November 20, 2009

What Is SEO and Why Optimize?

Link building India :- SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - An Introduction

You spent a good deal, worked hard for many days and nights and built a great website, but alas! it doesn't get enough visitors. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there and your website is totally lost in the shuffle, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. When search engines ignore your site, your site becomes non-existent in the cyber world. The real problem with your website is that it failed to harness the most cost-effective and powerful Internet marketing strategy: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site appear at the top of search engine results for your domain-specific keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks in the results of Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., the greater the chance that your site will be visited by many, which in turn would skyrocket your sales.

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is about making your website visible on search engines. Its commercial purpose is to be the first to hit a customer base effectively.
Why Search Engine Optimize

Everyday, millions of people search the web to find out what they look for. If your website doesn't come up top in the results, you lose your business to your competitors. SEO is important not only because it brings lots of visitors to your website, but also because it helps to increase the return on investment, if harnessed properly. Say for example, you have a website that sells mobile phones online. Optimizing the site for targeted keywords like 'low cost mobile phones' would bring it to the top results on popular search engines. This would in turn bring prospective customers to your site, which would result in higher sales.

However, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that requires patience, careful planning, and a long-term approach. Don't worry, here are 4 easy steps that will help you get started with optimizing your website.
4 Easy Steps to get started with Search Engine Optimization

a) Create traffic targeted content

Identify the keywords, i.e., words or phrases using which your potential customers will search the web. Example, if you are a hair salon, they will probably search using the keywords "hair cut", "hairstyle", etc. After identifying and gathering a set of keywords, categorize them under various themes and write web contents on those themes. That is, under the "hairstyle" theme, you can put keywords such as hairstyles, crew cut, long cut, short cut, curly cut, layered cut, etc. Using a Keyword Suggestion tool, you can see how many people search for a certain keyword. Any keyword for which the number of listings is less and the number of searches is more gives you a better chance of ranking higher than keywords for which the listings are more and the searches are less. Once you got the right keyword, use it appropriately in the page so that the page appeals to both the visitors and the Search Engines.

HTML tags such as title tags and meta tags also play a role in ranking top on search engines. These tags must contain only relevant keywords. Neither fill these tags with keywords that don't appear in the content nor leave them empty.

b) Make your pages Search Engine Ready

Check if your pages are search engine ready, i.e., are they crawlable by search engine spiders, is there something in them that will make the Search Engine neglect the page or give it a lower ranking.

To make your pages search engine ready

* Your website content must be readable. For the sake of appearing top on the search engines, do not make the content clumsy by repeatedly using the keywords. These kinds of clumsy sites may get top rank, but won't get readers.
* Add only relevant keywords: Do not stuff the website content, title tag, and meta tags with too many keywords. The keywords that are provided in the title and meta tags must appear in the website content.
* Do not add invisible text: Most of the search engines find them out and ban those sites.

c)Submit your site to Search Engines.

Now that you have made your site search engine ready, start submitting it to the popular search engines. That way, they know your site exists. Some search engines may require periodical submission. If you find the submission process tough, get a Site Submission tool available on the web. (More on Submitting to Search Engines)

d)Track your performance

Often times, people complain that their position in search engines has gone down. We must not forget that Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process for reasons like, Search Engines changing their algorithm frequently, new sites coming up for the same keywords as yours, your watch sites (competitor sites) optimizing themselves for search engines and so on. Thus, it is important you keep track of where you rank for each of your keywords in the most important search engines and constantly modify the content so that search engines know that your page is active. This enhances your rank on the search results.
Conclusion

Although Search Engine Optimization seems to be so complicated at the outset, it really is a simple and interesting process that you will enjoy doing yourself. Search Engine Optimization is the most cost-effective, easy to implement Internet marketing strategy that can get you more traffic and in effect more revenue. So go ahead, start optimizing your site. Happy Search Engine Optimizing...
link Building India

Top Six "Donts" to Avoid Getting Banned by Google

Link building India :- Is Your Website Banned by Google?

Lets take an hypothetical situation. Say You have a Website that ranks top on Google, brings lots of traffic, and boosts your business. You start to feel that the time, money, and effort you spent on optimizing your site bring in the expected results. You go to bed as a successful man with a successful Website. But the next day, you wake up to find out that your Website is nowhere to be found on Google!. Your site is not listed for any of the top keywords, "link:www.yoursitename.com" and "site:www.yoursitename.com" do not return any results. Google has banned your Website! The traffic to your site diminishes and your online business crumbles. Why did Google ban your Website? The following may be one of the reasons that attracted a ban by Google.
1.Duplicate Content

If you have the same content in multiple pages on your Website or external sites, Google punishes your site usually by lowering its rank or sometimes by banning it.
If you feel some Website is copying your content (you can find such pages by searching for key phrases for which your site gets listed), you can issue a warning to that site's webmaster or visit www.google.com/dmca.html and notify them that someone is infringing on your site's copyright.
2.Cloaking and Redirects

Cloaking is an unethical practice of creating different Web pages for search engines and visitors. That is, webmasters create meaningless web pages that are stuffed with highly searched keywords. When the visitors click the link, the site redirects them to a well-written meaningful page but search engine spiders see the meaningless page loaded with keywords and links, that has been designed to impress them. Most engines today repeatedly speak out against cloaking. Nevertheless, the practice continues to thrive, because the engines have traditionally done a poor job of finding and penalizing sites employing this technique. Just because search engines are less effective in detecting cloaking, it doesn't mean you will never be detected. Avoid cloaking and redirects to protect your site from a ban by search engines.
3. Hidden Texts and Hidden Links

Hidden texts and hidden links are textual content and hyper links that the readers cannot see, but will be seen by search engines. In other words, these are generally links or texts that have the same color as the background color of the Web page. This is a trick whereby webmasters stuff the Web page with invisible keywords and hyper links to improve the page rank. Search Engines, these days, are getting better at identifying hidden texts and links and consider them as Spam, eventually banning those sites which use this trick.
4. Keyword Spamming

Keyword Spamming is a practice of providing too many keywords in the META tags and body text. The general techniques today for keyword Spamming are repeating the same word(s) and adding many unrelated keywords in the Meta tags. If the spider detects it, well, you are asking for trouble.
5. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods

Reciprocal links are great for improving your rankings. However, be careful and avoid joining "link farm" services designed to artificially inflate your link popularity.

* Do not sell or buy links to artificially increase ranking.
* Do not link to any Web page that uses Spam techniques to increase ranking.
* Do not join link exchanges that are designed to improve ranking.
* Do not link to a site that has been banned by Google.

6. Machine-Generated Web Sites

There are sites that generate hundreds of Web pages that are basically the same page repeated hundreds of times, but with a few unique lines of text and unique title. Generally, search engines are very effective at spotting this; and in addition, all it takes for such a site being banned is a competitor or a site user reporting your site to the search engine.
7.Conclusion

Many search engines, including Google, consider the above-listed techniques illegal. If you are caught indulging in any one of them, you run the risk of attracting one of the following penalizations:

* The page is red-flagged for closer inspection by a human reviewer.
* The page's ranking is considerably reduced.
* The offending page is dropped from the engine.
* The entire site is banned from the engine.
link Building India

9 Simple Steps toward a Search Engine Optimized Website

Link building India :-
On this Page

* Search Engine Optimization - An Introduction
* The 9 Simple Steps
* Conclusion

Search Engine Optimization - An Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is probably the cheapest and most cost effective form of Internet marketing. In fact some studies indicate Search Engine Optimization as being the second most effective marketing strategy. The increasing popularity of Search Engines and the fact that good quality and cost effective traffic can be brought through them to websites has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around how to make Web pages/Websites more search engine friendly or in other words better optimized. The result of this advent of Search Engine Optimization industry is the feeling among webmasters and novices in the industry that SEO is like rocket science and has to be handled by professionals only. Thankfully, the truth is that anyone can search engine optimize Websites. All it takes to optimize a Web site and get better ranking and traffic are 9 simple steps.
The 9 Simple Steps

1. Select Right Keywords

This is THE most important step and can easily be the reason for your ranking ahead or ranking below your watch sites (competition). Identify the words or phrases using which people search(might search) for your Web page on the Internet. If you sell dog food, your keywords must have something to do with "dog food". Do not use irrelevant keywords, even if they get you more traffic. If you are not sure of the keywords to be used, use any of the following tools to find good target phrases:

* Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity of target phrases.
* Googleis great for brainstorming target phrases.
* Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and compare how the competitors use the target phrase.

2. Analyze Competition

Determine who your competitors are. It is quite simple; search for the keyword on popular search engines. The sites that show up above your page are your competitors. Analyze those sites and find out how effectively they have used the targeted keywords. Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes, it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase.

Check out yours and your competitor's link popularity. In many engines, you can type: link:http://domain-name and get a link count for that particular site. The more the link count, the better.

3. Page Creation and Optimization

After identifying the keywords, create Web pages by targeting one word or phrase for each page. One common mistake most novice SEOs do is dump many keywords into a page. Not only does it make it difficult for you to rank high for each of those keywords, but also it makes the page less readable.

i) Make sure your keywords are present in the following places:

* Title tag
* META tags: Description tag and Keywords tag
* Body text: Heading tags, comment tags,alt tags and prominent places on the page content

ii) Conduct HTML validation for your Web pages. HTML validation helps you find out the errors in HTML code, which may prevent search engines from indexing your site.

iii)Then check and ensure that your pages are Spam-free. When your page elements, such as Title tag, META tag, and body text, are stuffed with repeated keywords, search engines may consider them Spam and ban your site.

4. Visual Review of Page

* Check whether your site has usable navigation.
* Ensure you have informative and readable content. Good content will ensure that your page appeals to human visitors as well as spiders.

A badly written page may get a good ranking on search engines, but visitors will move away from your site with the same speed they came in. Although Search engine spiders that grade your site will not look for visual appeal, directory editors and human visitors will!

5.Link Building

Get inbound links from quality sites. Quality sites are those that rank high on search engines and/or have a good Google PageRank. If the sites are in someway connected with the theme of your webpage that will help increase your rank better. DO NOT turn to link farms for link building this can get your site banned in search engines.

6. Submitting to Search Engines

If you have followed steps one to five you are ready to submit your webpages to the search engines. Chances are the search engines found your webpages through the links that you built but if they some how missed your webpages don't worry you can always let them know that your pages exist through Search Engine Submission.

You can refer this link for details on submitting to search engines. But if you did prefer the shortcut here are links to some popular search engines where you can submit your webpages.

Altavista

http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

All The Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

7. Submitting to Directories

Search Engines consider Web Directories as expert documents. A presence in popular directories can help you get a better ranking on search engines. You can submit your site to popular directories, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, and Microsoft bCentral. For more information on Web Directories and guidelines for submission, refer to "Submitting to Directories".

8. Maintain

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Popular Search Engines keep making changes to their algorithms i.e the way they rank webpages quite often. Thus it is imperative that you continually optimize your pages based on the current algorithms to achieve high ranks.

It's important to measure your rankings atleast monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then re-submit or wait for the search engine to revisit the page.

9. Tracking

Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are really after, but more traffic and sales. High traffic is not something that automatically follows top rankings. It is something you get by ranking high for "good keywords". Thus it is important that you track your website usage using a good log file analysis program and find out which keywords and which keywords bring in most visitors to your pages. Use this information to optimize your pages better for these terms and search engines.

Conclusion

At first glance, search engine optimization may look like magic; but actually all it takes is 9 simple steps. Search Engine Optimization is a simple continuous process that helps search engine do their job more efficiently. It does take a lot of time and patience but stay the course search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.

If you follow all the above-listed steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!

Happy Search Engine Optimizing!

link Building India

Seven Common Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

Link building India :- Starters in Search Engine Optimization, in their zest to increase their site's SERP ranking, commit some mistakes, which drastically affect their Website's position on search engines. The following is a list of 7 common mistakes, which you can use as a checklist while optimizing your Web pages.
Ignoring the Title Tag

This is one of the gravest, but most common, mistakes that may spell doom for your site's SERP ranking. Most of the search engines consider the Title tag very important. Search engines generally display the content that you give in the Title tag. Therefore, have most important keywords in the Title tag. DO NOT leave the Title tag empty or have irrelevant words such as "Home page", "Welcome to our site", etc. in the Title tag.
Irrelevant Keywords

Some Webmasters use irrelevant, but much sought after, keywords to drive traffic to their site. Getting traffic in such a way will not help your business in anyway. After all, you optimize your Website to boost your business. Say for example, you have a Website where you sell Desktop Computers. To increase the traffic, you use the keyword "Britney Spears" throughout your content, META tags, and Title tag. People who search for "Britney Spears" reach your page. But, when they find that your Website has nothing to do with "Britney Spears", they will move away from your site quickly. You don't gain anything from that traffic. In fact, had you optimized your site for genuine keywords, you would have brought in possible customers.
Spamming

Spamming is an unethical practice of using the same keywords repeatedly in Title tag, META tags, and Body text. Some shrewd Webmasters use this technique to artificially increase their site's ranking. However, search engines are shrewder enough to find out Spamming and they lower the ranks of those sites that use Spamming. Sometimes, search engines may ban your site for Spamming. Therefore, never spam your site with repeated keywords.
Invisible Text & Links

This is one of those old tricks used by Webmasters to cheat search engines. Webmasters stuff the Web page with keywords and links, which will be invisible to readers but will be visible to search engines. Nowadays, search engines have intelligence to find out this. If you use this trick, search engines may send your site into oblivion -- into perpetual ban!
Links to and from Bad Sites

It is a known fact that links from external sites would increase the rank of the recipient Website. However, links from low ranking sites or banned sites will not add much value to your site. Therefore, ensure you link to and get links from top ranking sites. Linking to link farms or banned sites can be harmful to your pages SERP ranking.
Invalid HTML

Most new Webmasters commit the mistake of not checking their Website's HTML code. When your Website has HTML errors, it will fare poorly on search engines, even if it has optimized content. When your site's HTML code has errors, it will be slow to load, appear incorrectly on different browsers, and rank low on search engines. Therefore, validate the HTML code before submitting your site to search engines and directories.
Having too much Graphics in your page

Search engines view Websites much as a text browser would Large amount of graphics won't help you get a better ranking. In addition, lots of graphics will make your pages slow to download, which will drive search engines and visitors away. For better ranking on search engines, have keyword-rich content instead of graphics.
link Building India