevant to my niche area and region. My priority afterwards then would be to acquire links from article submission websites with high PR and getting links with my desired relevant words in the anchor tag.

Now see this from another angle. I want to promote my website by running Ad campaign. Now there are many ways to do so. I can use Google Adwords, Linkedin, Facebook, and AdBrite etc. But choosing Adwords would be more relevant and appropriate for my Auto’s website promotion. Linkedin is a website for professionals, so it can give me best results if lets say I have a jobs website. So linkedin network for my Auto’s business will be an irrelevant selection for Ad campaign.

Timely

The “timely” factor is the most critical from SEO perspective. Once you have an online presence, you need to remain in-touch with your visitors or customers; you would never want that relationship to break. Because once your site is up, and you started receiving traffic, then you should be very efficient and effective in delivering fresh and relevant content to your visitor, which will convert them to returning visitors and then finally to customers. Even when you are performing SEO activities, you should keep in mind that search engines love fresh and updated content with uniqueness and relevancy. So if you respect time, it can give you long lasting results.

Never Dilute your PageRank (PR)

2009-11-22T19:42:00.000+05:00

So, here comes a very important issue that most people don’t understand fully. You can surely think of your website PageRank as a steeping pot of tea. The greater no. of links you get pointing to your website, the stronger the tea. Taking reverse of it will make your tea weaker (weak PageRank). Placing lots of outgoing links in your pages actually dilutes the PR that is moved to target pages.

“Some people feel links off a page drain PageRank. Others more accurately say it means that the more links you have, the less powerful each of those links are, i.e., if you wanted to boost another page, linking to it from a page with fewer links on it means each of those links should carry more weight. But it’s even more complicated than this, and the best advice for a site owner is to simply link out to any pages they feel a user
will find appropriate.” Danny Sullivan

Anyhow, the best practice is to keep your outgoing links less and very relevant, so that both search engines and readers should get what you intended to deliver to them.

What is Google Sandbox and Penalty Box

2009-11-21T19:30:00.000+05:00

For a new website with a new domain, it can take months for Google to rank the site. Conventionally speaking, this has meant that a brand new website could not seem to rank high for much beyond its own domain name. After a few months, Google decides that it can “rust this newly created website and can let it rank. This indexing delay for new websites is called the Google Sandbox.

Google can also penalize websites that try to game their system. Many websites try this and practice un-ethical approaches to rank high in the search engine result positions. The intention behind may be lack of awareness, or someone just trying to rank #1 in matter of few days without following guidelines. But once identified, Google penalize the website and places it in its sandbox, where the site can stay for the rest of life, until following proper guidelines from Google. We normally call this the Penalty Box, which can be checked in the gray PageRank bar in Google toolbar for firefox and IE. To get out quickly from sandbox, you need to remove the worst things that get you banned and then follow the Google’s guidelines for webmasters. After you have cleared your website with Webmaster Central, you can request for inclusion again.

If you have a Blog or any forum where you accept comments from your visitors, specify the nofollow attribute for avoiding comment spam. This method is rather very important for your site to avoid going into Google sandbox. Because anyone can easily include a website link in comments which could already be in Google’s sandbox due to violation of webmaster guidelines for that website. Eventually your site may also go into sandbox as a link from your site would be pointing to a spam site. So be careful in this regard.

For more information on the nofollow attribute, visit this page at
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/

How to Build Inbound Links with Online Promotion

2009-11-20T14:49:00.000+05:00

After your website is keyword optimized, it is now time to build your inbound links. Please see my earlier posts for "How to Create Valuable and Keyword Focused Content". It is very important to watch your niche competition before you start working on inbound links. Try to Google the website in same niche area in which you are going to hit. Watch your competitor’s site carefully and watch directories in which they have been listed, also watch other popular websites linking to them. It should be your primary concern to build more quality incoming links then your competitor has. It is the most important criteria to beat them in main keyword competition.

For this reason, try to get links from the High PR websites and directories, this will definitely give you a certain boost in the long run. Here are few more techniques you can apply to boost your inbound links

• Use XML news feeds such as RSS to routinely syndicate your content to other sites.

• News aggregators are good for your feeds, Register with them.

• Content is the king. So write quality content in the form of articles on your most important topics for other sites, and have a link back to your website.

• If you are in business where you can create useful tools for your visitors, do it. It will give you free quality inbound links.

• Get listed in the major directories and in relevant categories. Like
http://dir.yahoo.com
http://www.business.com
http://www.dmoz.org
http://botw.org

• Acquire links from discussion forums, write articles, post to forums and use your link in signature files.

With regular promotion, the majority of new sites take from 6 to 9 months to rank high on Google. They take somewhat less time on Yahoo and MSN.

The Power of High Ranking Pages for Inbound Links

Links coming from high PR sites carry more weight than low PR sites. In fact, estimates show that a PR 6 link is worth 100+ PageRank 3 links, and a link from a PageRank 7 page is worth 500+ PR 3 links. So, links from quality and trusted websites are worth more to your rankings in search engines. Think in terms of quality, not quantity, when you are going to promote your website.

How to Create Valuable and Keyword Focused Content for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2009-11-17T23:15:00.000+05:00

Unique, keyword focused and quality content is still a king on the Web. When search engines are ranking sites, they look for a lot of themed content about particular topics. Publishing a huge amount of useful and valuable content that is keyword optimized will surely provide your site more chances to rank Higher for different keywords, and will definitely help in your overall search engine rankings.

You can also use a content management system (CMS) or a kind of Blog to make quality rich content consistently. Reflect back what your users are looking for and what terms you want to target. It is good to target one major keyphrase per article. You want to create a large amount of content about your main topic that will act as digital flypaper.

Enhance your content with targeted keywords
For on-page SEO, the most valuable website component is keyword focused content. You should be very much aware of the topic about which you are going to write, read other relevant materials from Blogs, books and tutorials. The more accurate you can get topically, the higher your conversion rates will be, and the quicker you will achieve results. Keyword oriented content is usually focused at one theme or one keyphrase per page.

Avoid combining all of your services just into one page. Split your content into multiple pages and then target each specific topic embedding main keywords. For example, if you have a website about e-books, you can follow a 3 level hierarchy for your website as follows:

1st Level Page – (Home Page)

Include your primary keywords here. Specify them in Meta tags and couple of major keywords in Title tag. Specify your main book categories here and links pointing to those categories. Present your visitor with clean and neat navigation system. Make your website’s home page graphically appealing but avoid over use of Flash content.

2nd Level Pages

Create separate web page for each of your sub-categories like:

Adventure & Travel
Family & Relationships
Fantasy
Food & Cooking
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Health & Wellness
History
Science
Nature
Careers
Communications
Computers and the Internet
General Business
Management
Poetry
Humor
Philosophy

3rd Level Pages

This is the most important level of your website where you can target your specific keywords and keyphrases. This is a kind of landing page for your visitors coming from search engines. You should list each individual book in a separate page at this level and you should have reasonable amount of unique content about the book here (at least couple of paragraphs). You can do this by specifying that what this book is about or write something in a form of a summary. The more relevant will you be, more chances are that you will rank higher in search engines.

Important SEO Steps for Optimization of a Website

2009-11-17T00:37:00.000+05:00

Below I am going to list some important and essential steps from basic to advance level for making your website optimized. I have divided them in four phases. Phase I through Phase III cannot be ignored if you are serious in your SEO efforts. Phase IV is optional but it will give you boost ahead of your competitors and it is recommended that you perform activities listed in phase IV to further take your site high in search engines.

SEO Steps – Phase I

Include your main keywords in domain name of website
Make a professional website design
Think about your navigation strategy and make it simple for users
Use keyword suggestion tools for getting keyword ideas

SEO Steps – Phase II

Write unique and quality content
Use CSS instead of HTML tags to format your pages
Include your keywords in Title tags
Never repeat same keywords in Title tags
Optimize headlines (H1 through H6)
Include Alt tags for images
Optimize your Meta tags, include only relevant keywords
Create a sitemap of your website

SEO Steps – Phase III

Embed your main keywords in body area at the top
Include your main keywords in anchor tags
Include links within the site of your pages (interlinking)
Submit your website to high PR directories

SEO Steps – Phase IV

Make Blog or Forum for active participation
Social bookmarkings and social media participation
Newsletter subscriptions
Inbound links building

SEO and Google Analytics - The best match for Integration

2009-11-16T18:04:00.000+05:00

Google has a lot to offer for website optimization and tracking, it has many sophisticated tools that you can use freely to promote your website and to monitor its performance over time. One such tool is Google Analytics. You can use this tool to take control of your SEO activities and monitor them in real time. Google analytics provides in-depth analysis of your site visitors, traffic sources, content and regional data for geo targeting. You can even set your Goals which you want to achieve over time.

Google Analytics also have a Dashboard, where you can see summary of all activities at one place and in rich graphical format. You can apply different filters to look for different patterns and insights into data. Below I am going to show you concrete steps to integrate this great free service into your own website or Blog.

Step: 1 Enter this address into your browser and launch Google Analytics. Click this link to launch Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics

Step 2
If you have Gmail account, you can Login directly by pressing “Access Analytics” button and then signing in. If you don’t have Gmail account, then click Sign Up Now button.

Step 3
After your account has been created, its now time to setup your Google Analytics account. Login with your ID and password and provide the website URL asked. Also give your account a name and select appropriate time zone. Then hit “Continue”. Here you will provide your contact information, you must agree to the Terms of Service.

Step 4
At this stage you will be provided with the Code snippet. Copy it and paste it into your web pages just before the end of HTML body tag.

Step 5
Here you are almost done. Now you can track your website performance and reports in real time. Google may take few hours to display the reports for the very first time and information about the stats like visitors, traffic sources etc.

Writing Keywords and Description Meta Tags

2009-11-15T01:35:00.000+05:00

Keyword Tag:

The keywords meta tag expresses the content or body of page at hand and should reflect keywords specified in the content areas of the page. There are two approaches that I suggest people to create their tag cloud for Keyword meta tag.

First approach is to write your content and put your ideas on the paper roughly. Put all your thoughts once, even don’t miss the ones which you consider to be least important for that writing. Then narrow down your purpose of writing and try to give your written content a very comprehensive Title or try to present your whole theme in just one line. After writing a heading for your article, now it’s the time to pick up keywords from your heading or comprehensive title that you have written. Make a comma separated list of keywords that you extracted from your title and put them in your Meta Keyword tag. If you are not able to come up with more than couple of keywords then you should also think in terms of synonyms or words matching your main them and put them in meta as well but do remember that those selected keywords should be at least present one time in body of your article or content.

Second approach is the reverse of above. Think of your main theme and keywords first about which you are going to write and then write your article revolving around those keywords. But remember your writings will be read by humans so don’t ever try to only think crawlers and robots in your mind and how they are going to rank your page. If you have written a quality article which has sufficient keywords in body, title and in meta then people would naturally link to your website and you will eventually enjoy the higher rankings.

First approach is more comfortable and appropriate for people who don’t know about SEO or have a basic idea of it. It is also recommended to use lowercase text to better match search queries. For example:

<meta name="keywords" content="ebooks download, 
electronic downloadable copy, downloadable ebooks, 
pdf  ebook downloads, pdf downloads, free ebook download”>

Try to avoid repeating your main keywords in the same fashion more than three times. It is best to change your terms using plurals, breakings, and mis-spellings. Don’t use the trademarks and brands of other companies in keywords.

Description tag:

Although the significance of meta tags for search engine rankings has declined, it is still vital to write a good description meta tag because search engines like MSN and Yahoo prefer the description meta tag in their SERPs. Google is least concerned with description tags for calculating SERP position. Google looks for other factors too while calculating the relevancy of content. But its good practice to always write meaningful and relevant description meta tags. If there is no description tag specified on any page, search engines create their description starting with the very first paragraph of content displayed on the page. Description meta tag should be at most, 300 characters long.

Top Factors to Rank High in Search Engines

2009-11-13T23:51:00.000+05:00

Most people think that PageRank is the only factor to rank high in search engines but Google uses many parameters of a site to rank search results. Google uses many signals to calculate the rank of a page. I have concluded the most common factors in best practices implementation for search engine optimization. This is a quick checklist against which you can benchmark your website.

Use of Keywords in Title tag and their relevancy
Text contained in the anchors of incoming links
Unique and quality Content
Global link popularity of a website
Linking structure within the site itself
Relevancy of inbound links
Use of Keywords in main content area of the pages
Use of keywords in Meta tags and their relevancy to content
Global link popularity of linking sites
Proper and controlled keyword stuffing in content
Use of alt tags in images
Professional website design
W3C compliant (see W3C guidelines for details)
Fast server response
Age of website
Fresh content
RSS feeds for readers
Magazine subscriptions for increasing relevant traffic
Social media bookmarking
Blogging

Five essential steps to Higher Search Engine Rankings

2009-11-12T23:03:00.000+05:00

Let’s break down this entire process of search engine optimization into five essential steps. To attain higher search engine rankings, you first need to discover the right key phrases. Then, you should create unique content revolving around those keywords and phrases that are optimized with well defined titles, meta’s, headers, and body text. Finally, create inbound links by promoting your website. Below, I will show you the most essential steps required to boost your rankings in search engines.

1. Create and Deploy keywords strategically

Each web page can efficiently target two or three phrases well. Rather than running for one main key phrase that ranks very high, strive to have many keyphrases that rank medium to high. Overall, there are more chances that you will get more traffic because your keyword reach will be wider. Also take benefit of the long tail of search queries by targeting specific phrases.

2. Title, Meta tags, Links and Content as a Big Picture

It is very important that each and every piece of your website should have a very high relevancy. Each web page should have the same theme in title, body and links. The theme of a page should flow through everything related with that page. By exercising this practice, you’ll also get a very good chance of getting good and quality in-bound links because your webpage will represent the exact theme which you intended to present to your audience in natural fashion.

3. Optimize URIs for SEO

You can convert complex URIs to search engine friendly URIs that include keywords and by doing so you can also hide the technology behind your website to improve rankings. To concentrate on PageRank, be very selective regarding what websites you link to (e.g., avoid linking to spam or flagged websites). Try to embed your main keyword in the URIs so that it will show high relevancy to search engines.

4. Make it link worthy

You have only one chance to create a first impression on your visitor. Don’t let it spoil with an un-professional website design. You can get a lot of links when your site is professionally designed, and have valuable/fresh content and useful tools.

5. Acquire inbound links

Search engines, specially Google use external factors such as inbound links, anchor text, surrounding text, and domain record, among others, to calculate the relative importance of your website. Most of the rankings in search engines are calculated by the number and reputation of inbound links. You will see these concepts frequently as you will read different articles related to search engine optimization and increasing search friendliness. Consider incoming links as a vote to your site, more links you get, more your site will go up in the search engine rankings.

Common SEO Mistakes to be avoided while optimizing website

2009-11-11T23:35:00.000+05:00

Certain website parameters can damage or limit your potential search engine rankings. By avoiding these general SEO pitfalls, you can smooth the way for higher search engine visibility. Below, I will show you some common mistakes that most of the beginner SEO guys commit while performing optimization.

Insufficient inbound links

One of the major problems with low level ranking websites is a lack of inbound links which are popular. Without a reasonable number of high quality links, you will be at a disadvantage against a competitor who has more links than you. Other linking problem include links to flagged sites, inappropriate redirects, lack of relevant keywords, and generic link text.

Splash pages

Splash pages are graphically rich pages intended to astonish visitors or to direct
them to alternative views of content, such as a very high, medium or low bandwidth versions of a site. A “Skip Intro” link on a web page itself says that the web page that visitor is going to see is not very important. The issue with splash pages, whether they include “Skip Intro” links or not is that they are an opportunity which is wasted. Splash pages typically reside at the very top of a site’s hierarchy. Web pages that are higher in your site hierarchy are likely to get more links and hence more traffic than web pages that are lower in hierarchy. If visitors of a site must have to click and if search engines must have to parse and crawl farther to reach the actual home page (i.e. what should be your high level main or index page), you have definitely put up a obstacle to success.

Flash player and Flash Content

Flash player needs to be installed computer that is accessing the website content which includes Flash. Flash came with different versions. Older versions may not support flash content created in newer versions. Another problem with Flash is that search engines cannot properly index the content present in flash file. I recommend using Flash to improve the user browsing experience, not to create it totally in flash. One method you can use to make your Flash web pages more SEO friendly is the 2 div approach. Using one div for the Flash movie, and other div with its HTML equivalent. If any flash plug-in is available and it is compatible then show div containing flash and hide the other div, else vice verse.

Unprofessional design

It’s a very true saying that “A first impression is the last impression”. Your website can take only few seconds to make an impression to the new visitor and it will also affect your long term success in terms of visitor loyalty. Having a well designed website is the most critical factor for apparent web credibility. The more your site is aesthetically strong, the higher its credibility will be. Customers are also more willing to buy from websites that are well designed. Web credibility, valuable content, and useful tools are key factors that compel webmasters to link to you, and visitors to stay and spend money.

Poor navigation

The navigation on your website should include text that is easily indexed and that was not created from JavaScript, or any Flash object. Search engines can only read and index the content within your pages. They cannot read text that is embedded in images or Flash movies, nor do they run JavaScript snippets. Though modern search engine practices may include to read text present in images but it has yet not achieved so far, therefore you need to stick to equivalent text. It may be in the form of Alt tags. By embedding your main keywords in images or graphics, you lose a golden opportunity to swelter your SEO directly into the information design of your site.

Duplicate content

Avoid duplicates of pages at different locations in your website. Although Google representative Matt Cutts mentioned that there is no penalty for duplicate content, but Google’s own guidelines say “don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Google usually tries to show the best version of a resource, but in rare cases it can penalize a website that shows to game the system with duplicate content. The use of duplicate titles across too many web pages on the same website can damage rankings and PR. Duplicate content may confuse the crawlers of different search engines as to which page is authoritative, thereby diluting your Page Rank among the various URLs. You can use the protocol to exclude duplicate content. (See here for more details http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html).

Title Optimization – make your titles SEO friendly for higher SERP

2009-11-11T23:28:00.000+05:00

One of the most important factors that consider your success of website depends on how Titles are made. There is no doubt that Title should represent the main theme of the body or page on which it is displayed but there are other factors too; that should be taken into consideration while building them for achieving higher SERP (Search Engine Result Position) and making them SEO friendly. We will look into each of it in detail.

Title optimization and density / relevancy factor

First thing to be considered while creating title tags for any page is to check the relevancy factor. By relevancy we mean how close or relevant is the title to its content, just as Story heading represents the main theme of the content inside it. Title tag should represent the core theme or idea of any webpage. It is also very natural to represent the title on the basis of its main theme. Another important thing that SEO guy should consider is that a reasonable amount of words should be present in the content area which are mentioned in title tag. Suppose this page as an example, see the title tag and then count each word individually. Title is the first word in heading, and it is repeated several times in this page without loosing the context, next is Optimization which is again repeated with considerable amount. You can count the rest and will find that density is very important while making these tags. As a rule of thumb, your title tag keywords should occupy 5 – 10 % of the whole content. You will find some people, emphasizing this ratio to be around 20 – 25 % but I recommend it to be under 15% for best results.

Include your main keywords in internal links

Second important thing to boost your PR (page rank) is to have at least one internal link coming to this page with main keywords present in the link. This link should not be confused with the left or right panel links which most sites have, rather it’s an internal link that should point from content of any other existing webpage of your site. This link should have at least one main keyword which is also present in title tag.

Make your Title tags attractive to people

Titles are shown in result pages displayed by search engines whenever queried, and they are the very first thing that got prominent when people read them in those results. So if you don’t have relevant words and appealing keywords for which the visitor is looking for, you are gone. Also not try to rush for main keywords because the competition is very tight in those keywords, instead start with less competitive keywords to get higher position. For more detail on this, study the topic of long tails.

Few Precautions in Title Optimization:

Avoid duplicate Title Tags: Don’t put same title tag in other pages of your website. This will greatly reduce your content’s quality and search engines will consider it duplicate text and will reduce the points for those pages having duplicate tags, some search engines handle it very strictly.
Don’t cross the density limit: Few people propagate their main title keywords all over the page to game the search engines and get instant results. This is very dangerous and you can be penalized by major search engines by doing so and all your optimization efforts will spoil, so only provide quality content and don’t exceed 30 % density limit for your keywords.
Don’t make titles very long: Your title tag should not be very long. 3 – 15 words long Title is OK. Don’t make titles to read like a long sentence. If you need long titles in some situation, try to separate them with hyphens.
Put your company name at the start: Include your company name in Title tags to make them unique, this will also help you in branding your products. Try to put it on the very start of it. If you wish to include your company name in each and every page of your website, try following the same pattern throughout the whole site.

We have seen many websites with great content but with no visibility to the world, because they didn’t handled Title tags properly or somehow they put very little attention to this factor while implementing SEO. If you can focus on the points discussed in this article, you can enjoy higher search engine rankings and improvements in very short time.

Choose Best Keywords, make optimization and get the full power of SEO

2009-11-11T23:15:00.000+05:00

Increasing the website traffic is core objective of all SEO (search engine optimization) activities. By quality traffic, we mean that people should get the content for which they were looking for, while landing to your webpage and that’s it. But for different key terms, the traffic graph greatly varies, so if you want high traffic, you should target those keywords in which the competition is somewhat medium, even it seems very difficult to achieve at the very first glance but if you are following all the techniques in your website then this should not be a big problem for you. If you are choosing best keywords and proper optimization in right manner, you will surely get high volumes of traffic and hence increasing sales or whatever your initial goal is.

For optimization of a web page, you need to choose best keywords relevant to the content present in the body. Here, we will discuss all keyword selection and optimization techniques which you can use to maximize the SERP (search engine result position) of your website with proven results.

There are mainly 2 simple steps for achieving boost in traffic with targeted audience.

Keyword Selection: Whatever business you are doing! You are offering something to your customers. Customers will get to your business by typing some keywords on search engine which should probably take them to your website. So you need to SELECT those keywords, the visitor is searching for.

Optimizing Keywords: After keyword selection, you would need to optimize your selected keywords so that you should get higher position in search engine result pages.
Now we will discuss these 2 steps in detail.

Search engines like Google crawls any webpage from top left to bottom right, the closer you have placed your main keywords to the top left side, the more weight will you receive. This can be said as top-bottom approach of keyword optimization. This is very natural too, as people will also see your page in this way while reading, so putting emphasize on this part of webpage is crucial to your success.

Selecting the best keywords

Before going into any detail, you need to understand what is meant by best. By best we primarily mean the traffic or number of visitors looking for that keyword, so you should go for the keywords which are relevant to your context and their monthly or daily traffic graph is higher. You can always find high traffic search terms for any business through different programs. We will show you, how to accomplish this. Actually there are some programs available that can do it for you.

Google keyword Suggestion Tool

This tool is the best solution for anyone serious in getting the best keyword for their website at no cost. It is totally FREE and provides very sophisticated statistical results. You can access it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Use this Google Suggestion tool to obtain a list of keywords that contains your business idea. You would require entering keywords or phrases related to your business or you can also provide your website address and Google will suggest keywords for you. Screen shot of this is shown below:

For demonstration purpose, we input “Job” as input to this tool and it returned the results in following pattern. Only a portion of the result set is shown in the screen shot below:

Word Tracker

Word Tracker is also very effective solution for choosing best keywords with accurate data of monthly traffic estimates along with other features. It will cost you $59 per month for continuous access to their complete keyword database. UK customers will have to pay only $25. You can access it here http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html

Keyword Elite

This is yet another nice software that can not only suggest you best keywords but also help you in launching successful Adwords campaign through its easy to us GUI. keywordelite.com/index2.html

Optimizing Keywords

The most important thing that you should understand is your landing page, where the customer would be taken to when he/she will click your website in search engine result page. You landing page should provide customer with the content for which he/she clicked your website by looking at the title and short description in result page. This is called relevancy and is also crucial to your success with advertising campaigns that you might have planned in future to increase website traffic even further. When optimizing your pages, think like a searcher. Navigate your website by assuming yourself to be as a customer and find out holes and improvements needed in most prominent pages.

There are many factors you should consider to increase your website quality and relevancy. You title tags should represent the body theme and it should represent the content which visitor is looking for in your website, plus you should have reasonable propagation of main keywords in your webpage. Major headings should also support your title tag and abstract of your webpage i.e. initial text of page should be in close relation with the subject. Also try to focus on META tags. Internal and external linking should also have your main keywords present, never use click here text or anything like that, instead specify descriptive hyperlinks throughout your website.

This is all what you need to boost your traffic with best keywords and with proper optimization of those keywords.