Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Tactics To Increase Your Website Crawl Rate

Google webmaster tool enables you to view crawl status of your website. It also allows you to submit sitemap which helps Googlebot to index pages easily. Crawl stats displays graph of Googlebot crawl activity in 90 days on your site. Spider allows you to find the problems on your site during its crawl.

Crawl stats provide you the statistical data of your website with the help of Googlebot activity. By considering main factors like page rank, links, traffic and domain age Googlebot crawls your website.
 
Search engines index your website with the use of crawl rate. If the crawl rate of your website is low, automatically traffic of your site decreases, because search engines spend more time to index the website if the rate is low.

Few suggestions to increase crawl rate:

 

1.Update Content Frequently: Search engines Crawler considers unique content as a primary constraint. Though it is difficult task to update content on a regular basis but you should update your content frequently. Update your blogs couple of times in a week to get it crawled by bot more frequently. Blogs are the simplest way to produce new content frequently.
  
2.Optimize Load Time: Page loading time must be short because crawler spends much time on images and java scripts. If this will take more time to load, there will be no time for crawler to visit other pages. So use PNG or JPG formats which will load easily. By making use of W3 cache wordpress plugin you can easily cache a page and display it quickly to the user.

 3. Add Sitemap: Sitemap submission helps Googlebot to crawl your site easily and it also increases the crawl rate. Sitemap is the better way to crawl your new pages and updated blogs. It is easy to submit sitemap for images and videos in wordpress.

4. Get Good Page Rank: Website page rank is a main criterion that determines the crawl rate of your site. Site with high page rank gets crawled by bot regularly. So, to increase page rank of website, you have to build quality inbound links, create unique content and increase SEO score.

  5.Avoid Duplicate Content:  Website Content must be unique because most of the bloggers take content from another site and modifies it and publishes the content on their site. Google Algorithm is very strict on this aspect. If it finds the duplicate content, it penalizes and reduces the rank of your website. Duplicate content harms your crawl rate.

6. Use Ping Services: Pinging is a best way, where Goolgebot can know when your site content is updated. Make use of ping services like pingomatic and pingoat to increase crawl rate. Wordpress adds more ping services, where googlebot automatically notifies when new post is updated.

             If you want bot to visit your website on regular basis, update your website by considering above factors through which crawl rate also increases.






TACTICS OF NEGATIVE SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the visibility in the search results and getting the traffic from free or natural listings. Negative SEO is the complete opposite of SEO. The aim of negative SEO is to bring down your website in the search engine rankings. Competitors target your website and can affect your rankings by developing bad backlinks and using negative SEO tactics.

Negative SEO Tactics

Following  are  some  of  the negative  SEO tactics  that  your  competitors  can  use  to  bring down your  website's   ranking  on  search engine  results.

1.Paid Linking: Some of the websites which buy and sell links in order to pass page rank is a violation of Google's quality guidelines. Google announced to all webmasters to remove the paid links. The links which you have no control over or unsure about, submit a reconsideration request about all those links.

2.Stealing Content before it gets Indexed: Whenever a new content is added to your website, it is not indexed immediately. Your competitors can steal your content before it gets indexed. You can avoid this by updating the sitemap and re-submitting consistently when the new content is published in your site. You can identify whether your content or site is being duplicated by other websites or not by performing a Google search containing sentence of your page within quotes.

3.Fake Reviews: Competitor can add fake reviews to a business listing and it seems to be as if it was created by you. You can prevent this by making sure to monitor the reviews and use Report a Problem link so that Google can notify about all such reviews.

4.Site Speed: If your website is getting crawled then your site can experience loading problem. You can prevent malicious crawlers from having access to your site and allow reliable crawlers like Google, Bing to access your site. For identifying and stopping bad crawlers knowing Google and Bing's IP addresses will be useful.

5.DCMA Removal Requests: After monitoring the most valuable backlinks, a competitor can send email to the webmaster that the link to your website is causing copyright infringement and it should be taken down. You can avoid this by establishing a relationship with the website and email them thanking the sites.

6.Monitor your Backlinks Profile: Monitoring your backlink profile plays a crucial role in finding your competitors using various tools like Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer for generating quality backlinks.

7.Monitor Your On-site SEO Activities: Apart from monitoring the backlinks your site is receiving, your competitors can also get the information about the press releases, social media optimization etc. You can check frequently on your competitors to see whether they are using any strategy to pull down your website from SERP.

Off Page Optimization Techniques

Off page optimization is a process that can be done off the page by some of the factors to improve the page ranking with targeted keywords. 

The major factors which have effect on off page optimization are listed below: 


1.Social networking
2.Directory submission
3.Article submission
4.Press release
5.Blog submission
6.Forum postings
7.Social bookmarking
8.Link popularity
9.Link exchanging
10.Link building and few more.

1. Social Networking: There are social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ etc. Login in to any of them and anyone can update any information in these sites. Communicating with friends can build up the promotion of website which is shared on social networks.

2. Directory Submission: Directory submission is one of the major factors which can improve page rank of a site. Submit the information related to business or services to famous directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, Pegasus, Niche etc.

3. Article Submission: Write an article with content rich and it should not be copied. In order to get quality back links and to increase the traffic make sure to get unique content. Post the articles in famous article submission sites like Ezine, Squidoo, goarticles.com, etc. Sign up into these sites and submit your articles.

4. Press Release: Press releasing sites are Google news, Yahoo news, PR newswire and many more which enables to reach everyone globally. Submitting in quality press releases can improve organic traffic and can get better position in search results.

5. Blog Submission: This is one of the major ways to promote your business through online. Blogs which are writing for your business promotion should be unique in content so that your blog can receive huge traffic. Submit the blogs to sites like RSS, word press, blogs.com etc. through which you can also receive comments. Based on these comments, you can alter their views on blogs.

6. Forum Postings: This is an online discussion where anyone can post their views and can share with others. Posting comments with signatures should be must. This forum posting creates relationship with others views and improves the promotion of your sites.

7. Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is one of the methods to store the documents online. Bookmarking helps users to save the useful information at the instant and can share with others also. This increases online visibility.

8. Link popularity: Link popularity determines the number of quality back links to your site. More the number of back links linking to your site more will be the popularity. It is of two types, internal and external link popularities. Internal link popularity meant for number of links that are linking with in a site. External link popularity meant for number of links getting back to the particular site.

9. Link Exchange: Exchanging links between the mutually cooperated web site owners for the improvement of rank position of the site with huge traffic. There are three types of link exchanging which are one way, two ways linking and three way link exchanging.

10. Link Building: Building the quality links with external sites will improve the page rank by search engines. If the links have good content rich keywords then position of the site alters to a good position in search results.




How To Get Traffic From Pinterest

Pinterest is the latest social media network to people for advertising. While social network people doubt it as just another site but the reality is that it is quite different from the other similar sites. Therefore, you can use Pinterest as a free promotional site for your business.

What is Pinterest and how it is different from other social networks?

Pinterest is defined as an online virtual pinboard. It is a place where you can pin images and other interesting things you can share with the world. Compare to the other social media networks, you follow people and have followers. In addition to this, users can repin your pins or posts through which you can reach the world.

Though you can pin any type of stuff on Pinterest, but it is not suitable for all kinds of brands. It works the best if your product/service can be presented in a visual way. In this case of publicity of your product on Pinterest could get more traffic.

Tips to make the most out of Pinterest for the benefit of your business

In order to make the most out of Pinterest rather wasting your time or doing damage to your brand you need to know how to use it. Here are some tips:

Be active on Pinterest

Like other social media networks, you need to spend time on Pinterest in daily basis by following what others are pinning on it in order to get benefits from Pinterest.

Use high quality images

Pinterest is about visual appeal therefore we can't go with poor quality images. You need to use quality images or else you will be doing your product more harm than good. This doesn't mean you should hire a professional photographer but use your own skills to create the image.

Post in series

When you keep your followers interested, they will visit your board regularly. One should post in series in your board regularly to keep your users interested. For Example, if you have 10 images to post, don't post all at a time but post it one by one.

Add a Pin-It button to your site

If you want to get repins for your posts, you need to make it easy so that users can do it. One should do by adding a Pin-It button to your site which is visible to users. In this way you can increase the pins and repins for your website.

Post interesting stuff not limited to your products/services only

People are hardly visiting to your board to see your products; so you should post interesting pictures that will increase the pins. This helps to attract new visitors to your account because when they see a good image on your Pinterest, chances are there that they will visit your profile and products there. If you only post images in your posts for products, that may not attract some visitors much.

Write interesting and meaningful descriptions

Good Images are the attraction but even the most definite photo will benefit from a good description. Additionally, a good description will increase the images rank, which increases the traffic for you in search engines. Be brief and definite in your descriptions and users will surely appreciate it.

Use hashtags (wisely) and categorize your boards

When you use hashtags and categorize your pins, this makes them look more organized and helps users to find easily. On the other hand, don't use hashtags every time but use only if it is needed otherwise your pins will look spammy and your visitor may decrease.

Follow users with large followers groups

When you choose whom you want to follow, think not only if their pins are interesting but also have good followers. When you follow such users, if they follow you back you may get huge follower base which is an assured advantage of increase of pin/repins to your posts. Therefore, choose such power users for which one repin can bring more repins to you.

Repin interesting stuff

Like other social media network, interplay with other users is of crucial importance on Pinterest. This makes sense when you like or comment on other people's pins. By this you can get in return some repins, likes, and comments from other users. However, you don't need to repin, comment, or like every single pin from the users because this reduces your share.

Use videos, charts, infographics

Pinterest is not only about good images but also consists of video section as well. Though this is not YouTube but you can also upload videos about your business. In addition to images, you can include various types of sheets and infographics which are popular among users.

Pinterest is an interesting place and its main benefit for you is the publicity you get and valuable promotion means more sales to your site.

Helping Webmasters with Hacked Sites

When the website is been hacked it is an unexpected thing for site owners. You need help from webmasters to prevent the sites from being hacked. When the site gets hacked you must inform the webmasters to provide clean up steps and resources which will be useful.

The important thing is to check the pages which link to your search results are safe. When the site is hacked the information produced by the site will be malicious content, at that time you can take help of the webmasters to alert the users by displaying as warning in search results.

If you give the necessary information for webmasters to clean your websites then it can be soon recovered. In the webmaster tools report you can check the message like your site has been hacked. Google chrome search results can alert visitors by showing the message like "This Site May Harm Your Computer”. At some special reasons you can keep the information in malware section of webmaster tools report.

Injected Content

Hackers try to use the spam content and injected links to the sites as they wish, this becomes a difficult task for the webmasters to detect the injected links which are been hidden. The site may be compromised in such a way that the content will only be displayed when the crawlers visit the site.

When you find such sort of things you can send a message to webmaster tools with details. By using fetch as Google tool you can check the content. At .php files and template files you can look for the source.

Redirecting Users

The hackers’ main target is to redirect users to malicious sites, and then they target all users or specify those who are coming from search engines. When you visit your site and it has been redirected to other page you can confirm that your site has been hacked.

When you check the server configuration files, you can get some information because the hackers’ server configuration files to different content to different users.

The malicious behavior can be accomplished by injected links to your java script of the source code. The designing purpose of the java script is to hide from view for terms like eval, decode and escape.

Cleanup and Prevention

Through Google webmasters tool you can clean up the site. Google will regularly check the site, whether the problem has been prevented or not, but it may take some time. When the review is posted it examines sooner and removes the malware warning very soon.

Ecommerce Content Doesn't Have to Suck

Just for the reason that we have an ecommerce website, it doesn't mean that we have an excuse to consider quality content. In case of ecommerce websites there are many equal opportunities for content from both an SEO and sales perspectives.

Write Product Descriptions That Don't Suck

Majority of ecommerce websites don't specifically write meta descriptions for their products. They use the product “back of the box” as meta description, combine it with specifications and call it good but it isn’t good. Product meta-descriptions are perhaps the easiest way for companies to write quality content. We should speak to customers in a way that helps both SEO perspective and improves our brand's personality better.

In addition to increase in the entrances, there was increase in the amount of time customers spent on pages and decrease in exit rate on the product page.

Ultimately it’s all about understanding the needs of our audience. Because our audience constitutes primarily of pool players, players to write our product meta descriptions. Additionally, we also tapped our own organization's resources, to write product meta-descriptions.

Give Customers Content they'll Actually Find Useful and Interesting

The primary purpose of our site is to sell product, it doesn't excuse us from creating content that our customers will find useful, amusement or thought stimulate. For example, we are in the business of selling pool cues, so one of the first non sales based content we created was our Anatomy of a Pool Cue graphics present. We didn't create it as "link bait" but we created it because many customers have asked for. If other sites pick it up then we just want to help our customers help themselves. That’s the question we should try to ask while adding new non-product based content on owner site.

Do Research and Report Your Findings

Before selling our products that are in a niche, trying to find data can be a problem. This can be solved by various researches. For example, every pool cue tip has a different solid matter but most manufacturers simply list them as different matters which really don’t help customers. We couldn't find data more useful; we set our test parameters of all of our tips. The result allowed us to attach a specific number to each tip, which allowed our customers to make a more education decision, that’s because of invariable new products; we can continually update the content on this page.

Give Your Customers Articles with Actionable Points

To increase sales one should talk to customers a lot. As a result, we know what's important to them from a pool playing perspective. One should regularly look for ways to improve their game, so we should communicate with some expert player so that they can write quality content to sell goods for customers and that are easily searchable.

Use Your Blog for More Than Just Self-Promotion

Blogging is not easy especially when it comes to creating corporate blogs. We don't blog as much we should do, but we do customers required information only. The posts change quite a bit, but we think our popular posts will show our corporation personality. In the end, it depends on audience what they search for and need. Whenever we write anything we should think about audience what they will like. If our content is unique then audience, the back links and shares will come automatically. Even if we don't get back links, we still know that it will create a quality experience to the customers and we will get good visits or business for sure.

Importance of Quality Website Content

Quality content on your website plays a vital role in promoting your site. Quality content should be unique, user friendly and relevant to the users search queries. To produce high quality content, website content writers should make sure to use relevant keywords and rich information related to the website. While ranking a website, search engines consider quality content as most valuable.

In SEO point of view, website content plays a key role as it boosts traffic to your site. Better page rank and more quality backlinks are based on unique content. Content must be attractive to the internet marketers, who links to your site.

Why to Create Quality Website Content?

Quality content on your website is one of the factors to achieve success and to improve your website. By building quality content on your website, there will be an increase in the search traffic, gain more number of conversions and get more natural, quality and relevant links.

Factors for Creating Quality Website Content


The following factors are to be considered to generate high quality content:

The main aim of creating quality and unique content is to provide specific, in-depth information of value to the readers.

Through keyword research and analyzing, you get more ideas on how to provide quality content.
The content should be relevant to the main topic of the website. Choose the right tone of your content to benefit the readers by providing unique information.

The information which you provide in the website should be interesting to the visitors/customers. By keeping up-to-date information on the website, customers’ returns to the site and you can gain their trust.

You can convert the visitors into customers by providing valuable content. It is important to focus on the visitors/customers needs and offer effective ways of accomplishment. You need to make sure to describe the benefits of your website and information given in it to the visitors and how they are related to their needs.

Your content should be targeted at communicating audience by questions and comments in your website. This helps your visitors to contact you and understand about the services you offer.

Recheck the content of your website to find out grammar mistakes, broken links and any information which was left out. This also helps to keep the website content up-to-date.

Benefits of Quality Content

1.Greater Chance of Organic links: A hyperlink of others website that links to your website is referred as organic links. Quality content helps in many ways. For example, when more number of backlinks points to your site, your site gets high page rank.

2.Improved Visitor Experience: While reading your valuable content visitors spends more time and gets ideas of your products. There would be high chance that a visitor finds time on your site and converts to a customer.

3.Increase in Conversions: By getting more traffic through quality content, the customers will increase and in turn there is a chance to increase conversions by purchasing your products.

4.Improved ROI: To improve your ranking and to increase ROI quality content plays a crucial role. After Google Panda & Penguin updates, quality content has become a important one. When your content is unique, you can expect high traffic and sales which in turn increases ROI.

Is Hiding Ads from Google Considered as Cloaking?

Cloaking:

Cloaking is a practice in Search Engine Optimization where in different content and URL’s are presented to humans and search engine bots. The content or URL’s which are viewed by users will be completely different compared to what search engines read. This is considered as one of the spam techniques because it violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines where in it provides users of Google with completely different results than what they expect.

Examples of Cloaking:

Allocating a HTML page with text to Search Engines, but the same page is shown to users with images and flash.
Adding text or keywords into a page if and only if User-agent requesting page is a search engine and is not a human visitor.

Cloaking Ads:

If you want to hide ads from Google it is considered as cloaking ads similar to the situation where in content and URL’s are hidden as in cloaking. And it is considered as violating terms and policies of Google.
In this case, it is considered as webmasters just want to show ads only to the users who sign-up and logged in. Users who do not login will not be able to see ads, even if they are registered or not. Only the one who is logged in will be able to see ads. So, even Google bot will not be able to see ads as it won’t be able to login. It can be able to see what a non-logged in person will see and will not see what a logged-in member views. But this will not be considered as cloaking ads as Google bot and non-logged in member sees same thing. There will be absolutely no issues because google bot will not login and it does not even know that logged in users are being served different content.
 If you show Google bot different and non-logged in user’s different matter then it can be considered as cloaking and it in fact revolves around your purpose for representation of different content. If you are showing Google bot one thing in order to rank for particular keyword phrase and if you serve something totally different then this will result in being penalized. 
So hiding ads from Google and not logged in members is not considered as cloaking because both not logged in users and Google bot will be seeing the same content, only logged in members will be seeing something different.

Better not to ‘Depend’ on Google Traffic

Google algorithm updates have a significant effect on driving traffic to sites. Most of the online businesses are depending on Google for traffic. It is obvious that 70% of users depend on Google for searching anything.

Google algorithm effects:

The latest penguin, panda and EMD updates have charged some online businesses very badly. Many online businesses have undergone problems with no traffic, no sales and customers. As and when Google goes through algorithm refresh or update, there are high chances of losing website in SERP’S and these updates are done very frequently.

To Know how dependent is your site on Google:

The clear answer is that it could be better if you avoid depending largely on Google for traffic. It would be more noteworthy if the site is analyzed with the help of Google analytics to know about traffic through Google search engine.  Here you can note down traffic through Google sources such as Google base, Google adwords, Google maps and many more. So, it will be quite simple to compare traffic from Google with Yahoo, Bing and other sources.
This evaluation helps you to determine on which search engine or source you are most dependent and if it is Google you need to take up necessary steps to be careful from the updates. Even you need to know the other sources so that you can gain more traffic next to Google search engine and have to concentrate on them.

Suggestions to receive more traffic ‘apart’ from Google:

The best option is to even find other sources and promote equally to  Google for all online businesses to regain the traffic and sales. Even you need to optimize your site properly so that you no more need to worry if there are any updates or refresh of Google algorithm from Google. Most of the major online businesses have started diversifying their businesses as they don’t want to take any more opportunity to drop their online presence. Here are some of the examples as where you can promote your businesses other than Google. You can look out for traffic by building mobile applications, Social media traffic and another major source which can help you with traffic is the word of mouth that is promoting through conversation from person to person.
So, it is the best option to advertise and promote in Social media through which you can earn traffic, gain customers and sales again without depending much on Google traffic.

Site Architecture & Search Engine Ranking Factors


Website architecture is one of the key roles in search engine ranking factors. It is categorized under on page optimization factor. The right and good site architecture or structure can help with your Search Engine Optimization efforts.





Site Crawlability:



Search engine crawlers going from one page to another page incredibly quickly and the crawlers acting like hyperactive text scanners. They make copies of website pages and get stored in their database. This process is called "index". In general words, it is like a big book of the web.

When anyone searches for the keyword or query, the search engine flips through the big book that it has created already in their database. Search engine finds all index pages from the database and picks out what is the search keyword and what it thinks are very close to the keyword and shows the best ones first as priority wise.

Generally most of the websites don't have the crawling issues, but there are things that can cause problem to the websites.

For example: JavaScript or flash potential websites hide the links, this kind of scripts make the pages lead to hide from the search engines.

Most of these problems can be easily avoided. A good practice is to make use of sitemaps (HTML and XML sitemaps).

Remember one important point that “search engine friendly design (structure)” is also “human friendly design (structure)”.

Site Speed:


Google and other search engines want to make the website a faster place. So it has declared that the speedy websites get good rankings over slower speed websites.

Boosting your websites speed isn't a guaranteed express ride to the top of Google and other search engines results. It is a minor factor.

Is Your URLs Descriptive?


Having the search or target keywords within your domain name or internal page URL's can help your search engines ranking prospects. But it is not a major factor.

Some Important Site Structure Points:


Below given are some important site structure points in terms of search engine factors.

1Site Crawlability.
2.Target keywords in domain name or internal page URL's.
3.Easy navigation from one page to another page.
4.Sitemaps (HTML and XML).
5.Website speed (quick loading time).
6.Descriptive URL's.
7.Internal navigations.
8.No JavaScript and Flash potentials.
9.Site Structure Based On Visitor Language.
10.Integrate Site Navigation Everywhere (home, about, contact, products pages).
11.Content Hierarchy.

Six Common Google Adwords Mistakes

In online advertising Google Adwords is the first point of call. As adwords users are increased, due to this competition good advertising becomes more difficult with same keywords.
Below are the most common mistakes that advertisers make with their adwords campaigns.

1. Not setting up individual ad groups: This is the most common mistake. When you are creating a campaign, you have to focus on the relevance. The best way is to group all relevant keywords as one ad group that gives us more control on the campaigns.
For example: If you have an online mobile shop, you have to target a lot of keywords which are related to mobile phones like 'buy mobiles online', 'online mobile store' and more.

2.Writing a ‘one size fits all’ advert: In this case also relevance is important. When you are writing ads for your ad groups, it is better to write two or more relevant ads for each ad group. Writing single ad for a campaign may not get the relevant traffic.
In the above example if someone searches for 'mobile broadband' and your ad got clicked, you may get the traffic but not the useful traffic. Even a single letter difference can make a big difference in ads. So write different ads and compare which works better.

3.Targeting the wrong keywords: Every time people do not search with the same keywords. The targeted keywords may change every time. You can use Google keyword tool as a guide to find the targeted keywords.
But you don't use all the keywords that Google recommends, because it is not free. If you use all the keywords then you have to pay more. So choose the right keywords to get the targeted traffic.

4.Lack of monitoring: Creating a campaign is not enough for the adwords. You have to check it daily that which keywords are doing well and changing the bid based on the keyword performance. Leaving the campaign alone may not give any traffic or sales.

5.Not having any tracking in place: Whenever you are doing paid marketing, the ROI is an important measure. For this you have an idea about conversion tracking to measure the results. Every campaign should have conversion tracking tool. It is very easy to set up in Google adwords.
Without conversion tracking, you cannot find the effectiveness of a campaign.

6. Getting caught up in a bidding war: In PPC advertising bidding wars are for the rich people only. It is not profitable to bid high for a keyword which is not worth. Some search engines provide features like 'autobid' which will increase the bid automatically for a keyword to maintain a rank. It is better to avoid getting caught up in bidding wars for particular keywords.