Archive for January, 2007
First and foremost I would like to wish everyone a very Happy New Year!
As we enter into the year 2007 I launch a new blog dedicated to search engine optimization and search engine marketing… yes that’s right, day one of 2007 and I am one of those few dedicated web masters sat at their keyboards working on New Years Day.
Well actually I have been planning the launch of the new blog for several weeks, but as I wrap everything up and prepare for launch I still find myself looking of ways to improve the web site.
But for now… I launch, I hope you enjoy the content!
For a website to rank high with the search engines, it must employ some fundamental techniques. The 3 most basic SEO techniques are discussed here (in brief): Read more… »
There are several terms that are related to search engine marketing very closely. For someone who is not very close to the world of Internet marketing, these terms might seem like a riddle. Read more… »
In today’s world of e-commerce and online marketing, search engines play a vital role in determining your website’s success or failure. As such, a high ranking website is always at an advantage to a lower ranking website. There are many reasons why you need search engine optimization for your website. Read more… »
In general all of the methods or tactics of carrying out search engine optimization can be categorized under two names. They are “white hat” and “black hat”.
White Hat - All the methods and tactics of carrying out search engine optimization are regarded as “white hat” if they are in accordance with the guidelines of the search engines and do not include any deception or trickery. It is important to note, as the guidelines on any search engine are not written anywhere in the form of rules or commands. Apart from conforming to the guidelines, using “white hat” methods also means that the content which is indexed and ranked by the search engine is exactly same to what a user will see when they visit the same web page. Read more… »
Linking to other sites is important for enhancing your website’s search engine ranking and to bring more traffic to your website; thereby generating more business for you. But linking with irrelevant and blacklisted sites can backfire and your website too might get black listed and or penalized by the search engines (something which you will not want for sure). Moreover, you will lose genuine visitors if you provide links to such irrelevant / nuisance websites on your own website. In general it will bring down the quality of your website.
Trading links with blacklisted sites should be avoided. Websites which deal with multiple sites under the same identity, websites that contain pornographic material, racist websites, illegal or illicit websites that are involved in harassment / stalking / fraud, and websites that plagiarize / copy content etc from other websites can be easily identified. Such websites generally end up getting blacklisted with search engines and you should avoid them at all costs. If you have any links with such sites your website might get blacklisted too. Read more… »
Viral strategies include both marketing and advertising techniques that facilitate and encourage people to pass along a message to others, augmenting the potential and exponential growth of the targeted websites, brand, ideas or products.
There are various types of viral strategies, which can be applied to promote websites. Some of them are: pass-along message, rewards for passing a message, undercover advertising, using users’ database and existing resources, and providing free services for users. Let’s do a quick check to see if these viral strategies are actually useful in promoting websites; and if yes, then in what way: Read more… »
Many web masters regularly ask the question, what type of quick fixes they should make to their web site so that so that it gets a higher ranking in a particular search engine. Most of these people are those who have been optimizing their site on their own and never achieved any success. Here are some tips for people who are new in the field of SEO and also for people who have been doing such optimization for a long time. In order to implement the tips properly one should have knowledge of HTML and little bit of SEO knowledge would also be helpful. Read more… »
Pay-per-click (PPC):
This is one of the most popular options to market your website. Many people are using PPC for advertising their websites. This way of campaign works because users are shown relevant ads that match the context of the sites and products or services they are looking for. The PPC ads are useful for the users too and prompts them to visit the advertiser’s website.
Through this strategy, the advertisers get the targeted visitors at their site. But if you are going for this option, you need to plan well since most of the PPC ads are now based on bidding for keywords and you may not get expected returns if you have not selected the keywords carefully. Read more… »
PPC is a method through which you can promote almost anything on the Internet a cost per click basis. All you have to do is choose the product or service you want to advertise and a PPC advertising company. Many people regard PPC as the most efficient method to generate more and more traffic to their website. Nothing is different for the targeted customers browsing the Internet because they just have to click the advert which is basically a keyword or a keyword phrase and they are automatically redirected to your website. Read more… »
Since you would like to sell your product or services to the maximum potential customers, securing a high ranking for your website is very essential to increase traffic and visibility. Certain linking strategies are followed for securing high-ranking on search engines. Getting it wrong on linking strategy might prove costly to your business.
When we talk of linking, we are generally referring to reciprocal linking and one way linking. Reciprocal linking involves linking Site A to Site B and Site B linking back to Site A. One way linking on the other hand simply involves Site A linking to Site B. Read more… »
‘Impressions’ is a term that you would have quite commonly heard in the world of internet marketing. Let’s check what ‘impressions’ means and how people get confused with this term.
Impressions are classified as either page impressions or ad impressions. Here, by page impressions we imply web page impressions. A page impression is used to refer to the number of times a page is loaded in a user’s browser. Similarly, ad impressions are referred to the aggregate number of times ads are shown to a user.
In order to understand this better lets take an example. Consider a website that has 4 web pages. Whenever a particular web page is accessed (loaded) by a person who visits the website – 1 page impression is recorded. Since different webpages could have a different number of users visiting them, the page impressions for each of the webpages of the website could be different. Also, different webpages could be laid out differently and hence contain different numbers of ads. Read more… »
Search engine optimization or SEO can be considered both as a science and voodoo. The benefits which can be drawn from using SEO links entirely depend upon the way you have implemented them. The term SEO does not refer to ‘fooling the search engines’ rather it is an effective way to increase the traffic to your website.
Many people think that SEO is some sort of black magic or a secret code which is used by the web masters in their periodic conversations. However they are not aware of the fact that SEO is a technique and its proper implementation requires continuous monitoring and interaction with the website. In reality SEO is just one of the various marketing strategies available to web masters but it is a fundamental strategy. Read more… »
From time to time an SEO contest will be launched that we may place an entry for. This section of our blog will be where we record what we did and how we ranked in any competition that we enter.
You don’t know what an SEO contest is? Then read on…
The first english language contest was started in May 2004 by SearchGuild. The objective was to see who could rank highest for the search term ‘nigritude ultramarine’ in Google search engine.
The winner of the competition was the person who’s web site ranked first in the search engine on the 9th of June 2004 at 9am GMT for that particular search term. The prize on offer was an iPod and Flat Panel LCD Screen. Read more… »
The DirectoryContest.com was launched by Mike Dammann on the 6th of November 2006 with a view to finding the top 10 directories which are worth submitting to. It is not your normal run of the mill SEO contest with a variety of rules in place that are not usually seen with these types of contests. However, the rules are fair and necesarry to ensure that the competition winners are indeed directories which are worthy of submission. Read more… »
It is amazing to see how many people cannot stick to some basic rules when placing their entry into the Directory Contest. After paging through the Google results you can quickly see which sites have broken the rules and those that have not. The very fact that this contest has cash on offer has brought out all of the usual tricks and cheating methods.
We know full well that it is not worth cheating, not because we fear getting caught but because it is just plain wrong. The competition has rules for a reason, it also has a purpose, to find out which of the directories are actually worthwhile webmasters submitting to. I am very pleased that Mike Dammann has stated that before announcing who has won anything he will be checking each entry which is in with a shot of winning something to ensure they have not broken the rules. Read more… »
To be honest our chances of winning the competition are pretty slim. We only picked up on the DirectoryContest.com contest around the 10th of January which gave us only 28 days total to get our entry listed in Google. We spent the first day deciding whether or not we would actually enter, after that was decided we then spent the next 4 days formulating our strategy. So we are then left with just 23 days to get our entry ranked for the search term. Read more… »
You might have heard people talk about the number of ‘impressions’ they are getting for their website and how they plan to further bolster that number in order to earn more money from their website.
Yes, ‘impressions’ is indeed one of the most important terms in the Internet marketing arena. In one of my other articles, I have explained the term ‘impressions’ in great detail but here I will just stop with saying that ‘impressions’ is the number of times a page or an ad is loaded (known as page and ad impressions respectively). Also, since most web masters use on-line advertising programs like ‘AdSense’ on their website, we will orient our discussion more towards importance of impressions in such programs. Read more… »
Before we start our discussion on keywords, let me (for the benefit of those who don’t know it) define what we mean by ‘Keyword’ in the field of search engine optimization.
‘Keyword’ (in SEO terms) is used to define a word or a phrase (referred to as ‘Key phrase’ too) that relates very closely to the webpage in question. Keywords are the group of words and phrases that can clearly indicate the content of the webpage in question.
Every search engine (be it Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine) identifies each webpage through that webpage’s keywords. Keywords are used by these search engines to index webpages. So for each keyword or a group of keywords, the search engines prepare a mapping of relevant websites in their database. Whenever you make a search on a search engine, search engines try to look for the keywords in their database. Here, the keywords that the search engines look for are actually the words that you enter in the ‘search box’ of the search engine (the search engines generally ignore the words like is, it, the etc unless they form a key part of a key phrase). Read more… »
So far the DirectoryContest.com has attracted quite a large number of entries, today when searching for the term ‘directorycontest.com’ on the Google search engine it returned a total of 390,000 search results. There are a lot of people who want to get their hands on those prizes that’s for sure!
The current number 1 web site has been in the top 2 positions for the last few days, seemingly rotating with the main contest web site which is currently in 2nd place. Read more… »
Preparing the comprehensive list
Most people who run their own website would know the importance of keywords. Those who are not yet familiar with the importance of keywords can read one of the other articles in this section that talk about keywords and their importance.
So, now that we know that the use of proper keywords can do wonders, where (and how) do we find the ‘right keywords’ for our website?
The first step is to think of the audience for your products / services / website-content. In fact, it would be a good idea to sit down with a pen and paper while doing this exercise. Just keep jotting down the various sets of people who would be interested in your products / services etc. Read more… »
Pruning the comprehensive list to arrive at the best keywords
In part 1, you have seen how easily a comprehensive list of keywords can be prepared. However, this list is still quite big and needs some pruning down in order to be become usable.
If you have not done it already, you should format this comprehensive list in the form of a table containing the following columns – ‘Keyword/ Key Phrase’, ‘Number of searches’, ‘Priority’ and ‘Overall Rank’.
The next task is to assign a priority (on a scale of 1 to 3) to each of the keywords / key phrases in your comprehensive list. While assigning the priorities, you should hide the ‘number of searches’ column in order to avoid any kind of biasing in assignment of priorities. The priorities, of course, will be based on the relevance of each keyword to your website / products / services. Read more… »
We all know that keywords lay at the heart of search engine optimization strategies and hence identifying the right set of keywords is an important activity (and we have discussed this in detail in two other articles on keywords). But your job doesn’t end here; you have to now ensure that you use the keywords in the right way in order to get the maximum results from them.
Let’s start with looking at one of the most popular myths that are associated with the use of keywords – Many people think that stuffing their webpages with keywords will make their web pages more attractive to the search engines. However, this is not true. In fact, most search engines are intelligent enough to recognize keyword stuffing. The search engines either ignore such websites or black list them (remove them from their index). Read more… »
Well the Directory Contest is really hotting up now, Google has jumped up from 390,000 to 442,000 results since I last checked for the search term ‘directorycontest.com’ just five days ago.
The number one and two have swapped around yet again with this latest increase in results. The romow.com entry has dropped from 7th position into 10th while global-weblinks.com gains one place to move into that 7th spot. Finally linksarena.com jumps from 10th to 8th position. Read more… »
The Independant Search Engine and Directory Network (ISEDN) was launched in the first quarter of 2005 and since then has grown into what some would say is a serious alternative to the traditional pay per click systems available.
Unlike traditional PPC there is no cost per click involved which takes out all of the possibilities of click fraud. Instead you pay a fixed $12.00 (Can be even less if you bulk buy) for a three month listing based on the keyword of your choice. Read more… »
The DirectoryContest.com reached a massive milestone today, upon checking the search results Google is now showing 501,000, just 3 months after the competition first started and already the participants have created over half a million results.
With only 13 days remaining until the winner of the DirectoryContest.com is announced, a fair amount of movement has taken place amongst the top ten. There are still no new entries in the top ten, these ten seem to be jostling for position almost on a daily basis and no one else is able to break in. Read more… »
Ok, so here we are yet again discussing another trick that is based on the use of keywords. In this article we are going to discuss a keyword based trick that is usually overlooked by a lot of people.
You must have observed that a lot of people use sub titles or sub headings in their articles and web pages e.g. a website that sells insurance might have a web page that explains various insurance related terms to their readers / prospective-customers. Each of these terms might be used as a sub title or header followed by an explanation of what it means. Now, the general tendency is to use either style sheets or just use the <B> tag for sub-headers and sub-titles. A lot of times people forget that another wonderful category of tags (the header tags) also exist. However, these tags (H1 through to H5) should actually form an integral part of your SEO strategy. This strategy involves including a keyword or two in headings (within the header tags). Read more… »
Over the past couple of weeks Google has carried some updates with a back link export and an update to the Google Toolbar PR. Both of these updates have had an effect on the DirectoryContest.com most significantly in the past week.
On the 24th we posted up the DirectoryContest.com results with an all time high of over 501,000 results returned for the keyphrase “directorycontest.com”. Shortly thereafter the results took a bit of a nose dive. Read more… »
The DirectoryContest.com is still running strong and despite the recent spate of Google updates which have been applied in the past two weeks there still remains some stiff competition which refuses to budge from the top 10. However, someone has finally broken the top 10 jostling trend, today biz-dir.co.uk managed to break into the 10th position unseating web1directory.com and relegating them to the second page. Read more… »
You must have come across several websites that have repetitive content and websites that have keywords stuffed on their web pages (totally ignoring the advice on keyword density). Then there are websites which contain distasteful content and websites that have grammatically incorrect content that is full of spelling mistakes too.
None of this is going to help. People who think that they can fool search engines are in for a surprise since the search engines have grown really intelligent and they understand all of these gimmicks. Ok, so that is about the search engines. But poor quality content can be detrimental to the success of your search engine optimization strategy in more than one way. Read more… »
So without further ado we would like to show off our entry into the DirectoryContest.com
The contest is now into it’s final stages and today Google was reporting in the region of 515,000 – 519,000 results for the search term DirectoryContest.com
It has been a long slog for many entrants, for us only a couple of weeks and even we will be glad that it is now only 7 days until the winners are announced. Read more… »
We have already discussed how people get turned off by reading bad quality content. And on the other hand, good quality content can ensure cosistently good traffic to your website. Here we will take this discussion further and will see how the search engines get influenced by the quality of content.
One thing that you must avoid is repeating the content of a web page on your other web pages. Of course, copying content from other websites (without the permission of the copyright owner of that content) will amount to plagiarism which is a crime to be avoided no matter what; however, even repeating content across your own webpages is not recommended since it is not considered good by the search engines. Similarly, overstuffing of keywords can lead to search engines black listing your website i.e. search engines will ignore your website and will exclude it from its search results. Read more… »
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