Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009

Six and a half years ago (which is ages, in Internet years), Robin Nobles, Eric Ward, and John Alexander compiled a legendary list of 131 legitimate link building strategies. Four years later, Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans published 101 link building tips to market your website, which was inspired by the other article. Considering the furiously changing face of search engine marketing and with 2009 already ahead of us, I thought it was time to evaluate both lists and create an updated collection of link building strategies.

7 Internal link building strategies

1. Make sure that your navigation is spiderable. Either use (anchor text carrying) text based navigation, or an image based navigation with relevant alt attributes attached to each image link.

2. Breadcrumbs are a great internal linking tool. Use them for usability and anchor text differentiation.

3. In-content links not only tend to have a higher click through rate and perceived trust, but are also able to add more relevance to a link because of the surrounding text.

4. Use a sitemap. A good sitemap is useful for visitors, useful for search engines and, therefore, useful for you.

5. Link to topically relevant pages on important pages of your website. Link to important pages on every (or most) topically relevant page of your website.

6. Be consistent in linking behavior. If you link to homepage.com, always link to homepage.com, and not to homepage.com, homepage.com/index.php and homepage.com/index.php&id=123.

7. Identify your most linked-to pages, and make sure that the link juice flows to your most important pages from there, in a well-optimized way.

10 Easy link building starters

8. Optimize your existing links. Contact the webmasters of prominent websites that link to you and ask them to change ‘click here’ to an anchor text that contains relevant keywords, an anchor text that encourages clicking through, or -ideally- a combination of both.

9. Monitor your 404 statistics. Keep track of whoever links to old pages or misspelled URLs, which is data that Google provides as well. Contact those webmasters and provide them a good URL which they can link to.

10. Create a ‘link to us’ page, where you provide information about how people can link to you and which URL(s), logo and/ or anchor text they can use. Update this page regularly in order to diversify the anchor text.

11. Contact family, friends, colleagues and other people you know and let them know about your website. Some will send you useful feedback, others -who happen to have a website of their own- might link to you.

12. Do you block search engine bots from indexing certain parts of your website via robots.txt or meta-noindex? Find out if people link to this section of your site. If so, contact the webmasters of these sites and kindly ask them to link to an other page of your website.

13. Use your spell check. People will more likely link to correctly spelled articles than to content that’s full of grammar errors.

14. Search for websites that already mention your business name or URL, but haven’t linked to your website. This works excellently in Yahoo!.

15. Look for websites that mention your personal name, but currently don’t link to your site. Use Yahoo! for this as well.

16. Leave comments on the blogs you visit every day. Hey, you’re visiting them anyway, so why don’t leave a (relevant, useful!) comment?

17. Find out which website your company owns. If you work for a small company, there may possibly be several. If you work for a large company, the number will probably knock you off your shoes. Link these websites (carefully!) together, or redirect the most important and/ or relevant ones to your main website.

12 Old school link building techniques

18. Search for related websites by using relevant keywords. Filter out all interesting websites and contact them. When you did this for your main keyword(s), there are still tons of other combinations possible.

19. Check which websites link to your competitors. Try to get them to link to your website as well.

20. Check which types of websites link to websites that offer the same services or products as you, but in a different country/ language. This might result in a “I never thought of that…” feeling.

21. Either interview an expert from your field, or try to get interviewed by someone else. Don’t forget to mention your best content: readers of the interview might be willing to link to it.

22. Write guest posts for relevant websites in your niche. You could also write posts about your industry for websites that are slightly related to your niche.

23. Teach. Whether it’s a public workshop (local press), a class at a local college or University (.edu website) or at a business related event (industry links), teaching can result in authority links.

24. Use any search engine advertising program and advertise on keywords that linkerati might use. Try to convert the targeted traffic into links.

25. Use Google AdWords’ content network to determine which (relevant) websites generate traffic and conversions. Contact those websites directly.

26. Join an affiliate program. See #25.

27. Determine who’s linked to you before. Contact them again when you’re releasing an interesting new piece of content.

28. Trade links. There’s nothing wrong, with swapping links with a few, highly relevant, authority websites that can bring in extra traffic. Exchanging links with lots of irrelevant websites, however, might get you in trouble.

29. Donate to a charity. Although buying links is not allowed by Google, there are still lots of ways you can buy links (kind of) legitimately.

12 Places to submit your URL to

30. Most social media websites are only useful for promoting good content (which will get you links in return), but sites like LinkedIn still provide dofollow links with an anchor text of your choice.

31. Some general directories, such as DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web are still worth submitting your website to. Make sure to submit your site to the most appropriate category.

32. High quality, niche directories can be worth considering as well. Notice the emphasis on high quality.

33. Don’t forget to submit your website to high quality, regional directories. Especially worthwhile for websites that target local markets.

34. Publish stunning, interesting, funny or beautiful images in your Flickr account, that contains a link to your website.

35. Writing an article about a relevant topic, that contains one or more links to your website, and submitting it to article directories such as eZineArticles might work for you.

36. Relevant, non-spammy links in Wikipedia articles, Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups may have nofollow attributes attached, but can lead to (dofollow) links indirectly.

37. Submit your RSS feed to important RSS directories.

38. Blog directories may be willing to link to your blog. Submit your blog to the high quality ones.

39. Use PR websites to distribute your press releases, in addition to your PR agency. Make sure that your press release contains one or more (clickable) links to your website.

40. Got a great design? Submit your site to CSS directories and/ or website design contests. Even well-designed parts of your website can result in links.

41. Twitter. Just published a new post or article? Mention it on Twitter, your followers might visit it and -if they find it interesting- link to it.

12 Ways to make people write about you

42. Send out christmas gifts or birthday gifts to bloggers (or website owners) you know.

43. Offer services or a product in exchange for a review. Don’t ask the bloggers or webmasters to link to you, they most often will do anyway.

44. Create something unique. Top 10s, top 250s, mash-ups, how-tos, best-ofs, surveys, studies, awards. Define the proper hook, create unique content and attract good links. The possibilities are infinite.

45. Try to start a hype, use a new word, get a meme going, or do something else you’re the first at.

46. Link to others. People -especially bloggers- will notice it if you link to them. If you do this several times and offer content that is or might be relevant to these bloggers, they might link to you as well eventually.

47. If you happen to have some breaking news, offer a blogger (or a select group) the scoop. Bloggers love to publish scoops.

48. Say something groundbreaking, shocking, confronting, stupid, weird or flattering. People tend to link to others who are different or act that way.

49. Create something with an amazing design. This does not necessarily have to be your website, just having an awesome business card can result in extra links.

50. Launch an extraordinary offline campaign. People will talk about this online. If you integrate this offline campaign with an online version in a perfect way, you may even receive some extra links from ‘this is how you should integrate offline and online’-articles as well.

51. Create a contest and offer give-aways for winners. This is not only a great way to get attention, but to get valuable input as well, for example when hosting a guest post contest.

52. Build useful tools and/ or plugins that are free to use.

53. Speak at an industry conference. You’ll meet lots of interesting new people, and will probably get mentioned in several conference write-ups.

12 Common business tactics

54. Add a link to your local Chamber of Commerce profile.

55. The Better Business Bureau, and any industry related association you’re a member of are interesting link targets as well.

56. Contact your (preferred) suppliers, manufacturers, other partners. Obtain links from these website if they have a partners page as well.

57. Offer to write testimonials or a quote to your suppliers, if they are willing to link back to your site in or near this testimonial.

58. Ask clients to write testimonials about your product or service that they publish on their website, in exchange for a discount, extra fast delivery or any other benefit you can provide.

59. Hire a publicist. Press agency employees usually know the right people in the right places, which can result in a higher acceptancy rate of your press release.

60. Join relevant forums. You can either link to your website on your profile page, in your signature or in your posts. Notice how this one is listed under ‘Business related tactics’ in stead of ‘Places to submit your URL to’? There’s a reason why: forums are not places to drop links, but to join discussions.

61. Sponsor something. There are tons of possibilities, such as an industry conference, a sports club, a relevant forum, a local happening, or just any offline event that happens to have a website.

62. Hire an intern. You can let him or her work on a piece of research, which you can in your link building process. Also, don’t forget the website of the University you’re intern is attending.

63. Offer awesome product or services. People love talking about great stuff they’ve bought. If your products are ‘just’ good in stead of awesome, make sure that your after sales or customer care is excellent. People love talking about companies with a great service as well. Of course, offering crappy products or a lousy service will also result in links, but I don’t think those are the links you’re after.

64. Look for companies that went out of business. Either acquire their website, or contact the website that they’re currently getting links from and ask these sites to link to you in stead.

65. Turn your colleagues into link developers. Each of them has his or her own specialty and group of contacts. This not only take works off of your hands, but is very efficient as well.

4 Important considerations

66. Hire a link builder or an expert. Either let somebody you trust manage (a part of) your campaign, or visit a link building workshop. Especially when you’ve been building links for your own site for several years, a fresh mind can bring new ideas.

67. Hang in there. Link building isn’t something you can do in just a few hours, or something that you only have to do during one week in a year. Building a brand can’t be done in a single day, the same goes for a solid link profile. It’s a continuing process that takes time. Lots of time.

68. Keep an eye on the news. Follow important and interesting different blogs, in order to keep up with the latest news, trends and tricks. I’m not just talking about link building or SEM blogs, but make sure to follow general marketing blogs, slightly different, creative blogs or industry related news websites as well.

69. If you have to ask yourself ‘is this a legitimate approach’ or ’should I be doing this’, the answer is probably no. Too much, too aggressive or too shady isn’t advisable. Don’t do things you would be ashamed of when explaining them to your mother. Or Matt Cutts.

0 Advanced link building strategies

There is no such thing as advanced link building. While this list already sums up quite a few different strategies, I’m pretty sure that you can easily come up with a dozen more, that are specifically suitable for your company or industry.

Eric Ward once said that link building is “one part marketing, two parts public relations, and three parts common sense”. I’d say that link building is 10% basic SEO knowledge, 20% business thinking, 30% creativity and 40% perseverance. Either way, there’s nothing advanced to it.

Source : Link Building Strategies

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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Google Mobile App for iPhone with Voice Search

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Thursday, July 3, 2008

Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web

Adobe Flash Technology Enhances Search Results for Dynamic Content and Rich Internet Applications

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

The openly published SWF specification describes the file format used to deliver rich applications and interactive content via Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology, helping users find more relevant information when conducting searches. As a result, millions of pre-existing RIAs and dynamic Web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter them.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search. “Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation,” said Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering.

“Designers and Web developers have long been frustrated that search engines couldn’t better access the information within their content created with Flash technology. It’s great to see Adobe and the search engines working directly together to improve the situation,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief, SearchEngineLand.com. “The changes should help unlock information that’s previously been ‘invisible’ and will likely result in a better experience for searchers.”

Adobe Flash Player is the world’s most pervasive client runtime that delivers unparalleled creative options, highly engaging user experiences, stunning audio/video playback, and nearly universal reach.

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Google Improved Flash Indexing

Words from Google

We've received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we've greatly improved our ability to index Flash.

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file?
We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google's ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

We're already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!

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Google learns to crawl Flash

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There's more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

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Keyword Research : Where to Start?

Keyword research is the first thing you do when planning a website. You do it before thinking over the site architecture and creating the content. Keyword research is the what you do to estimate your competition and create a promotion strategy.

But where to start? How to find the correct core terms that you will then explore and expand? What you can do first:

1. Make a list of most essential aspects of your business;
2. Think what your visitors or customers would be most interested to see;
3. Learn what your competitors use (but don’t copy their strategy - sort out only most essential and useful terms);
4. Explore your niche essential vocabulary - check out dictionaries and glossaries.

While the first three are more or less clear, number 4 needs further information, I guess. I have a collection of my favorite sources I check regularly to get help with keyword research and content creation. And I am going to share my collection now:

The free dictionary (available with the FireFox search plugin) list a wealth of useful information for any term:

  • your keyword definition(s)
  • set phrases/ idioms (use them to lighten up your writing style)
  • examples of usage
  • words of the same root (inflected words and derivations)
  • thesaurus
  • classic literature mentions
  • keyword phrases
  • related acronyms

Wordnet will provide you with the definitions and sample sentences using your key term.

Rhyme Zone will define your term and find:

  • rhymes (can be real fun to play with by the way)
  • synonyms
  • antonyms

Synonym.com (as the name suggests) will show you the word synonyms and antonyms. The dictionary database is really not bad but they really have to work on usability and disturbing pop-ups the keep popping in.

Cambridge online dictionary will list most essential definitions and keyword phrases.

Meta Glossary finds the word definitions, related words and synonyms

Reference.com (with the FireFox search plugin) shows your core term synonyms and definitions.

Merriam-Webster dictionary lists definitions and derived terms.

Urban Dictionary provides related terms, definitions and examples created by users (FireFox search plugin available).

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Top 20 SEO Tools

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SEO Has No Future - Rediculous!



All In One SEO Plugin Pack ( My Thoughts )


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Future of SEO

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Future of Internet Marketing Advertising SEO Pr Leyden

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SEO Interview: Brett Crosby Google

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Social Media for Businesses

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Social Media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Social Media Optimization



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Search Engine and Social Media Optimization Tips

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Facebook Social Media Optimization Social Networking

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Social Media Optimization Basics Social Media Optimization Basics

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Google's Advice On How Brands Can Leverage Social Media This is a video response to Media professor/expert Paul Levinson on new media influence Rate:

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Make money online with Internet Marketing Work at Home

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$3.5 Million With Google Adsense & Internet Marketing

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Online Marketing Videos









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Advanced Techniques in Google Analytics

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Google Analytics - Non-Ecommerce Sites: Beyond Averages

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Google Analytics - Rules for Revolutionaries

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Google Analytics - Optimal AdWords Campaigns

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Google Analytics Interface Tutorial

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Google Analytics - Bounce Rate: The Simply Powerful Metric Video

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Friday, June 6, 2008

Black Hat, White Hat and Gray Hat SEO

Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) can wear many different “hats”. The color of the single hat is determined by the SEO philosophy and the methods, that is used to optimize websites. We usually speak of:

  • Black Hat SEO
  • White Hat SEO
  • Gray Hat SEO
As an affiliate it is important to understand the difference and the risks between the single SEO Hats.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is also known as SEO spamming, and is when someone creates websites that have little or no value, that are intended to trick the search engines into offering irrelevant or low-quality search results.

Black Hat SEO will heavily leverage technology and automation in order to create tons of poor quality sites, and gain inbound links from other websites (link spam). Once the visitor has arrived to the website, the owner of the website will often use some kind of cloaking or redirect to show the visitor a sales page of the products, that is the really goal of the Black Hat SEO technique.

Black Hat SEO are all about getting fast results. The method they use to optimize their websites will often get the website to the top of the search engines very rapidly, but when the search engines catch-on, the website will very often crash or get banned.

I do not condone Black Hat SEO for affiliates, because it is very risky SEO business, and it can especially damaging, when it is used on a website, that you have invested heavily resources in.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO focus on building quality content first and SEO second. White Hat SEO may use technology and automation to build their websites too, but they use it to accomplish different goals. They write content for people, not search engines. White Hat SEO tend to rely more on their content and marketing skills to achieve a top ranking, rather than automated programs.

White Hat SEO understand that good search engine rankings takes time and don’t try to rush results. White Hat SEO are able to get more inbound links from other websites, because their content is considered valuable. They go by the philosophy CONTENT IS KING.

When you use White Hat SEO tactics you run absolutely no risk of being banned by the search engines and visitors who come to your website will also be more likely to convert.

Gray Hat SEO

A lot of SEO fall into the Gray Hat category, and there are many shades of gray. Some Gray Hat SEO tend to use more questionable tactics and take greater risks. Gray Hat SEO is all about risk versus reward. Some Gray Hat techniques may be frowned by the search engines, but are not necessarily against their rules, while other techniques may be more risky and should be used only after careful consideration.

What SEO hat should you wear ?

The hat that you decide to wear should be determined by your goals and objectives. I would never recommend anybody to use any black hat SEO strategies, because these strategies are short-lived and will almost always get you banned in the search engines.

Everybody should strive to be a white hat SEO and focus on writing quality content. However it may make sense for you in some instances to use Gray Hat SEO tactics to gain a competitive advantage. But when using Gray Hat SEO tactics it is very important, that you measure the risk and reward of each strategy, and determine for yourself, if some of these Gray Hat SEO strategies makes sense for your websites.

But it is important that you never take too big a risk with your most valuable websites, and here it is much more valuable, that you make a more safe and long term SEO strategy for these websites.


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Friday, May 30, 2008

How To make the Online Business Successful?

Everyday lots of shopping carts are developed in IT companies. As we know that there is a great trend of online shopping from web so there is a very tuff competition in Online Business Market so getting maximum online business from web is a demanding job. For example, if you make a search in google for any product than Google will give you lots of sites which are selling that product online.

The main purpose of Online Shopping Cart is to get the maximum business from web. So while creating any Online Shopping cart, there are some areas which should be keep in mind to make the Online Business Successful otherwise you will not be able to get the maximum online business from your website.

  • Market research
  • Select the Product
  • Check the profitability of that product in the Online Market
  • Check the requirement of that product in the Online Market
  • Check the competition of that product in the Online Market
  • what strategies the competitors are using to sell their hot products And also what is their price
  • Make the strategy from which you can stay unique in your competition market
  • This strategy should be different from the competitors and if you want to follow that strategy than you have to use that strategy with some extra ideas.
  • Finalize the Product
  • Deep Keyword Research for Your Products
  • Web Site Development (Keep On Page Optimization Factors and Search Engine Algo factors in mind while developing the website)
  • Unique Content
  • SEO, SEM, PPC, Online Marketing
If all the above steps are properly performed than you can make your online business successful.

SEO or PPC :

Selecting SEO or PPC will be depend on you because SEO is a natural process of getting the top search engine rankings and PPC is the paid process . So it will be depend on your budget.

So to make the online business successful, SEO or PPC is the major factor.

You will not gain or maintain high rankings unless the search engines understand the theme of your website as determined by the LSI algorithm and other important on and off page factors.

It will survive because it provides value to the search engines, the search engine users and the Internet community at large.

This exchange is a win for the search engines, a win for your website visitors and a win for you. The search engines get the genuine, relevant content that they need from you. Your website visitor gets the genuine, relevant content that they seek. You get rewarded by the search engines with traffic that turns into dollars from your visitor.

"It is a Win, Win, Win scenario and is the true and everlasting WWW of the Internet."

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SEO Glossary

301 - A server response code, meaning "page has been permanently moved to x" A 301 redirect is commonly used to redirect sites or individual pages in cases where a domain or page name is changed and is usually the preferred method of redirection by search engines.

302 - A server response meaning, "Page has temporarily moved form this location".

Anchor Text - The visible text component of a hyperlink.

Alexa ranking - Alexa is a famous search engine that provides extra information such as traffic rankings. An Alexa ranking is an indicator used to gauge site performance.

ALT Image tag - Spiders cannot able to read images as such, so the alt tag or text attribute describes what the specific image represents.

Above the Fold - The part of a Web page that is visible once the page has loaded. It is normally the top part of a Web page. This term comes from the newspaper industry and refers to the top half of the front page, which is visible when the newspaper is folded in half.

Algorithm - A set of mathematical equations or rules that a search engine uses to rank the content contained within its index in response to a particular search query.

Analytics - Technology that helps analyze the performance of a website or online marketing campaign.

Associate - A synonym for “affiliate.”

Auto-Approve - An affiliate application approval process where all applicants are automatically approved for an affiliate program.

Auto-Responder - An email feature that automatically sends an email reply to anyone who sends it a message.

Black hat - A person engaged in or tactic used to increase search engine rankings using methods prohibited by search engines.

Banner Ad - An electronic billboard or ad in the form of a graphic image that comes in many sizes and resides on a Web page. Banner ad space is sold to advertisers to earn revenue for the website.

Benchmark Report - A report used to market where a website falls on a search engine’s results page for a list of key words. Subsequent search engine position reporters are compared to that.

Blog - A chronological journal that is available on the Web. Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.

Blogosphere or Blogsphere - The current state of all information available on blogs and/or the subculture of those who create and use blogs.

Browser - A client software program such as Internet Explorer, Netscape or Opera that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.

Bot - Used in reference to a search engine robot or spider; software applications that retrieve web page information to feed into a search engine database.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. Used mainly to decrease the amount of source code on a page, by referencing a single set of instructions on how to display various elements on web page.

Crawl - The process by which search engine spiders fetch web page information.

Click and Bye - The process in which an affiliate loses a visitor to the merchant's site once they click on a merchant's banner or text link.

Click Fraud - The deceitful practice of posing as pay-per-click (PPC) traffic for the purpose of costing advertisers’ money or helping to generate false revenue by those affiliates serving the ads.

Click Through - The process of activating a link, usually on an online advertisement connecting to the advertiser’s website or landing page.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) - The percentage of those clicking on a link out of the total number who see the link. For example: if 20 people do a Web search and 10 of the 20 people all choose one particular link, that links has a 50 percent click-through rate.

Client - A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of server programs and each server requires a specific kind of client. A Web browser is a specific kind of client.

Cloaking - A deceptive process that sends search engine spiders to alternative pages that are not seen by the end user. Also the process of getting a search engine to record content for a URL that is different from what the visitor sees. It is often done as a way to obtain more favorable search positions.

Co-branding - The situation where affiliates include their own logo and branding on the pages to which they send visitors through affiliate links.

Collaborative Commerce Networks - An organization of merchants and websites that work together as true business partners. Merchants give their affiliates the same support that manufacturers would give to their resellers.

Commission - The income an affiliate receives for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant's website. Sometimes it is called a “referral fee,” a “finder's fee” or a “bounty.”

Context-centric - The process of matching your product or service offer closely to the visitors of an affiliate's site. By placing the product or service in an area close to related or relevant item, more people will buy.

Contextual Link - The integration of affiliates links with related text.

Contextual Merchandising - The act of placing targeted products near relevant content.

Conversion Rate - The percentage of clicks that result in a commissionable activity such as a sale or lead.

Conversion Reporting - A measurement for tracking conversions and lead generation from search engines queries. It identifies the originating search engine, keywords, specific landing pages entered and the related conversion for each.

Cookies - Small files stored on the visitor's computer that record information of interest to the merchant site. With affiliate programs, cookies have two primary functions: to keep track of what a customer purchases and to track which affiliate was responsible for generating the sale and is due a commission.

Cost Per Acquisition - Online advertising ROI model in which return is based solely on qualifying actions such as sales and registrations as measured against the marketing costs associated with that sale or registration.

Cost Per Action (CPA) - The cost metric for each time a commissionable action takes place.

Cost Per Click (CPC) - The cost metric for each click to an advertising link.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) - The cost metric for one thousand banner advertising impressions.

Cost Per Order (CPO) - The cost metric for each time an order is transacted.

Crawler - Component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically trolling the Web and following inks to Web pages (also called a spider or robot or bot). It makes copies of the Web pages found and stores them in the search engine’s index.

Customer Bounty - The merchant payment to an affiliate partner for every new customer that they direct to a merchant.

Charge Back - An incomplete sales transaction (for example: merchandise is purchased and then returned) that results in an affiliate commission deduction.

DMOZ - Directory MOZilla is a human reviewed directory, the contents of which appear on many sites, including Google. A listing in DMOZ said to assist boosting rankings in general search results.

Doorway Page - A page used for driving traffic form any page to another specific page and usually focusing on specific keywords. Generally, doorway pages are designed for search engines only, human visitors never see them - consequently, they are illegal one. Doorway pages must not be confused with landing pages, a legitimate strategy.

Dupe/Duplicate content - Usually used in reference to a penalty applied by a search engine for the same content appearing on different pages/sites.

Deep Linking - Linking to a Web page other than a site's home page.

Delisting - When Web pages are removed from a search engine’s index.

Directories - A type of search engine where listings are gathered via human efforts rather than by automated crawling of the Web.

Email Link - An affiliate link to a merchant site in an email newsletter, signature or a dedicated email blast.

Email Marketing - The promotion of products or services via electronic mail.

Email Signature (Sig File) - The signature option allows for a brief message to be automatically inserted at the end of every email that a person sends.

eZine - The short term for an electronic magazine, which can be electronic versions of existing print magazines or exist only in digital format.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) - A document that answers the most common questions on a particular subject.

FFA - Free For All pages; basically a link farm. You add your site link to the page, it then gets pushed down as other links are added until your link is ultimately pushed off the page. Not a standard method of promotion or link building.

Flux - A term describes the shuffling of positions in search engine results in between major updates.

G - Google, also known as The Big G or The Mighty G.

Gateway Page - A Web page created in hopes of ranking well for a term in a search engine’s non-paid listings. Sometimes called a “doorway page.”

Geographical Targeting - The analytical process of deciding upon which regions and locales a company should focus its marketing efforts.

Geographical Segmentation - The ability to determine from which geographical area Web traffic is coming.

Graphical Search Inventory - Banners and other advertising units that can be synchronized to search keywords.

Google Algorithm - A mathematical formula used in calculating search engine ranking. The goal of any SEOP is to understand the algorithm as best as possible. Algorithms of course are very closely guarded secrets and possibly you’ll never meet anyone who has "cracked" an algorithm. Search engine algorithms change regularly to prevent anyone from guessing the system.

Grey bar - A Google PR score that can indicate a ban in place on the page currently being viewed; i.e. the page does not appear in Google search results.

Grey hat - Optimization strategies that are in a unknown area of reputability/validity.

Hidden Text - The deceptive process of filling Web pages with keywords that are not visible to visitors but will still be indexed by search engines to help achieve higher rankings.

Hit - Request from a Web server for a graphic or other element to be displayed on a Web page.

HTML Code - The code used to build Web pages. Affiliates use HTML code to put links on their websites. Affiliate solution providers often provide a tool so that affiliates can simply copy the code for an affiliate link and paste it into their own HTML pages.

Hybrid Model - An affiliate commission model that combines payment options (i.e., CPC and CPA).

IBL - Inbound Link. Links pointing from another site into your site.

Impression - An advertising metric that indicates how many times an advertising link is displayed.

Index - The collection of information a search engine has that can be queried against.

In-house - An alternative to using an affiliate solution provider; building an affiliate program architecture within a company.

Interactive Agency - An agency offering a mix of Web design and development, Internet advertising and online marketing, or e-business/e-commerce consulting.

Interstitial - An advertisement that loads between two content pages.

KDA - Keyword Density Analyzer or Analysis. The ratio of keywords or keyphrases in relation to other text on a page.

Keyword/Keyphrase - A word or words that strongly relate to a page/site topic or search engine query.

Keyword Marketing - A method of getting your message in front of people who are searching using particular words or terms.

Keyword Stuffing - Where a keyword or phrase is used excessively in page content or alt tags in an attempt to gain higher rankings. Can result in page penalties or bans.

Landing pages - Pages that are optimized and very targeted towards a particular subject. An effective/valid site optimization and sales conversion strategy.

Lifetime Value of a Customer - The amount of sales in dollars that a customer will spend with a particular company over their lifetime.

Listing - The information that appears on a search engine’s results page in response to a search.

Link Farms - Pages that consists of little else but links to other sites and usually the sites listed have links back to the farm page. The goal of a link farm is to artificially boost rankings through link popularity and is consequently at risk of penalty or ban.

Link popularity - A gauge of a site's popularity based on the number of inbound links. Link popularity is a major factor in search engine ranking and has greater strength (in theory) where inbound links are from other quality sites.

Manual Approval - An affiliate application approval process where all applicants are manually approved for an affiliate program.

Merchant - An online business that markets and sells goods or services. Merchants establish affiliate programs as a cost-effective method to get consumers to purchase a product, register for a service, fill out a form or visit a website.

Mini-site - A prefabricated HTML page for affiliates that displays new or specialized products with integrated affiliate links.

Meta tag - These mainly refer to the title, keywords and description tags. They are summary of the content that is on the page in different formats. Metatags content does play a role in rankings for many search engines.

MSN - A reference to Microsoft's search engine.

Mirror Site - A copy of a site with some content differences to target particular keywords. Not a recommended strategy as it can trigger a penalty or ban.

OBL - Outbound Link. A link pointing from your site to another site.

ODP - Open Directory Project - DMOZ

Off-page factors - Factors such as inbound links and the popularity of sites with links pointing into your site that you have little control over, but that still play a role in your site’s rankings.

On-page factors - A reference to the elements on your site and their role in your rankings, for example, Meta Tags, Code Cleaning relevance etc.

OOP - Over Optimization Penalty. Where a search engine algorithm detects that changes you are making to a page or the way the page is constructed is to influence rankings over being useful to a site visitor.

Organic search results - the results displayed after a search engine query that are not paid for by the listed site's owner.

P2P - Pay To Play. Any search engine marketing strategy that requires payment to the search engine company.

Paid Inclusion - Advertising program where pages are guaranteed to be included in search engine’s index in exchange for payment.

Paid Listings - Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion.

Paid Placement - Advertising program where listings are guaranteed to appear in response to a particular search term with high ranking, typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers. This is most often done in an auction or bidding environment.

Payment Threshold - The minimum accumulated commission an affiliate must earn to trigger payment from an affiliate program.

Pay Per Click - A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each click (visitor) they refer to a merchant's website. Pay-per-click programs generally offer some of the lowest commissions (from 1 cent to 25 cents per click), and a very high conversion ratio since visitors need only click on a link to earn the affiliate a commission.

Pay Per Lead - A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sales lead that they generate for a merchant website. Examples would include completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries, downloaded software demos, or free trials. Pay-per-lead generally offers midrange commissions and midrange to high conversion ratios.

Pay Per Sale - A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant's website. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions and the lowest conversion ratio.

Podcasting - A form of audio broadcasting using the Internet. Podcasting, which does not require the use of an Apple iPod, involves making one or more audio files available as "enclosures" in an RSS feed, which can be played back by the RSS subscriber at their convenience on an MP3 device.

Pop-Up Ad - An advertisement that displays in a new browser window.

Portal - A website that typically includes a catalog of websites, a search engine or both. A portal site may also offer email and other services to entice people to use that site as their main point of entry to the Web.

Position - How well a particular Web page or website is listed in a search engine’s results. Positions 1 through 10 are the most visible and the most desirable.

Pagejacking - the copying of a page by unauthorized parties in order to filter off traffic to another site.

PFI - Pay For Inclusion. Payment paid to a search engine company for inclusion in search results.

PPCSE - Pay Per Click Search Engine.

PR / PageRank™ - A ranking used by Google that is meant to act as indication of the quality of a site and its authority status.

PR 0 / PageRank Zero - Another term relating to Google PageRank. It can indicate that a page has been spidered but appearing in general results as yet, or could also possibly indicate a penalty.

Query - The word (or words) a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box.

Rank - How well a particular Web page or website is listed in a search engine’s results.

Residual Earnings - The programs that pay affiliates not just for the first sale made by a shopper from their sites, but all additional sales made at the merchant's site over the life of the customer.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feed - A data format for syndicating news and other content. People can subscribe to RSS feeds so they will be notified every time content is updated on a particular site.

Reciprocal link - An agreement between two sites to exchange links between them. Sites exchanging links can risk a penalty or ban if they are not related topic with each other.

ROAD / ROI - Return on Advertising Dollar, or Return on Investment. The measure of effective of expenditure vs. the number of visitors received or sales.

Search Engine Optimization - The act of altering a website so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. The process usually involves choosing targeted and relevant keywords and phrases that will drive traffic to the site.

Server - A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running. For example, "Our mail server is down today, that’s why email isn’t getting out." A single server machine could have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different servers to clients on the network.

Spam (or Spamming) - The electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings, generally email advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

Spyware - A somewhat vague term generally referring to deceitful software that is secretly installed on a user’s computer and that monitors use of the computer in some way without the user’s knowledge or consent. Most spyware tries to get the user to view advertising and/or particular Web pages. Some spyware also sends information about the user to another machine over the Internet.

Storefront - A prefabricated HTML page for affiliates that displays new or specialized products with integrated affiliate links.

Super Affiliates - The top 1 percent of affiliates, based on performance and earnings, that generate the lion's share of the revenue for your program. They are born marketers and are very successful with the affiliate program they promote from their sites.

SE - Search engine

SEM - Search Engine Marketer/Marketing

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEOP - Search Engine Optimization Professional. Someone who claims to have the skills to increase a clients' search engine rankings.

SEP - Seach Engine Placement (or Positioning/Promotion)

SERPs - Search Engine Results Pages. The pages that display after a query is submitted.

Spamming the index - Related to black hat optimization techniques. Pages that have high ranking but are non-relevant or exist purely to redirect traffic to other sites.

Spider - A software program used by search engine companies to visit web sites and return information about pages.

Stop words - Common non-query specific words that are ignored by a search engine when a query is made. These can include words such as “I”, “and”, “if” depending on how the query is constructed.

Submission - The process by which a search engine is manually notified of a new site or page.

Targeted Marketing - The act of making the right offers to the right customers at the right time.

Text Link - A link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.

Tracking Method - The way that a program tracks referred sales, leads or clicks. The most common are by using a unique Web address (URL) for each affiliate, or by embedding an affiliate ID number into the link that is processed by the merchant's software. Some programs also use cookies for tracking.

Two-tier - An affiliate marketing model that allows affiliates to sign up additional affiliates below themselves, so that when the second-tier affiliates earn a commission, the affiliate above them also receives a commission. Two-tier affiliate marketing is also known as multilevel marketing, or MLM.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator. The web address of a site or page.

Viral Marketing - The rapid adoption of a product or passing on of an offer to friends and family through word-of-mouth (or word-of-email) networks. Any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do.

Visitor Segmentation - Differentiating users to a site by categories such as age, sex, etc.

White hat - legitimate optimization techniques employed that are agreeable to search engine companies, such as the proper use of meta-tags, an adequate keyword saturation and spider friendly page design.

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Thursday, May 29, 2008

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Introduction to SEO

  • “SEO is a process of optimizing a web site by improving on site and off site aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.”

Ethical SEO – Based on experience and evidence rather than theory.”

  • SEO is a process through which we can achieve the natural or organic results of the website in Search Engine Results Pages – SERPs. Some organizations, which practice SEO, can vary; some have a highly specialized focus while others take a broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique factors that many professional of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization.
  • SEO will make the site search engine friendly so that our potential clients to find us more easily when surfing the web.
  • SEO is also called natural or organic results because we don’t have to pay to search engine to get the listed in search engine database and to achieve the high rankings on the desired keywords.


Why company or website need SEO?

  • As we know very well that nowadays there is a trend of online shopping because people don’t have enough time to go physically at the place so they are making the shopping from the Internet or by online so it will save the lots of time.
  • The major traffic (visitors) on the web site is coming from a well-known Search Engines - Yahoo, MSN, and Google. Although AOL gets nearly 5.9% of searches, their search engine is powered by Google's results). Now if your site will not be submitted in the search engine’s database than it will not be found by search engine so when people will use the search engine they cant find your site whether your site is providing best content, products and services .so that your company can miss the invaluable chance available to your website through search engine so search engines are a basic method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

  • Once your site will be stored in the Search Engine’s database after the site must be optimized for the search engine to achieve the rankings on the desired Keywords.
  • Site can be optimized for search engine through mainly two factors that are given below.
  • There are mainly two optimization factors to optimize the site for the search engine.

· On Page Optimization factors

· Off Page Optimization factors

  • We can see from many experiences that the traffic, which is coming from the search engine traffic, can make company's success. Company can create the traffic of targeted visitors from search engine so if you will invest in SEO by time or finance, it will give high ROI. If any company, organization or site will not give the more emphasis on SEO than they can loose their 50 to 60% online business.
Why your site can’t get high rankings in search engine without SEO help?

  • When you submit your site into search engine database so that will be stored in their database but nowadays the online business is becoming very competitive day by day so there will be lots of site in search engine’s database which will be related to your site. So how your site can get high rankings??
  • Search engines are using Algorithm (mathematical equations) for giving the ranking priority to the web sites. However, there will always be a limit that how search engines are working so right step can create great traffic of visitors at your site and the wrong step can down your rankings in search results.
Search Engine Algorithm

Every search engines have their own method to give the rankings to the website in search engine results pages (SERPs). This method is called Algorithm. Search engine algorithm is based on mathematical equations. Every search engines have their own algorithm. No body knows the search engine algorithm but based on some experience and results, SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) know some factors of search engine algorithm. Based on experience, they can achieve the high rankings of web site on desired keywords.

Search engines are changing their algorithm at some time (Not fixed) so nobody can stay permanent with existing factors and knowledge in SEO market. Based on experience and results, professional SEOs can stay update with the search engine algorithm update.

Nowadays there is a vast opportunity for small and medium size companies and organizations to make their online business successful with the help of SEO.

How the Search Engine Works??

Search engines are doing certain operations that allow them to provide relevant and unique web results when people (searchers) use their system to find the information.

  • Crawling the website
When the site is submitted into the search engine database, search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "Spiders" that use the hyperlink structure of the web to "crawl" the pages that make up the World Wide Web. There is some estimation like from 20 billion existing pages Search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion.
  • Indexing pages
Once search engine crawled the link, that link page contents can be "indexed" and stored in a giant database of pages that makes up a search engine's "index". This index pages needs to be tightly and strongly managed so that when the requests will be searched by the searcher, search engine sorts billions of documents can be completed in fractions of a second.
  • Processing the queries/requests
When the searcher will request or search for information, the search engine retrieves all the pages from its indexed pages that match the request. A request is determined if the search or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user. For example, a search for software design and development at Google returns 42.40 million results, but a search for the same phrase in quotes ("software design and development") returns only 3.13 lacs results. In the first request, commonly called "Findall" mode, Google returned all pages which had the terms "software" "design" and "development" (they ignore the term "and" because it's not useful to narrowing the results), while in the second search (request), only those pages with the exact phrase "software design and development" were returned
  • Ranking results of the website
Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the search engine's algorithm runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query (request). They sort these on the results pages (SERPs) in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select. Again the basic things will back here, search engine will display the results or it will give the priority to web site based on page and off page factors


Search engine's operations are not lengthy but systems like Google, Yahoo and MSN are among the most complex, processing-intensive computer systems in the world. Their system is managing millions of calculations each second and funneling demands for information to an enormous group of users.
  • Relevance
When the user will search to get some information at that time search engine will check the relevance factor in the content of the page. How much the content is related to the user’s query intention and terms? The relevance of the page increases if the request searched by the user occurs multiple times in the content and shows up in the title of the page or in important headings and subheadings.
  • Popularity
If your page is related to the search query than it will be relevance so it will be popular because other pages can give the reference of that page. In page analysis, search engines look at whether the search phrases are found in important areas of the content in page - the title, the Meta data, the heading tags and the body of text content. They also try to automatically measure the quality of the page (through algorithm).
  • Duplicate Content
One of the most common and problematic issues for website builders, particularly those with larger, dynamic sites powered by databases, is the issue of duplicate content. Search engines are primarily interested in unique content. If you have duplicate content in your site, than it can be hurt your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Building a Site Search Engine Friendly

One of the most important (and often overlooked) subjects in SEO is building a site, which must be search engine friendly and user friendly to get the top rankings in search engine. Search engine’s goals are to rank the best, most usable, functional and informative sites first. By intertwining your site's content and performance with these goals, you can help to ensure its long-term prospects in the search engine rankings.

  • Usability
Usability means the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment. In related to a Website, Usability is the user experience in navigating an interface, locating information, and obtaining knowledge over the Internet. Not really making sure about everything on the site works, but making sure how quickly and easily your visitors are able to reach the goal.

  • Design
The graphical elements and layout of website have a strong influence on how easily usable the site is. Design also encompasses important topics like visibility & contrast, affecting how easy it is for users to interest the text and image elements of the site. Separations of unique sections like navigation, advertising, content, and search bars, etc. is also critical, as users follow design cues to help them understand a page's content.

  • Information Architecture
Information architecture focuses on designing effective navigation, organization, labeling, and search systems. The role of the information architect is crucial to the planning and conceptual design/redesign stages of web development, as good information architecture lays the foundation upon which a website is built. Topics and categorization impact the ease with which a user can find the information they need on your site.
  • Why need Informational Architecture?
Users can feel lost even in a relatively small information space that is not well organized. The problem becomes even greater when you consider the possibility that people can arrive at any given web page from any other page on the web. They may not always enter your site from your home page.
  • Solution
Arriving in the middle of a site through a search engine is the equivalent of waking up in an unknown station. So use your navigation and category structure to tell your visitors where they've arrived. The best way is to use the breadcrumb trail, and also to change the color of the current section in any navigation bar that covers your main sections.

  • Navigation
  1. Be easy to learn.
  2. Provide feedback.
  3. Be consistent throughout the website.
  4. Use the minimum number of clicks to arrive at the next destination.
  5. Use clear and intuitive labels.
  6. Support user tasks.
  7. Have each link be distinct from other links.
  8. Group navigation into logical units.
  9. Avoid making the user scroll to get to important navigation or submit buttons.
  10. Not disable the browser's back button.
  • Accessibility

“Users need to find information quickly and easily”

Accessibility refers primarily to the technical ability of users to access and move through your site, as well as the ability of the site to serve disabled or impaired users.

For SEO purposes, the most important aspects are limiting code errors to a minimum and fixing broken links, making sure that content is accessible and visible in all browsers and without special actions.

  • Content
The usability of content itself is often overlooked, but its importance cannot be overstated. The descriptive nature of headlines, the accuracy of information and the quality of content all factor highly into a site's likelihood to retain visitors and gain search engine rankings.


SEO Benefits:
  • Targeted and potential traffic
  • Visibility in the international market
  • High ROI (Return On Investment)
  • Higher Sales
  • Cost-effective
Conclusion: Implementing an SEO Strategy

The process of SEO is a long term or never ending process because so many pieces of a site factor into the final results.

Patience is not the only virtue that should be used for successful SEO”

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SEO - On Page Optimization Factors

Introduction to On-Page Optimization Factors:

On Page Optimization Factors:

Keywords:

Keywords are very important factor of On Page Optimization. People are using the phrase of request to get the information about the site that phrase or request is called the keyword.

If you want to build a new site than first of all you have to make some keyword research related to your site. From keyword research, you can get the related keywords for your site, which are used to search by the visitors. You can make keyword research and select the keywords by the following steps.

  • Brainstorming
Brainstorming means you have to identify your customer's mind that means what keywords they are searching in the search engine to find the information/products/services your site offers.
  • Customer Survey
You can make the survey from the past and potential customers about the keywords. It may also increase your keywords list and it may give you potential keywords. It can increase your conversion ratio from searcher to visitors.
  • Keyword Research Tools
There are many keyword research tools, which are available for free on Internet. There are well known tools which are used for keyword research is Wordtracker (It uses its own database) and Overture (It uses the database of Yahoo). In keyword research tool, you have to just enter the main keyword of your site and that tool will return all the keywords related to entered keyword that means related to you site. It will also give the competition of every keyword. For example, if you have online pizza store than “pizza” will be your main keyword. So when you enter the keyword pizza into the keyword research tool, it will give all the related keywords of pizza.
  • Keyword Selection
You can get the keywords list from the keyword research tool so after that you have to select the right keywords from that list. You can select the right keywords by many intelligent process like which keyword will give you high conversion rate, expected traffic. You can also target the right keywords from the competition of the keywords.
  • Finalize the keywords and implement the keywords
After passing from all intelligent process of keyword selection, you can get a list of selected keywords. When you get a list of keywords than you have to implement those keywords in the site. That means based on that keywords, you can write the best and unique content for your site. So that content will become search engine friendly.

By Targeting right keywords, your site may get higher rankings in search engine results pages. Also by targeting wrong keywords, your site may never seen in the search engine results pages.

Title:

Title another important factor of On Page Optimization. Title means summary of a page. It should contain all the major keywords of that page. Title should be very specific and unique because it will be displayed at the search engine results pages so from title any visitor should get the idea about the page and about the web site. Title should be like it must attract the visitors to click on that title and to visit your site. Because you have to represent your whole site to the visitors in only one title.

There are some important points or terms which should be maintain in the title.

  • Title of every page in the site should be unique.
  • All the main keywords of the page should be used in that page title.
  • There should not be a keyword stuffing in the title. Like any keyword should not be repeated in the title. Every keyword should be unique in the title.
  • Google is displaying the title of only 64 characters in the search engine results pages. If you have title which is more than 64 characters than Google will display only first 64 characters. So try to keep the title of 64 characters if possible but the normal title should not be more than 90 keywords.
  • Stopping words like “and” ”but” should not be used in the title because it will waste the space of the title. You can separate the keywords in title by using “|” (Pipe Sign),”-”(dash), “:” so it will separate your keywords and also it will not waste the space of the title.
  • Every first character of the keyword should be capital in the title.
  • Every title should be related to that particular page.
Search Engines are giving more priority to the title so it should be maintained to get listed higher in the search engine results pages.

Meta Description :

Meta description will be displayed at the search engine results pages under the title. So description is also one of the factors of on page optimization.

There are some points which should be keep in mind while making a description of the page.

  • Description should be unique of every page.
  • Description should contain the main keywords of that page or title 2 or 3 times but in natural way.
  • Description should not be more than 3 lines.
  • You have to mention about your whole site in just 3 lines of description so it may attract the visitors to visit your website.
  • In description you should include such a things that will satisfy the visitor’s requirements. And it may make higher your visitor conversion ratio.
  • Description should be like call to action. That means it must enforce the visitors to visit the site. Call to action words like “Buy Now”, ”Visit Now”,” Call Now”.

Alt tag :

Alt tag means Alternative. Google and other search engine's spiders can not read the images in the site. They can only read the coding of the site. So alt tag should be used on the images.

The main benefits of alt tag are:

  • It makes site accessible to the visually disabled and search engines.
  • Alt tag should be related to the image.
  • You can use your main keyword as an alt tag so that it will indicate to search engine about the keywords of your site.
  • It will Helpful for people who view pages in text-only mode. They can see there what is the image is about. The alt tag describing an image that appears when the mouse is rolled over the image on a Web page.
Content

Content is the major factor of on page optimization. Relevancy should be maintained in the content. All the major keywords are used frequently in the content in a natural way. All the main keywords should be highlighted by making them bold, italic or underline. By highlighting the keywords, we will indicate to search engine about the keywords. Content must be unique it should not be duplicate otherwise it will hurt your search engine rankings.

All the major search engines like Goggle, Yahoo and MSN gives more emphasis on the content. If you have good keyword list, best title contains the main keywords and the unique content based on the selected keywords than your site may get the top rankings in the search engine.


Keyword Density

Keyword density means how many times your keywords are repeating in the content in a natural way. So when the spiders will come on our site to crawl, they can find the keywords easily that is searched by the user in search engine. Some times people are doing keyword stuffing to maintain the keyword density but it will be bad for the search engine. If you have 100 words in one paragraph and if 4 words from 100 words are your main keyword than it is called 4% keyword density. Generally 5 to 6% keyword density should be maintained in the content.

Headings (H1 to H6 tags)

Our main keywords should be used as a Heading. So that it will be very useful for search engine and visitors of the site. You can use the HTML Tags H1 to H6 to make the headings in the content. H1 can be used for main heading and main keyword and than h2 to h6 tags are used for subheadings and other useful keywords. By headings you can indicate the search engine and your visitors about the keywords.

Navigational Links

Navigational links are generally used at the top of the site so that user can go directly to the desired page. If your site has lengthy content than user will go at the bottom while reading the content. So when the user will reach at the bottom and if user wants to go directly to other pages than user must have to scroll up to reach at the navigational links. So it is better to keep all the navigational links at the bottom (footer) of the page. So it will be user friendly and also search engine friendly.

Sitemap

Sitemap is very useful for visitors and search engines both. Because visitor can reach at any page of the site within two clicks. Sitemap should be at the top of site so when visitor will come, he can go directly at the sitemap and from sitemap visitor can go directly at any page of the site.

It is also helpful to search engine because when spiders will crawl that sitemap link at that time it will crawl all the pages of our site. So it can be also useful to your site.

Google Sitemap

The above sitemap was general for visitors and all the search engines. You can also create a sitemap for Google. Google sitemap is created in XML. If you have google sitemap in your site than google can easily crawl all the internal page links of your site. You can use the online tools that can create a XML based sitemap for google. When the sitemap is created for google, sitemap.xml name should be given to that file. After that you can upload that file into your web server.

Robots.txt

When you don't want to crawl some files or images by search engine spiders than you can create robots.txt file and in that file you can mention the files, images which you don't want to crawl by the search engine spiders.

You can create robots.txt file in the simple notepad. Write the coding and save that file as a name of robots.txt and than upload that file into your web server or in the public.html folder of your FTP.

If you want to crawl all the pages of your site than you can simply write the file.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

And if you don't want crawl some files or images to spiders than you can creat a file like :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /file name/

What Search Engine doesn’t like?

There are some programming side factors that you should keep in mind while developing the web site for SEO purpose.

  • Frame
If your site is built on a frames based architecture you will need to consider a redesign because when Search engine's spiders find a frame based website they will see a few meta tags and title but no content. That is why your frame based website will never make it to the top of the results pages even with the latest techniques used for search engine optimization.

  • JavaScript
JavaScript is a wonderful technology, but it's invisible to the entire search engines. If you use JavaScript to control your site's navigation, spiders may have serious problems crawling your site. That's especially true if your scriptbuilds links by combining several script variables into a fully formed URL. It is best to avoid JavaScript navigation.
  • Dynamic URL
If you have a database-driven site that uses server-side technologies such as ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion, or JSP, there's a good chance your URLs include a Query strings. For example, you might have a URL like this one:


http://www.nameofsite.com/catalog.asp? item=320&category=23


That's a problem, because many search engine spiders won't follow links that include a query string. Why? Most search engines have made a conscious design decision not to follow query string links because they require additional record keeping by the spider. Spiders a keep list of all the pages they've crawled, and try to avoid indexing the same page in a single crawl. They do this by comparing all new URLs to the list of URLs they've already seen.

Some spiders, such as Googlebot, will handle URLs with a limited number of name/value pairs in the query string. Other spiders will ignore all URLs containing query strings.

If you have dynamic URLs in your site than you can convert that url to static html url so that spiders can crawl that pages. Data will come from the database just url will become the static one.

  • Flash

Flash is cool, in fact it's much cooler than HTML. It's dynamic and cutting edge but spiders simply can't interpret newer technologies, such as Flash.

So even though that Flash animation may amaze your visitors, it's invisible to the search engines. If you're using Flash to add a bit of spice to your site, but most of your pages are written in standard HTML, this shouldn't be a problem.

But if you've created your entire site using Flash, you've got a serious problem getting your site into the engines.

Conclusion:

On page optimization factors should be optimized in site for search engine to achieve the high rankings and high ROI of your Online Business.

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