Tag - SEO

30 Jul

Easy Ways To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization For Higher Rankings And More Website Traffic

A website you build might look really flashy and pack in a lot of features, but ask yourself an honest question here: What good are all those bells and whistles doing if nobody’s even visiting your site? This is the problem you’re going to have unless you address the issue of SEO, so bone up on your skills.

Backlinks

When setting up your site using SEO, don’t forget the importance of the site-map. Search engines spiders love site-maps, as do human users. It shows both groups where everything is on your site, and increases the keyword density of your pages. Site-maps also help boost your linkage ratings similarly to backlinks.

Authoring a blog and commenting on other blogs related to your website’s niche can be a good SEO technique. It is not difficult to get a blog ranked on the results page of the search engines, as long as you constantly update the content. Backlinking is an essential part of boosting your search engine rankings.

Building backlinks is a good SEO technique, but avoid linking to bad neighborhoods. The number of backlinks your site has usually positively effects your site’s search engine results page rank, however any backlinks from bad neighborhoods can make your site guilty by association causing search engines to penalize your website. It is best to avoid adult sites, gambling sites and free-for-all link farms when building backlinks.

When creating backlinks to your website in order to increase your web site’s search engine ranking, remember which factors determine the value of a link. A quality backlink depends on the anchor text in the link, the pagerank of the page linking to your website, the page title of the page linking to your website, the reputation and quality of the website linking to your website and the method used to create the backlink.

Remember that the people who visit your website again and again will bring more traffic to you because they will tell their friends, post a link to your site on their social networking page, give you backlinks in their articles, and so on. This is why it is important to demonstrate genuine respect and concern for your visitors and build a good relationship with each one.

Link Building

When it comes to search engine optimization, you must remember that content is always king. The key to attracting visitors to your page is to load up on as much unique, relevant and well-written content as you can about your particular keyword. Link building only works if you have good content to back it up and keep readers coming back for more.

You need to treat link building as a process that keeps going. Spend a few minutes every day on your link campaign. You can pay for services that will build your links for you, though those have proven not to be as effective as taking the time and doing it yourself.

The top priority in SEO these days is article marketing. It is the very best technique for link building in SEO today. By adding good content to your site on a regular basis, you will be generating links to your site at a consistent and measured rate, that will attract the right kind of attention from the search engines.

Start a blog and do your best to stay in touch with other blog owners that are in the same industry. if you read a lot of different blogs and leave comments on them you will start to build relationships and possibly help increase your exposure and help you with your link building.

Build links to your site naturally. There are plenty of automated link-building programs for sale, but they do not always work. Also, the search engines often know and do not appreciate speed-of-light link building. If you have no links today, and one thousand links tomorrow, they will know something’s up, and may remove your site from their indexes. Don’t chance it build your links manually.

In order to improve your site’s search engine optimization, it is vital that you work on link building. One of the most important factors in determining your Google page rank is the number of links pointing to your web site. Generating links with other web sites and blogs will greatly improve your site’s page ranking.

Search Engine Optimization

Frequent updates are a powerful tool in the ongoing effort to optimize a website for search engines. It is tempting to view search engine optimization as a one-time treatment for a business website, but in fact it is an ongoing process. Adding fresh content to a website – content that contains the same keywords as the rest of the site – can leverage the site’s position on search engine results pages.

Tag optimization is really the key to search engine optimization, because your tags are one of the most important aspects of your website. In days gone by tags were just a way to get across basic info, now tags are used in order to locate your site and to rank it accordingly!

When you are trying to achieve Search Engine Optimization, do not forget the importance of the description meta-tag. This means you must have excellent grammar and no typo’s in the meta-tag. It should include at least two of your key-phrases. While the title of your site is critical in search results, an internet searcher will read the description to make their final decision on which site to click on.

Make your page friendly to search engines. Do some research on search engine optimization and incorporate some of the easier tips and tricks into your site. The higher ranked your page the better. Make sure you include keywords in your posts and in your titles. This will make your site easier to find for a search engine crawler.

Google and other search engines work diligently to insure that search engine returns are as objective and relevant as possible. These companies don’t react kindly to web page owners that try to circumvent objectiveness and relevancy in favor of drawing users to their site using shady Search Engine Optimization techniques.

Effective SEO tactics will not require a high level of skill or even a whole lot of effort. What’s important is that you take the right approach. As you learn about SEO, you will find that a few minor tweaks can equate to big results. Get started on your optimization by using what you’ve learned here.

 

You can also learn a lot about SEO at SEOMoz

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21 Apr

Google Over-Optimized Penalty Overview

Everybody who is involved in internet marketing and search engine optimization has definitely heard about Google Panda algorithm and penalties associated with it. It has been talked about for so long, so people got used to it and in one way or another we are all trying to cope with it, hoping that bad times are behind us. But you know what? It is not over yet.

Now there is a big buzz going around the web that they are about to introduce new penalties for over optimized websites. It means that if you did what was said in SEO books even one year ago, you can end up in being penalized for it. We personally think that Google is becoming too obsessed as they have enough analytics already to recognize dodgy sites. It seems they behave like the one who could not get enough and want more and more until they end up with nothing. World is really need an alternative to this monopolized market, but until it is not there we have to play their game.

So, what they mean by over optimized websites? We will try to analyse it below.
First think you need to check is your title and description. Those are your face for all search engines. Take a careful look at them and make sure that you do not just list keywords there, especially if all of them contain the same short keyword in each of them. The idea is that your title and description should be targeting your readers, but not search engines. The main idea here is that users are more likely to click on meaningful titles rather than on keywords. And if you have already read our Google Panda Overview post, then you should know how important click through rate is.

Second thing you need to think about is your internal backlinks structure. We all know that this is a very important part of SEO and we all use it on our sites. But be careful and do not overdo it. There are a lot of websites there, which stuff their posts with a lot of links to internal pages; they want to rank higher in search engines. Now this is considered as not a very good practice. Try to limit this and add only one or two text links there or even skip them if you have other backlinks in your posts. Especially avoid adding the same link multiple times on the same webpage.
Another tip, related to it is to avoid multiple links in your footer. I believe everyone has seen websites with a lot of links to internal or external pages, hidden in the footer. Stop doing it and find another place for those links on your website. Also, you should not make those links of the similar colour as your background. We all know that the same colour is a huge NO-NO practice, so a lot of webmasters started to use similar colours as a workaround. So, from now on, consider it as NO-NO too, as if you are caught you can lose more then you have gained from it.

Third point is to avoid backlinks from private networks. We think that it is not really dangerous to get backlinks from those if they are placed correctly. You should avoid networks, which contain interlinked members of them, as they can be easily detected. Another type of networks to stay away from those, which claim that, they will place your article to multiple websites. No matter how good your spun article is, it is really impossible to spin the same text even ten times so it cannot be recognized as the same article by smart search engine crawlers. So, if you really want to use blog networks, then you should use those, which allow you to publish one or two posts for the same article. We are planning to open our own network, which we are using for promoting our websites. So, if you are interested, keep an eye on our blog for announcements.
The same tip is relevant for article marketing. Do not publish the same article to multiple article directories. This means you should avoid automated tools like article marketing robot or use them very carefully.

Last thing we want to talk about is a content of your website. One thing you need to stay away from is from adding text to your content, which is specifically dedicated to search engines. Quite often webmasters publish very useful content, which might be difficult to optimize for specific keywords and then they add a paragraph to that article, which is stuffed with keywords and not really beneficial from readers’ point of view. This is going another target for Google in the nearest future.
Another important tip for the content of your website is avoiding multiple webpages optimized for the same keywords. It is fine to have several of them as it can be difficult to avoid this completely if your website is targeting a small niche, but you must avoid having lots of pages optimized for slightly modified keyword terms.

To summarize this, we tried to give you a very brief overview of additional things you need to look at when creating and developing your websites, so you stay under the radar of search engines. You should use these techniques together with all the others; we talked about earlier, in our previous posts. If you follow our advice, you will definitely rank higher than your competition and more importantly, you will be on a safe side from being penalized by Google.

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20 Mar

When Search Engine Index Your Backlinks

Recently we have been receiving a lot of questions similar to this one:

“We checked backlinks, using different backlinks checker tools and we could not see links, which we bought on your website. Why we cannot see them there?”

The answer to this question is very simple. Those backlinks have not been picked up by those tools as they do not update their databases very often. Let’s take opensiteexplorer backlinks checker tool. They clearly state that they update their database every thirty days or even less often. The situation with Majestic SEO is a little bit better, but still they do not update their base very often too.

You also need to remember that their capacity is much less than Google’s and they simply might miss some of websites during their crawling process.

The most accurate tool out there would be would be Google Webmaster Tools, which can be found here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. You can also try similar tool from Bing, as it is former Yahoo SiteExplorer and should be good for text links checking.

But even if you use all of these tools, backlinks do not appear their instantaneously. It takes time even for big boys to update their data.

But is you are still desperately want to make sure that your links are visible by major search engines, than give it one week or two, then go to Google and search for site:in it. Once you have found a page, which should contain your link in it and hover mouse over it, so a screenshot of the page appears on the right hand site, like this:

After that click on ‘Cached’ link, to see what Google has in their cache and when its cache was updated last time. You link will be definitely there if the cache has been updated after you had bought a backlink.

You might ask why it takes so long for the link to appear in Google’s cache. And the answer is very simple – ‘Panda’. Remember we wrote an article Google Panda Overview, where we gave a brief description of the new algorithm Google uses and what you should do to be compliant with it? As this algorithm is quite complex, Google does not update their database in the rush, but it takes time to carefully analyse all the pages and backlinks.

What we would advise you is not to rush and cancel backlinks you already have, but give them between two to four weeks to get indexed and then decide whether you want to remove them or not.

Another reason, why we would not recommend cancelling your links very often is that if backlinks to your websites appear and disappear very often, then it will not be good for your ranking as it will look suspicious for major search engines.

Just to finish this quick post, we would like to tell you, that we use our marketplace to promote websites for our clients and most of them are on the first page of Google for multiple keywords and they have been there for years now. What we do is occasionally add couple of links to keep them there. Even if a website, which has our backlink on it drops in PageRank, we still keep our links there as removing those would give a signal that something was wrong with that link, as this usually happens with link exchanged or bought links.

We also want to emphasize that we mainly use site wide text links or context links, including site wide context links. Over time these types of links proved to be the most efficient. The reason behind it is that if your link is surrounded by relevant text, it has more value. Another reason is, that site wide links have more value as it shows to search engines that there might be a good value in the referred website as the owner of this one decided to place a text link to it on all their pages.

This is it for today. So summarize all said we would say, buy relevant backlinks, try to use site wide and context links, including context site wide backlinks. Give it some time for your backlinks to get indexed. Do not cancel links too soon and do not do it as soon as PageRank of a page linking to your web site has dropped as this gives bad signals to search engines.

We hope this post has clarified some things for you. As before, we ask you for your feedback, so we can improve our services.

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14 Feb

What Kind of Backlinks You Should Buy Today

There have been a lot of discussions whether it is safe or not to buy backlinks. And there are two camps. Webmasters say that you should not buy text links. The second group says that you should. To be honest, neither of them is right, but we tend to think that you can use payable one way links to improve your search engine ranking, even after Google Panda update. To prove it we have completed several tests with several websites of our clients, which were dropped in ranking, using links in our inventory only. The results were quite amazing.

One of websites had couple of dozen pages ranked on the first page of Google for very competitive keywords. About a month and a half ago the whole website dropped in ranking and instead of being in the top of SERP, they all had positions between 100 and 500. Sounds very familiar in the modern post Panda SEO world? Of cause the owner of the website panicked and did not know what to do with it and asked us for help. So, here is the story.

If you read our earlier post about new Google algorithm and how to avoid to be penalized, then you will know that there are actually two main very simple steps to follow:

  1. Add new quality content regularly.
  2. Build backlinks to your website.

Let’s covet both of these steps separately.

Content Writing

In terms of content writing we decided not to start aggressively write and publish articles on a daily basis. Instead we were publishing one article a week. Each article was completely unique, so do not use spun content even if it pass copyscape check, as it is not safe now. The average size of each article was between 1000 and 1500 words per article.

Keep in mind days of 300-500 words articles have gone. You can still use those for article marketing, but, you should not use such short articles on your own website. You cannot really put any useful content, which visitors of your website will enjoy reading and find it useful in such a short article.

Let’s summarize what we have actually done with the content. We simply started to update the website regularly and have been publishing one quality article per week. We did this, just to prove that quality of the content is more important than quantity. It does not mean that you should not write articles more often. If you have a capacity, then do so, as this will only help you in a long run.

Backlinks

Now to the interesting part – text links. To prove that purchased backlinks can work as good as free links we used only first types of links and used links only available in our database. It is worth saying that we did not really use single page simple text links. Instead we were using only site-wide backlinks, both context and simple. We also used regular context backlinks. To be honest we also used a couple of guest post feature, which is in a beta testing process at the moment and will be available soon for our users, but still the majority of backlinks we used in our link building process were text links, which are already available to our advertisers.

So, here is what we actually did. We were buying site wide text links ads both context and simple, on a weekly basis, with a pretty low pace (just 2-3 backlinks a week). So far we have built about 10-15 backlinks and we were really surprized with the results we achieved. The website of our client did not just return its positions, but it actually jumped even higher. This small test showed that you can beat Panda with the paid backlinks.

So, let’s summarize what we did in terms of link building:

  1. Buy site-wide backlinks. We were using both simple site-wide test links and context site wide links, to put our backlink within a short relevant content on as many pages as possible. The reason why we used site-wide text links is that they look very natural. Another reason why we prefer to buy site-wide backlinks is that it has better ROI as if you bought text links on the same website separately, it would cost you more if you sum up prices for each text link there.
  2. We also used normal, single page context links as they look natural too.
  3. All links were placed on websites with PR3-PR5. Again, site-wide links help to avoid backlinks to appear only on pages with high page rank, as websites usually have a lot of PR0 webpages too.
  4. We were aiming to get links on websites with page authority higher than 20.
  5. Build links regularly and with a small pace. It does not mean that you should not buy 10 of them on a daily basis, but this process should be spread over time. If you aim is to have 1000 backlinks, then you can buy text links with a higher pace, but do not buy hundreds of backlinks in one day.

 

Summary

Actually, this is pretty it. There is no rocket science in what we did. You should simply add fresh quality content to your site and build quality backlinks. Both of these components will help you in ranking your website higher in today’s environment. So, simply follow these steps and you will be fine. It does not mean that you should not use other methods and SEO strategies, like social marketing, article marketing, videos etc. They all will help, but we just wanted to prove that even simple strategy can help you to achieve great results.

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06 Feb

Google Panda Overview

What is Google Panda

As you might have noticed there has been a lot of talking about Google Panda and what it actually means for your online business. There are many internet marketers who were hit by it and thousands of websites were either de-indexed or significantly dropped in ranking. We know a lot of people who are struggling today as their websites dropped from the top of SERP to the very bottom of it. Their income was swiped overnight.

So, what is that magic ‘Panda’ word means for us. As we all know, Google is really trying to make search results cleaner and more useful for people who use their search engine. We do not really like this monopoly of Google and hoping that other search engines will come into play soon. But this is a different story. Let’s get back to Google Panda algorithm. The purpose of it is to get rid of low quality websites, which do not bring any benefits to their readers. From here, we have one of the main rules of it, which is content.

Website Content Rules

Everybody heard that content is the King in the Internet marketing world. But it actually was not really true until new algorithm updates. People still were able to earn money with low quality contend and syndicated websites with tons of duplicate content. And now that time has gone. Most of the websites, which were penalized, are those with duplicated or low quality content. Today, to rank high, you need to have a lot of great content, which is really beneficial for readers of the site. Also, content should not be too short and designed only for SEO purpose. Users should stay on your website and you cannot achieve this without quality content, but we will discuss it later in this article. For now, let’s summarize some main requirements for the content of your website:

  1. Content should be unique. Avoid content duplication.
  2. There should be enough content in each article as days of 300-500 words articles are over
  3. Content should be informative and useful for readers.
  4. There should be a lot of content on your website. This is not the main rule, but it definitely helps.
  5. Unnatural usage of keywords. This is not really new requirement, but we wanted to mention it here again as it became more important for us too.

 

User Interaction

We mentioned before that user experience is very important for new Google Panda. This means that users should be willing to visit your websites, to stay on it and to come back. Also, it is very important, how many users are clicking on your website in search engine results. Today, all these things are more important than ever before. Let’s briefly discuss these requirements separately.

  1. There should be low bounce rate. This means, that once on your site, users should stay there. If they do, than, this will show to the search engine that this site is important for the user. This brings us back to the high quality content.
  2.   Returning visitors are monitored. All visitors to your website are carefully monitored and if a lot of visitors come back to your site, this shows Google that it is really useful for them, hence it should bring you higher in the results. To get your visitors come back, brings us back to the content. You should update your website regularly and with top notch content, which visitors will want to read.
  3. Click through rate. This parameter is very important for Google and it actually has been for a while. This means a percentage of people clicking on your website in the search results. It does not make sense for any search engine to show your website if no one is clicking on it. So, you should be very specific with the title and description of your web pages.

 

Domain Requirements

We all know that some time ago it was quite important to have a keyword in your domain name. It has not really been the case for quite some time now. The only benefit of having a keyword in your domain name would be when somebody is linking to your website, using your domain name. We would not recommend to bet on that and not to spend a lot of time, searching for domains with a particular keyword in it.

Another change, which has been recently introduced, is that now whole domains are being evaluated, but not single web pages. With the Panda changes, an entire domain is evaluated rather than each page of it. To get higher ranking in Google your domain should have a very high authority, which is calculated on a summarized authority of each page of the website. This means that each page is important and deserves to be promoted the same way as you promote your home page. Also, this means that all your pages should have good value for your visitors. Again, think about content of each and every page. If you have just a couple of webpages, which bring great value to your website and other pages, which do not have any value at all, those low quality pages will drug your site down.

Testing SEO Strategies

Everybody knows that testing and especially split testing is very important in the search engine optimization process. Unfortunately, we have quite bad news here as with Panda update, it is more difficult to do this. We are not saying it is impossible. It just became a little bit harder as it cannot be done as quickly as before. The reason behind it is that, because of the complexity of new algorithms, it takes much longer for Google to analyze and rate our websites. As of now new updates do not happen more often than once every 30 days. So, if you have made a change, you should wait at least one month to see some results. And as the logic of the search engine becoming more complex, we believe that this process will be taking longer in the future.

Summary

To summarize our short overview of the Google Panda update we would recommend you to spend more of your time on writing quality content and updating your website regularly.

One area, which we have not covered in our overview, is link building.

This is another very important part of search engine optimization. Google wants to see backlinks to grow naturally, but you can still use legit methods like article marketing. You can even purchase backlinks if you do it in a right way. If you decide to do this, we would recommend you to get either site-wide backlinks or content text links. It does not meant that usual text links are not important, as they are, but site-wide and especially content backlinks bring more value. If you take a look in our inventory, you can even find site-wide content backlinks, which means you will have a text link to your website surrounded by relevant text on each and every page of a website you select. Please remember that you should try to get backlinks from high authority pages as low quality links can harm your website.

Register today and stat ranking higher.

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12 May

How Search Engine Optimization Affects Marketing

While marketing was pretty important part of the business even before information era came to be, now it’s more important then anything else, even the quality of your product is not enough to keep you afloat if you do not know how to make sure the word about your product reaches the customers. Easiest way to get to the customers is online, and to make sure you have high internet presence you have to use various search engine optimization methods.

SEO market experts are fast becoming one of the highest profile experts in the marketing world. They know all the knicks and knacks of the internet and can do a lot to make sure that your product reaches plenty of people. Of course, search engine optimization is by no means an easy task, usually behind those people there is a fine oiled up team that is day and night learning more and more about how internet evolves and are using that knowledge to benefit their customers.

The best part of a successful search engine optimization is that it’s pretty much self sustaining. Once the site of your product reaches top of the page when people use keywords describing your product, it is more then likely to stay there are traffic to your site increases, creating a positive feedback that will get you even more customers – that is all what you can get if you hire a professional SEO team to work for you and your product.

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11 Aug

Do You Really Need SEO Services?

SEO services are becoming an integral part to major websites. Despite the advances and growing knowledge of search engine optimization, not all sites are utilizing these tools yet. While every webmaster would like his site to be number one on page rankings, one should look at the broader picture before hiring SEO services.

The first question to ask before hiring SEO services is, “How will improved page rankings help my business?” For sites in competitive online sales businesses, the answer is pretty clear. If your website sells shoes, just going up from number 11 to 10 in page rankings for the keyword “women’s leather tennis shoes” can drastically increase traffic and potential sales. For smaller businesses, hiring a staff of SEO experts is not cost effective. It is better to hire outside SEO services who will give your site an extra boost to get you up to the top of the page rankings.

The best time to hire SEO services is when your website is just starting or you are doing a major redesign. This will give you the chance to optimize your entire site to a certain audience. Keep in mind that SEO services alone will not necessarily get you results! SEO is about getting your site to the top of the page rankings. Once the traffic starts coming, it is up to you to provide a useful site or service to keep the traffic coming back and get visitors to perform certain actions (buy something, click ads, etc).

When choosing SEO services, you will first want to consider whether local SEO or an international approach is better for your business. Make sure to ask the SEO services about their previous work, their techniques, and the short and long-term results they expect to see.

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08 May

Tips For When You Buy Links

Once newbies to SEO figure out how important backlinks are to your site, a lot of them run out and buy links from every end of the web. After the 1000th backlink and no change in the Google SERPs, they will probably start to rethink your strategy. Let’s face it: there is no way to cheat the Google algorithm. If we could, then the sites with the most money and best tricksters would always come out on top and all of our searches would be completely useless. When you buy links, you shouldn’t be thinking of it as a way to cheat but rather as a way to start networking. Since all businesses, including online sites, are about getting powerful friends, buying links is a bit like making campaign contributions to the right politician. If you are going to buy links, you better make sure that you are networking with the right sites with the power to get you results. Here are tips for when you buy links:

1. Relevancy! Buy links only from sites which are relevant to you own.

2. Do not buy links from sites which already have many paid links.

3. Be careful of buying links which will be labeled as “sponsored” or “paid.”

4. Pay attention to where the backlinks you buy will be placed. If you can buy links which will be placed in the middle of content, this is a big plus. Try to avoid buying backlinks which will be in footers or sidebars. Especially avoid links that will be placed on a separate page. These may be interpreted as link farms by Google!

5. Mind your anchor text. You want to make sure that your anchor text looks natural. You should also be varying your anchor text on every single page from which you buy backlinks.

6. Look at the page ranking of the site for its own keywords. If the site cannot do well for its targeted keywords, then it will probably not help your site.

7. Don’t just buy links for your homepage. You should be getting links which are pointed towards all the pages which are in your website.

8. Don’t focus on page rank while deciding where to buy your backlinks. Page rank is usually not up to date. New pages may have a low page rank but can still provide you with great backlinks, assuming that they are pertinent to your targeted industry.

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