Optimization, Over-Optimization or SEO Overkill?

To stand as the top search engines' results knows no bounds – neither rules, nor skill. We often see that websites that have been temporarily or permanently removed from major search engines because of malpractice and using “black hat” techniques. The response of search engines is easy to understand with many tricks that include in their armory, the pertinence of returned results is compromised to the point where search engines start to deliver completely irrelevant and manipulated search results. If search engines do not detect your tricks right away, your competitors can report you.

Keyword Density or Keyword Stuffing?

 Sometimes SEO experts want their client sites high in the search engines results and recourse to uncertain practices, like keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is considered an improper practice because we use the keyword in question during the text more often. But the suggested keyword density is from 3 to 7%, anything above this use of keywords will look like keyword stuffing and which can be easily noticed by search engines. The text with more than 10% keyword density not make sense, if read by anyone. Google recently introduced the method called “Florida Update” basically for the pages that are keyword-stuffed or over-optimized.

Generally, keyword density matters more in the meta tags, the headings, and first paragraphs. Therefore one should be careful not to stuff the keywords in these areas. We should use Keyword Density Cloud tool to check if your keyword density is in the acceptable limits in above-mentioned places. If you have a high density percentages then replace the occurrences of the keyword with synonyms. Usually the words in a sentence that are in bold or italic are mostly considered by search engine. But if the target keywords are in bold and italic it will not give you the top page rank results.

Doorway Pages and Hidden Text

Another most common keyword scam is doorway pages. Before Google introduced the Page Rank algorithm, doorways pages were a common custom for the experts and at that time it was not considered an unlawful optimization. A doorway page is a page for the search engines to rank their high page ranking that has no meaning for human beings. While keywords are still very important, today keywords alone have less influence in deciding the position of a website in search results, so doorway pages do not get traffic but if you use them, don't question Google about the punishment.

Similar to doorway pages technique another common scam is hidden text. This is text, which is included in the HTML source of the page, which is unseen to humans but is trying to deceive search engines as if the page is full of good keywords. Therefore we can say, both scams can barely be qualified as optimization techniques, there are more manipulation of the keyword than everything else.

Duplicate Content

In SEO precept content is king but not duplicate content. In terms of Google, duplicate content means using the text from one site copy and pasting to another or same site, then you may await to see the drop in your site's rank. Many of the SEO experts believe that syndicated content is not treated as duplicate content and there are numerous instance of this type of content. If syndicated content were duplicate content, the first to drop from search engine results are news agencies. Still, it does not hurt to inspect from time if your site has duplicate content with another website, because someone may be copying your content and you do not know. The Similar Page Checker tool will help you see percentage of duplicate content comparing to another site.

Links Spam

Links are other important SEO technique where data can be manipulated. While links are undoubtedly important, getting number of backlinks from a group of websites or a suspicion site is begging to be penalized. Also, if you increase your outbound links considerably exceed the number of your inbound links, and then you are putting effort creating useless links because it will not improve your ranking of your site. You can use the Domain Stats Tool to check the number of backlinks to your site and the Site Link Analyzer is used to check number of outbound links you have.

Using keywords in links, domain names, folder and file names does raise your search engine rankings but again, the accurate measure is the border between getting top of the search results and being out of the search. For example, if you are optimizing for the keyword “cat”, which is a quite often chosen keyword and as with all popular keywords and phrases, you may not see other choice for reaching the top. But getting a domain name like http://www.cat-cats-kittens-kitty.com, which is filled with keywords to the maximum but there are two problems first is difficult to remember, and second is if the content does not tally with domain name cats, you will never get top ranking.

Though file and folder names are less significant than website names, then you can comprise “cat” as keyword and in the anchor text of the links. Make a point that anchor text provided are not artificially stuffed. While you have no control over other sites that link to you and use anchor texts that you don't like, it is up to you to check what anchors do other sites use to link to you. A good tool for this task is Backlink Anchor Text Analysis, where you enter the URL and get a list of sites and anchor text other site link to you.

Finally, to Google and the other search engines it makes no difference if a site is intentionally over-optimized to manipulate them or over-optimization for good intentions. So no matter what so ever your motive is, always try to keep to sensible practices and remember that do not exceed the line.

SEO TACTICS TO INCREASE PAGE RANK OF YOUR SITE

      Google Page Rank is one of the important factors for sites and blogs. According to the site's importance and reputation Google gives the page rank. Page rank is a number given to a page which can be in between 1 to 10. This factor helps in determining page's rankings in the search results. Some of the factors like backlinks, inbound links, external links, internal links, no-follow links and do-follow links etc are taken into account to calculate page rank.

     The following are some of the seo tactics to be considered which helps to increase your page rank: 

Write High Quality Content

   The content which you post should be fresh, unique and user friendly. Do not copy the content from any other site. By posting high quality content Google crawls your site thereby search traffic increases and ranks well in the SERPs. Update the quality content frequently so that page rank will be high for the original content and pages in your site. This is the first most important factor to increase the page rank.

Make High Quality Backlinks

  One of the factor search engine values the most is the backlinks. It is very much important to maintain a natural backlink profile by getting backlinks from quality websites. The high quality backlinks which we get should be a trustworthy site which helps to increase the page rank of your site.

Guest Posting

  This is one of the best techniques to increase page rank and attract visitors. Write an article with unique content and submit it in the blog which has the option of guest posting. Make sure you guest post for a high page rank than yours then you can see the growth when there is page rank update. Hence guest posting is important for a page to be ranked.

Social Bookmarking

  This is one of the factors to increase the page rank. There are many social sites in which you can share your site and can easily get free backlinks and traffic.

The following are some of the popular social bookmarking sites:

Facebook

Twitter

Google Plus

Stumble Upon

Digg

Squidoo

Delicious

Hub Pages

Site Submitting

  The best way to generate quality backlinks is to submit your site to popular directories which helps the search engine to index fast and boost your page rank. Some of the directories with high page rank are given below:

DMOZ

Yahoo Directory

Ezine Article

Article Base

Go Article

Link Exchange

  Link Exchanging is one of the old methods to get traffic and increase your page rank. Contact the site owner whose page rank is high and has same niche as yours and ask him for link exchange. By this method you will get link juice, traffic and page rank.

Keep Updating

  Try to update your website with fresh and unique content. The more you post, the more Google will crawl and index your site and there will be more chances for your site to get high page rank.

Forum Posting

  Start posting in popular forum sites and answer the questions asked by the people. You can add signatures in the forums and get backlinks from forums. Hence traffic and page rank can be increased.

Avoid using Black Hat Techniques

  You will get banned from Google if you use black hat tricks. Stay away from those tricks and use white hat tricks to improve site's visibility and page rank.

Some of the illegal tactics which you should never use for your site are:

Keyword Stuffing

Duplicate Content

Paid Links

Spammy Outbound Links

Hidden Text

  The above mentioned seo factors are helpful for your website to get good and high page rank.

IMPORTANCE OF OFFLINE MARKETING TO RAISE WEBSITE POSITION IN SEARCH ENGINES

There are certain simple twists which when made to offline marketing can help along with SEO for a site. This results in ranking high of the site in SERP’s. Online SEO and Offline SEO are two different terms in SEO.  There are some offline activities which suggest a noteworthy way to influence position of site in Search Engines. Just there is a need to make small changes for offline SEO which is being done presently.

Difference between Online SEO and Offline SEO

Online Marketing is that where techniques are implemented over internet which includes On-page optimization, building in-bound links from other websites, email marketing etc. While Offline marketing deals with marketing trends or activities those businesses carry out, that does not interact with internet all the time. Offline marketing deals with promoting products and services through Press releases, TV, Posters, Social Media etc. 

There are some important techniques and points which help in gaining a high position in Search Engines, when done in offline marketing for a site. Following are some of the techniques:

1.It is needed to tell people what to search for:

Now-a-days some big brands are helping out people by advising them what to search for; it can be brand, products or business name. It is tough and leads the users to come across competitor’s products or even website. But search engines help out users by showing results of what people are looking for, this happens especially when high number of similar search queries is used. It is one of the effective strategies rather than just giving site address in advertisements.

2.Help pages of site in driving to good position in Search Engines:

Search Engines like Google notice when there is a group of search queries going on and will make sure to show only results related to what users are searching for. That is once when search engines recognize that users are looking for a page on your site then they will help find it out easily.

3.Off page helps in pushing pages up in Search Engine results:

Off-page has incidental effect in pushing up the pages results without our intervention. This when combined with complete on-page optimization will give better chances of ranking in SERP’s.

How to Create a Successful Pay Per Click Campaign

Pay per click advertising is a primary way of generating target traffic. PPC campaign determines about how many visitors visited your website directly. If user clicks on your link, banner and lands on your page then you have to pay for it.

    PPC campaign is an effective way to attract visitors to your site and converting those visitors into potential buyers. Google considers fields like PPC ad performance and CTR along with bid price. For a successful PPC campaign you have to consider several factors.

Steps for a successful PPC Campaign

Research: Research is the primary step to build a successful PPC Campaign. Before developing campaign you need to concentrate on three factors - business goals, target audience and keywords.

  By understanding few business goals, you can deliver measurable results. To target an audience you must follow the below checklist:

Who am I going to target with this campaign?
Why my target audiences choose this product?
Keyword research is an important factor for building successful campaign.

Implementation: Campaign implementation phase is a next step to follow after research phase. It includes: 
Campaign structure
Ad copy
Landing page development
Campaign settings

Build your campaign structure logically with identified keywords and form ad groups with 5 or 10 keywords. After campaign structure, next step is to start developing ads that are relevant to those groups of keywords which are used in campaign structure. Search for each of your target keywords in search engines and see which type of ad copy your competitors are using.

  Update high quality website content that makes your website well structured which makes user to navigate the website easily and purchase products via PPC Campaign. The last and final step is campaign settings.

When you have almost reached final step to launch your campaign, Google will ask you about settings that affect PPC campaign. In AdWords case, you have to consider specific settings like region and language, customizing ad delivery.

Optimization: Adwords contain complete report that determines which part of your campaign has high value. In optimization phase, you have to gather complete information which helps to optimize your campaign successfully. This phase includes: Statistical analysis, Refinement and Bid Management.
    
        Statistical analysis considers main key factors like CPC, quality score and conversion rate. This analysis will help you to find where you are falling short. You need to check and monitor individual and group ads. Key factors like keywords, landing pages and ad copy is the way to refine your ads. Finally, bid management is an important field in PPC campaign and it is also important for positive ROI.


       

Does Google take action on sites that do keyword stuffing with phone numbers?

I saw at http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/0*3/phone-numbers/ where someone complained about typing a phone number and getting back websites that just keyword stuff every phone number in the world on their pages. Does Google take action on such sites?

Matt Cutts, Mountain View

Some Common Link-Building Problems

                         Link Building was one of the common practices implemented by SEO’s in previous years to drive rankings and positions in SERP’s. Even it did not serve any purpose in marketing, most of the SEO’s used to follow link building. Due to this most of the sites has faced worst situations at time of Penguin, Panda updates. To successfully recover from link penalties there is a need to remove links from different sources. Here are 10 most common link-building problems which resulted in link penalties after updates.
Article Directories:
Links from article directories were hit badly by initial penguin update, now it is better to stop adding article links. Even if they are present we need to make use of Disavow tool to remove links and would be better not to use links from article directories.

Low Quality Directories:

Site with links from low quality directories faced penguin updates severely. Linking to few high quality directories is more advantageous rather than low quality sites in high number. Directories should not be considered a volume source of links.

Low relevance Guest posts:

Guest posting is another popular method used in link building. It is a great idea to do guest postings. But there is a need to remember that post should be relevant to site and vice versa.

Low Relevance / Accuracy Infographics:

Infographics are one of the best types of communication which is used by most users and publishers. But most of them started cranking on Infographics by concentrating only on volume but not on quality. Even though these low quality Infographics are not targeted in previous updates but they may be targeted in future updates. Google stresses more on Infographics links whether people who accept the page really end up about endorsing page that they end up linking to.

Paid Guest Posts:

Paid guest posts need to be stopped. One important note in these paid guest posts is that a site will have significant number of incoming links from posts which have rich anchor text embedded in the middle.  Guest posting should always be simple attribution links at bottom of the post.

Anchor Text:

Rich anchor text in back link profile may be another drawback and which may result in facing Google update. Little amount of rich anchor text may not harm the site but if it exceeds the limit then there arises a problem. So steps need to be taken to avoid rich anchor text in back links.

Doorway Pages:

Doorway pages are one of the oldest techniques used by most SEO’s. These are thin content pages which aim at attracting traffic and redirecting users to other pages. This technique need to be stopped to gain popularity among users.

International Sites:

Linking to international sites is not a good option. It is better not to link to foreign sites unless and until we market our products in those countries. So links from international sites does not make much sense.

Blog Carnivals:

Blog Carnivals are those where people will share content and editorial content may or may not be provided by owner of blog carnival. While other publishers can visit site and choose articles for publishing in their site. But Google does not encourage Blog carnivals, as article directories are being used as link schemes.  It is a better option to stay away from these and any other “marketplace” for content.

Poor Quality Content of Any Kind:

Poor quality content is measured by search engine with help of social media signals which add real value as signal. If a site or article gets more social attention then social users spend more time on site. Then it can be taken as people are interested in content or site. But publishing low quality content is bad for site as well as it hurts search rankings.

Link building should just not build back links instead it should market the site. It is very important to analyze and spot problems which are a key role of the process. It is essential to follow above steps to remove penalty first and then put efforts in not to use this type of link building again.

HOW TO IMPROVE GOOGLE PAGE SPEED AND USER EXPERIENCE

       In SEO point of view, Page Speed is one of the important factors for search engine rankings. The performance of a web page can be evaluated by Google Page Speed Score. The sites which are faster gives better experience for the user and leads to higher traffic and lower bounce rates.

Google Page Speed Insights Tool:   
 
      A web page performance can be examined and analyzed using online Page Speed Insights tool in Google Developer Page Speed. Suggestions are also given on how to make your pages faster. This tool helps developers to optimize web pages and gives a score out of 100 and provides the details on how to improve the score. By reducing the page load times, bounce rate also decreases and conversion rate increases.

The below mentioned are some of the factors to improve Google Page Speed:

Compress Images:

   If the images are properly compressed then page speed can be improved. The compressed image looks similar to the uncompressed image using few of the bytes. The correct form of compression reduces the file size without reducing image quality. Most of the image editing software’s have an option of "Save for Web and Devices" which helps to compress the file automatically. RIOT is recommended to optimize multiple images at once for Windows users. The below screenshot is an example to optimize or compress images in image editing software.

Serve Scaled Images:

  This common issue is mostly found in e-commerce sites which have numerous images for each product in pages. Some content management systems can convert these images to correct size and the others are left to the browser. When the resizing images are left up to the browser, page load times get increased. You can also create multiple versions of the image in appropriate sizes for particular pages. Apart from CMS, there are other tools which help in resizing multiple images at a time and hence page speed can be improved.

Minify JavaScript:

  Comments and white spaces from the JavaScript files should be removed in order to reduce the size of the file. Minify JavaScript is used to run all JavaScript files on a page using JavaScript minimizer. A link is displayed by the Page Speed if a small file is generated. Click the link and save the file minified and change your HTML. The minifying task can be performed by various tools like Google Closure Compiler Service.

Remove Unused CSS:

   CSS files contain the rules and if a rule does not apply to any element of a page, there is no change in the appearance of the page by removing it. As external style sheets may be included in the page, you can remove the rules which are not used in given page. Hence it is easy to recognize which rules are not used, by running page speed on all pages which use external style sheets and remove them.

       The above examples are sample problems with Page Speed and you can fix those issues. By running these tools and fixing the issues on your page, page speed can be improved and also gets better user experience.

A LOOK AT RICH SNIPPETS

Rich Snippets are the text of few lines that we can observe under every search results. These are designed for the users to provide basic information about the site and help users to choose the right site related to their search.
With these we can get readers attention and also can reduce the bounce rate, because users will know about our site before they click.

There are several types of rich snippets, some of those are given below.

1.Microdata for Event Rich Snippets:






 2.Microdata for Movie Rich Snippets:





 
3.Microdata for Music Rich Snippets:

4.Microdata for People Rich Snippets: 

5.Microdata for Recipe Rich Snippets:





6.Microdata for Review Rich Snippets:

7.Microdata for Product Rich Snippets with multiple offers:




When we get started we have to follow three steps as below mentioned to create rich snippets.

Three steps to rich snippets:

1.Pick a markup format:


We have three different types of markup formats. They are:

Microdata

Microformats

RDFa
Most of the companies use microdata format because Google suggests this format. For these formats we don't need any prior knowledge, just basic knowledge of HTML is enough.

2.Mark up your content:

Mark up the content by using HTML tags or Data highlighter. If we want to change our snippets frequently Google suggests HTML markup.
The content types that Google prefers as rich snippets are

Review

People

Products

Recipes

Events

Business and organizations

Music.
3.Test your markup:

After marking up the data we have to test that data by using structured data-testing tool. If Google finds the mark up data in a site it can read and display the rich snippets in the SERPs.

Rich Snippets are the text of few lines that we can observe under every search results. These are designed for the users to provide basic information about the site and help users to choose the right site related to their search.
With these we can get readers attention and also can reduce the bounce rate, because users will know about our site before they click.

There are several types of rich snippets, some of those are given below.

1.Microdata for Event Rich Snippets:





2.Microdata for Movie Rich Snippets:






 

3.Microdata for Music Rich Snippets: 

4.Microdata for People Rich Snippets: 

5.Microdata for Recipe Rich Snippets:

6.Microdata for Review Rich Snippets:





7.Microdata for Product Rich Snippets with multiple offers:

When we get started we have to follow three steps as below mentioned to create rich snippets.

Three steps to rich snippets:

1.Pick a markup format:


We have three different types of markup formats. They are:

Microdata

Microformats

RDFa
Most of the companies use microdata format because Google suggests this format. For these formats we don't need any prior knowledge, just basic knowledge of HTML is enough.

2.Mark up your content:

Mark up the content by using HTML tags or Data highlighter. If we want to change our snippets frequently Google suggests HTML markup.

The content types that Google prefers as rich snippets are

Review

People

Products

Recipes

Events

Business and organizations

Music.

3.Test your markup:

After marking up the data we have to test that data by using structured data-testing tool. If Google finds the mark up data in a site it can read and display the rich snippets in the SERPs.

Tips for Better Online Marketing Campaign

Now a day’s internet has been used for online marketing advertising, which has become a huge effective media communication. Online marketing business has become a proven successful economic marketing.

Here we provide few successful Online Marketing Campaign Tips:

Figuring Out The Long Term Goals: Online marketing campaign requires a successful plan in advance than any other marketing campaign. Even though it is economical than other methods there can be a mistake. So before starting the campaign, make a schedule plan.

Analyze Past Data: To make the better results from the past campaign, first you have to analyze the data and collect the keywords for the campaign you have created. Check the data and start working on the mistakes of the past campaign. Comparing the past campaign, make a different strategy to gain good results.

Fix a Budget: Firstly, prepare a budget on advertising, which you can spend so that you can make decision of fixing a budget. Planning a daily budget in the campaign is based on the marketing services which you are providing. Having a budget can help you in better success.

Use All The Platforms Available: In online marketing the websites has become the form of email marketing, content marketing and ad banners. Using social media the business has chosen advertising their products or services. Promoting your products in social media will give you the better results. Online marketing has become a platform for business advertisers.

Put Social Media Tools To Best Use: There are lots of ways to use social media. Each tool is designed for different purpose. Use analysis tools to get the data and to create a successful online marketing campaign. To reach the maximum number of visitors you can build strategies using this social media tools.

Get To Know Your Customers: In Internet marketing aspect it is very important to know, what the customers would like. By knowing this you can reach out personally to connect them. Using a particular social media, be the most of part in it, so that you will be one among them.

Create Original Content: When you are sending emails send the original content rather than others content. If the person reading your content finds the content is spamming it may cause damage to your reputation. Spam is hated by everyone and can cause damage to your website. There are the tips to success for online marketing strategy. Make a good strategy which might give better results in business.

Product Search Update: Google Merchant Centre

Google merchant centre is a front end tool which helps you to upload Data feed (Product listing) for Google shopping, product ads. It is used to check the status of an item and performance of your product listings. Use Google merchant centre to upload the list of products and use Google base to upload list of non products like vehicles, jobs etc.

         Google merchant centre has dashboard field that provides information about product listings, Data feeds and performance graphs. To upload your products in Google merchant centre, you need to sign up an account. If you have a Google account, you can sign in directly by using google.com/merchants website. Upload your product listing in Google shopping and get targeted traffic to your website. If you add more information, the better results you can achieve.

About Google Shopping

Google shopping makes users to find products easily and quickly. For sellers, Google shopping provides following benefits:

1.It provides potential buyers and it helps shoppers to reach your products.
2.You can update your product information on regular basis with the help of Google shopping. So, these shoppers can easily find out the products they are looking for.

Instructions to upload a product in Google Merchant Centre:

1.You need to sign up an account to utilize Google merchant centre and then login to the account by using website google.com/merchants.
2.Provide business name, website address and contact information and click save button to update an account.
3.Open Dashboard field which appears at left menu. This provides snapshot overview of an account and feed status. It includes:
               Product Overview
               Data Feeds
               Performance (Paid and Free clicks)
               Data Quality

Product Overview: After uploading your product list, look into the dashboard tab, where you can find products overview option which provides you information about how many products are active, awaiting review, disapproved and expiring.

Data Feeds: Data feed is a file, where you can upload products and can see the status of the products. Data feed contain attributes such as condition, availability, id, title which gives unique way for each item. You can upload products directly via Google merchant centre data feed page, which is the easiest way for the new users to upload file and size of the file must be less than 20MB.

Performance: Performance option provides information about product listing ads campaigns and Google shopping listing. Both paid clicks and free clicks are calculated by considering Pacific Standard Time. To get accurate paid clicks data refer AdWords. Performance option shows paid and free click graphs.

Data Quality: Data quality field provides you an overview about your product issues and it helps you to solve the issues by providing list of product ids.

Ways to Upload Product Listing:

There are three possible ways to upload data feed in Google merchant centre. Direct upload is the easiest way to upload data feed. Sign in to the account, click data feed field, where you will find upload file. Pop up window appears when you click on upload file and then go to the browse option and upload the file.
To upload large number of product listings use FTP upload option.
Use Automatic upload option to upload file of under 1GB size.

Settings: Setting includes general, FTP, Google cloud storage, tax and shipping, AdWords, checkout and users.

5 Steps to Organic Ranking Success

If you're searching for some new revolutionary trick to getting number one rankings, you won't find it because there is really nothing new here. In this post there is indeed nothing new about SEO but you may read about some new avenues or good SEO strategy, but not here. This post is all about who are looking for any good, solid, basic SEO.

SEO as the end result is completed in an undefined steps. But don't let these simple steps fool you. The most important time, skill and understanding are required to get good SEO results. Here are some basic SEO concepts and some information to get you started growing a great SEO campaign.

Step 1: Pick Relevant Keywords

Keywords are the good foundation of all your web marketing efforts. If you didn’t complete keyword research, it means you are not ready for SEO. In fact, you are not ready to build a website at all; therefore we can say that keywords are the most important.

Keywords are considered as the pig of the marketing world. This creature gives you ham, chops, spare ribs and more. Similarly, keywords can help you in building the navigation, titles, descriptions, content and blog posts of a website.

Without knowing your keywords, you really can't market your website to your viewers. You might do good job by targeting your own target audience, but get over yourself.

Step 2: Plant Quality Tags

There are three tags that you need to be concerned about. They are the Title tag, Meta Description tag and the H1 tag. These are not like Freeze tag, duck and goose. The title tag is your single most important tag of website marketing property. It's an important signal to the search engines for ranking your website and is the link to your website in the search results.

Another tag is meta description which has no real search engine ranking value but it is visible below your title in the search results as website depreciation. You can make this more interesting as possible to attract the viewers.

The H1 tag is another tag which is used as content title at the head of a page. This tag helps both search engine and user value as it's the first thing viewed by the visitors when they land on the page because it tells them what the content of the page is.

Step 3: Produce Compelling Content

Quality Content is the reason people visit your site again and again. It's the main reason viewers stay on your website.
While your audience who visit your site to purchase your products or services, it's mainly because of your content that brings them. Without quality content your site is just another site which has bunch of products or services. Your content tells your visitors what differs from other product sites.

If you don't have good or quality content or very little content, you're likely to get more bounce rates. Every customer does not read every word so give them the necessary words to help in buying what you are selling.

Step 4: Dig Into Architecture and Usability Issues

Every site has problems this means your site too might have a problem. You just don't know it because you haven't identified the problems.

Most of the website problems are hidden, architectural and usability issues are often the biggest obstacle to having a successful website. Your web developer didn't know about issues, even visitors may not notice them but SEO needs to find and fix them if you want to have your site rank high in search engine results.

Your website architecture and usability issues can be solved by number of tools. Tools like Broken link reporters, Google webmaster tools, Analytics tracking and a plethora are free and paid SEO tools are available to sites owners to analyze and test various issues and increases your rankings of their site.

Step 5: Fertilize Your Link Sources

On page optimization is a good technique, but the engine that actually makes it execute is quality back links. Back Links can be accomplished via social media advertising, content development is also important for increasing ranking for your site. Links tell the search engines that people like your site. In fact, they like enough to get more tweet, share, likes, plus, quality back-links to your site.

It is harder to get quality back links and social shares, unless you bribe or beg unless you have the compelling content.

There is lot more that goes into a solid organic web marketing traffic, but these are the five basic techniques we can build up for our organic search engine ranking to be high.

USING MAGESTIC SEO TO RECOGNIZE NEGATIVE SEO CAMPAIGN

Majestic SEO is one of the tools for reporting links to the third party. Majestic SEO
tool can be used to provide the domain information. It can also be used to generate
the backlinks and reports of a website. In majestic SEO, the link reports are updated
throughout the day almost hourly so that new links are available. Some of the tools
in Majestic SEO are Site Explorer, Backlink History, Neighborhood Checker, Clique
Hunter, Keyword Checker, Link Profile Fight, Bulk Backlinks, Majestic Million and
Comparator.

How to Recognize Bad Link?

A bad web link is one that:
1. Which comes from a page either de-indexed or on its way to de-indexing by
the search engine
2. Where the anchor text is same for every single link
3. A paid link
4. A hidden link

The following are some of the factors to recognize for a possible negative seo
campaign:


1. Look up the domain in question in Majestic Site Explorer

Choose "Use Fresh Index" to start and view the link profile.
The link profile has two link metrics citation flow and trust flow. Citation flow is the
number of links to a given url or domain. Trust flow is the number of trusted links to a
given url or domain.

If you look into the link profile regularly, you can find that citation flow increases and
trust flow decreases. This is one thing you should consider to find if anything is going
on to run a negative seo.

The following link profile shows that the citation flow is more and the trust flow is
less.

2. Look At Your Anchor Text Distribution:

Sometimes you can find the traffic coming to your site for unrelated queries by
seeing the referral data. It is easy to view how your anchor text is distributed by using
Majestic SEO anchor text diagram. You can also find out the odd anchor texts if
anyone runs a negative SEO campaign against you.


3. Use Historic Index Of Majestic SEO:

It is quite true that more number of links is built in a short span of time when a
negative SEO campaign is run. The quantity of the links built can be compared to
the total quantity links in your link profile. You can find out whether a negative seo
campaign is being run against your site if you have a sudden spike in the history of
your backlink profile.

The chart mentioned below shows a sudden increase in the referring domains in the
backlink history of a website.

You should be aware of the following two caveats:
i. You will not see any raise in the backlink history if the links are of poor quality.
ii. Sometimes such raises of activity account for Majestic seo's catalog renew and
not for any evil action against you, so this technique alone is not very reliable.

Although the above techniques do not guarantee 100% analysis, but they can provide
a way for indicating the warning signs so that you can come to know whether a
negative seo is being run.

Latest Google SEO updates in 2013

On yearly basis, Google rolls out nearly 500 SEO updates. Most of the updates are minor,
but for every few months it releases major update that affects website ranking in SERP.

Here are a few updates which were released few days back.

Google Algorithm Updates:

Update 1: On 17th January 2013(Not confirmed by Google)

Google blog didn't update it officially, but it affected website ranking very badly. Almost
1% search queries were affected through this update. The update could be Google
Penguin or Panda. The keyword position has deprecated from top 10 positions only
because of this update.

Update 2: On 22nd January 2013(Officially Declared)

On 22 January 2013, Google released Google Panda update which was officially
declared. This is the first update in 2013 which affected 1.2% of English language
queries. Google Panda is considered as major Google algorithm update which
refreshes the data.

Update 3: On 25 January 2013(Officially Declared)

Google Page rank update was released on 25th January 2013. This is a minor update and
site with high page rank (page rank of 4-5) got affected.

Update 4: On 27 January 2013(Officially Declared)

Google rolled back its recent algorithms which were released on 17th January & 22nd
January 2013. Websites and Keyword positions which were affected by recent updates
came back to their initial positions and this is the first time the data roll back to the
previous position.

Update 5: On 30 January 2013

Keywords positions are not stable from last few days because of Google dance. It’s been
fluctuating from update to update. If your keyword position is varying slightly, don't
worry about it because Google dance is going on in search results.

Update 6: On 4 February 2013 (Officially Declared)

Google page rank was updated on 4th Feb and this is considered as major update in 2013.
Google provided new page rank to the website by checking the quality of the content and
quality of backlinks for your web pages. Page rank affected in January was considered as
minor update, but it is considered as major update in February.

Google updates its algorithm on a regular basis. So, webmasters must update and
refresh their website content regularly to get high traffic.

Important Points to Panda - Proof a Website

Panda refresh took place again by Google in 2013 where it struggles to fight on spam using all major

algorithm updates. First Panda hit which took place two years back had its impact worst on site owners

who have not taken Panda seriously. Most of the site owners whose revenue was in six figures have

seen a sudden drop in their revenues over night. If any site has not been hit by Panda still, now needs to

follow certain instructions before another Panda update takes place.

Over-past one year a huge number of site owners have been recovering from Panda effect. Site owners

also need to Panda-proof their website with certain steps which help them to be away from effect.

Following are the steps which help site owners to Panda – proof their websites which are at risk.

Purge Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content has its impact highly on websites, it has always overwhelmed websites as well as

SEO’s. Panda update has proved that Google treat sites with duplicate content seriously. While pre-

Panda update used to have its effect only on particular piece of content but now situation has changed.

It means that duplicate content will shrink whole website. So there is a need for site owners to take this

issue seriously and have to work on duplicate content issues to Panda – proof entire site. To avoid these

duplicate content issues we can take help of ‘Screaming Frog’ which identifies duplicate content. This

tool gives a report on what can be improved further on site.

Here are some of the suggestions on improving duplicate content issues:

1. Meta Directives can be used. For example: no index, follow.
2. Use of “Canonical Tags” (example rel=”canonical”)
3. 301 redirects
4. Blocking of pages using Robots.txt.
5. Removal of URL’s using webmaster tools
6. Choosing a preferred domain in webmaster

Cleaning up entire content issues now may be difficult but if necessary steps are taken to prevent then it

can help from serious effect on site.

Eradicate Low Quality, Low Value Content:

Objective of Google with Panda updations is to help users in finding only “high quality” sites by moving

back visibility of low quality content sites in SERP, this can be achieved perfectly only with help of

algorithms. So, now it is an important task for site owners to eliminate low quality content. But what

does low quality content mean?

Google has guided us on how to access page-level quality which in turn helps us in guiding editorial road

map of our site. To help site with thousands or hundreds of pages a much more realistic approach has

been used by looking at user engagement signals which Google basically uses it to recognize low quality

content. It includes key behavioral metrics which is most efficient way to sniff-out low value content

such as:

1. Low to no visits
2. Anemic unique page views
3. Short time on page
4. High bounce rates

Here are ways in dealing with low value and poor performing pages:

1. Deleting content with low to no user engagement signals.
2. Merging content of thin pages in to thicker and making them as useful documents.
3. Adding more internal links which results in improving visitor engagement and these internallinks have to point high quality pages.

Pagination is another most important aspect that will often be overlooked. Appropriate pagination

effects hugely at distributing link equity throughout site. Following are tips for Panda – proof pagination

1.“No index, follow” paginated pages.

2.Tag paginated content with “rel=prev” and “rel=next” to indicate documents in a sequence.

Thicken – up Thin Content:

Thin content on site is not appreciated by Google and it acts seriously not only on spammed or thin

affiliated sites but also at sites without original content or with little content. The best idea is to thicken

1. up thin directory pages with original content. Some suggestions include:
2. Write original content of thousand words, it should be value added content on every page as each page should be treated as comprehensive guide on a specific topic.
3. Pipe in API data and content mash-ups (excellent when you need to thicken hundreds or thousands of pages at scale).
4. Encourage user reviews.
5. Add images and videos.
6. Move thin pages off to sub domains, which Google hints at. Though we use this as more of

a “stop gap” approach for sites that have been mauled by Panda and are trying to rebound

quickly, rather than a long-term, sustainable strategy.

By checking word count we can understand thin content issues. If it is wordpress site then there

are couples of plugins which help in accessing word count for every document on the site.

1. WP Word Count
2.  Admin Word Count Column

In most of the cases, we can observe that thin content pages after thickening will undergo a drastic

change in ranking and SERP visibility over competitors.

Develop High-Quality Content:

It is much important to publish only high quality content on the site. “Quality Content” is described by

Google as “content is that where your child can be sent to learn something”. Frequency of publishing

content is not so worth if content is not of high quality. It is always good to have high quality content

even if it is published once in a week. If sites are publishing content frequently then they need to

recheck it because sites should slow down and publish better, longer, concise content less frequently.

If site owners are in race with competitors about “publishing content everyday” then it just means

polluting SERP’s with quick, thin, low value posts and dragging down entire sites quality score.

Panda Proofing Wrap up:

It is best to take precautions before another Panda update effects our site. Most of the site owners

have recognized problem and have taken necessary steps to avoid Panda update effect. And these site

owners are making good revenue by following necessary steps to avoid Panda update effect.

5 Biggest Trends for SEO in 2013

The internet marketing strategies and seo updates are frequently changing. So Seo Analysts
quickly look to promote the real websites and worth content as to look at the Google updates
and changes.

Here comes the 5 Biggest Trends for SEO in 2013:

1) Video Optimization:

YouTube has become the second most search engine behind Google. The YouTube algorithm
lies on signals for ranking factors. Promoting video content through social networking sites
is a factor for improving page rank and traffic. YouTube allows back links to a website
which are valuable and help videos rank well on searches. Ranking through articles and word
content, video marketing is the best way to get traffic and audiences.

2) Google+

Google is placing top priority on author ranking, getting traffic to sites with content are
deemed authoritative on their topics. Getting authoritative authors is necessary way to use
Google plus, which create author profile list to the sites, provide content and links to the
content. To increase the value of links, focus on particular topic.

Long articles loaded with keywords are less important with quality content provided by
multiple links. Google makes Google products more important in seo to build their company,
integrate Google products like Google+ profiles to work with them but not against them.

3) Mobile Friendly

Internet is becoming more personalized for individuals to reach their requirements. People use
mobiles for searches to find their specific needs. Responsive web design is a growing strategy
in demand for mobile friendly sites, which creates websites design to fit in any screen device
or mobile devices. This can help the users to type M before the url to mobile friendly version
of the site towards the shift.

People believe that from 2014 most web traffic will be from mobile devices. Further demand
for the website is accessed by mobile devices.

4) Personalized Search Functions

Google generates users on Search History, brand building, keyword research is the valuable
sites to prefer the target audience. If you are perfect in traffic, search personalization will
boost your sites rankings. Using effective seo will find a great advantage over competitors.

5) Local Reviews

Online reviews make many customers to make choices to purchase. For this it is essential
to target local audience. Optimizing the pages within local searches makes your site more
accessible, this way you can reveal your rankings in different locations. Building pages to
different locations and searches gives higher visibility within the areas.

Keep Trying this growing trends and you will find modern web search to your sites in 2013.

Does Thin Content Hurt Ecommerce Sites and How to Fix It

Google Panda update not only affected traditional websites but its consequences were even on E-commerce sites. Most of the E-commerce businesses were taken off guard with its first hit. What happens if an e-commerce site has been never “hit” by Google updates and if still Panda update has its affect on businesses, but they don’t even recognize it? But this unidentified problem which is like a missed chance hurts the brand manufacturers most.

A successful brand does not even require SEO; even it uses SEO where there is no need for it to worry about any updates. But these successful brands need to take help of SEO until and unless if they have any competition in market with large retailers as competitors.

What does thin content have to do with it?

In these days, as e-commerce sites have put its step forward most of the purchases are carried out online. Search engines provide users to shop online from any devices such as mobiles for convenience. If a brand has trustworthy customers then there will not be any effect of Google updates but in case of new business in online it has to depend only on search. So, online businesses which are new have to follow rules of SEO to gain popularity among online shoppers and should survive from Google updates.

After these Panda updates it will not be sufficient if you drop a pair of keywords on to a page and put it for shoppers. Panda updates have changed rules by concentrating on to text over other aspects. Even it affects brands severely if only images are present without any content. After this update, it is made compulsory that even ecommerce sites have to focus on content like traditional websites.

2012 can be considered as year of content strategy, while in 2013 it’s very important that even ecommerce business have to follow SEO as part of content strategy and also digital strategy. It is essential for ecommerce businesses to identify problem of thin content and find a solution for it.

How to identify ‘thin content’ category pages?

Following are the basic points which are missing on a typical ecommerce sites and help you to recognize thin content category pages:

A paragraph describing category page with three to five sentences and should include a pair of keyword variations.

Links within the paragraph are must and rich with anchor text linking to subcategories, and also associated categories which help search engines understand content relationships.

Another important factor is not to miss alt tags for images as these help search engines to understand what the image is about.

Breadcrumb navigations help out in understanding site-architecture easily and crawl without confusion.
Category heading in H1 tag is of utmost important as it helps search engines to understand meaning of the page in absence of content and is preferred over an image banner.

A title tag should include category name and should be placed first before brand name as search engines read title tags from left to right.

A short friendly URL which includes category name should be placed right after domain name.

So, it is important to follow above rules along with using right keywords which lastly helps in gaining more users and popularity among online users.

5 Must-Have SEO Skills

In present days SEO is changing constantly. Due to this change search engine optimizers are getting a big demand. Below are the SEO skills that every search engine optimizer must follow.

Technical SEO:

  SEO is not only about keyword research and analysis. To make a website better ranking in search results a search engine optimizer must possess the knowledge about technical SEO also. Even On page and Off page optimizations are most helpful for a website to rank well in search results, code is also the major part of a website.

A search engine optimizer must learn about all technical issues like server side settings, server response codes and many more.
A perfect SEO analyst is the one who have the full knowledge in page level as well as server level optimizations.

Social Media Marketing:

We all know how social media marketing is growing widely in today's market. It is the process of getting traffic by marketing in social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, stumble upon and more. You require a strategy that suits to your business goals to market in social media.
Present SEO goal is to get traffic and attract customers through social media. So having knowledge in social media is a must.

Link Building:

 The well known fact is all search engines use links to measure the authority of a website. Link building is a method used to establish relevant, inbound links to a website to rank well in search results. In this you have to measure quality of the links not the quantity of the links.

You have so many traditional ways for link building like directory submissions, bookmarking submissions for high page rank sites and more. With this you will get permanent back links to your website.

Another important one is internal link optimization. It is not enough to do internal link optimization to your own properties; you have to do for social media pages as well.

It's not easy but is useful to get knowledge in both external link building and internal link optimization.

Usability & Information Architecture:

 Site usability is nothing but measuring how the information that you provide in your website is useful for the users, how you place the objects in a page and to check if the page is easy to navigate for the users.
Informational architecture is about the content in your website. It tells about how to organize the content, how to decide your folder structure and how you label the elements in your website and more.
These are important for a website to avoid visitors dropping.

Content Marketing:

Content is the key to attract customers. Content marketing is nothing but creating and sharing valuable content to engage customers. Once in a week changing the new content for specific topics in a website will improve the ranking in search results.

Content marketing is of two types. They are content creation and content distribution. Both are very important.

As a search engine optimizer you need to support content ideas that give more value to the users and search engines.

Three Tools & Hacks to Help Your SEO Efforts

Three things come to your mind when it comes to optimizing websites for search engines:

1.Fast loading websites
2.Advanced reporting for SEO campaigns
3.Conversions

To improve efficiency in your workflow in order to save time for thinking and experimenting rather than wasting time for repetitive work. Therefore one should use hacks and tools to make job easier.

Here the tools and hacks in the following lines:

Speedy Websites

Fast loading web pages are critical for all of us but not because Google considers the loading time in the ranking algorithm, but because to increase websites conversion better. To impress your customers show them the increase in the revenue and conversions during your SEO campaigns by making no mistake which makes your customer happy with the investment.

There are types of great tips on decreasing page loading times which usually need advanced procedures, change in design structure or resolve server configurations. To make things easily you need Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag Manager helps you to manage Google Analytics tracking codes or any other tags. The tag is written in JavaScript. So, if it works with one kind of JavaScript, it can be used anywhere.

The JavaScript codes provided by social network sites like Twitter, Google+ or Facebook slow down the speed of websites when they are repeated more than one time in a page. Remove the scripts to Google Tag Manager which helps to increase loading time down to zero.

Just copy the code provided by social networks and make sure that the tag is placed on all pages. Make sure to remove the code you placed in Google Tag Manager.

You can add the following as well to Google Tag Manager:

1.You can place web fonts, frameworks, web apps or widgets, web analytic codes including Google Analytics.
2.Move custom and inline JavaScript.

By this we can decrease the loading time of a websites.

Advanced SEO Reporting

To maintain long time relationship with your customers accurate SEO reporting is crucial.

The traffic analysis you get from Google & Google Analytics to your websites is not exactly correct, but only good thing that came out is it forces you to dig deeper and look for other key metrics to put you and your customers in right track.

Here are a few ideas for some of the reports that are parts of my SEO dashboards:

1.Landing pages for organic traffic for the webpages
2.Long tail vs. short tail traffic
3.SEO revenue and conversions rates over time

Converting Organic Traffic

Customers feel happy when they see the results even when optimization is in process but we all know that the real impact will take time.

Putting focus on getting results, you can keep customers happy and maintain good partnership with your customers.

Clients want more traffic from search engines for their websites, but what they truly want is to get more revenue out of their sites, therefore one should concentrate on getting organic traffic then revenue comes automatically.

Targeting organic traffic based on the keywords that drove the people to the website, you can use PadiAct.

When you use PadiAct a pop-up is showed to visitors that can take actions on the website matching your targeting definitions.

Email leads are sent immediately to MailChimp where you can set multiple autoresponders to convert many of the people into customers. Based on the sales information you get from the mail and you know the keyword positions that are more likely worth to invest in.

Going the Extra Mile

Social media is becoming more of a ranking factor. Why not use social network to increase your traffic.

Why Search Engine Optimization is Necessary

An important feature of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your website easy for both visitors and search engine robots to understand easily. Although search engines have developed to a high degree of complexity, in other ways search engine robots can't see and understand the webpage the same way a human does.

A Common Argument Against SEO

No one engineer would ever make a search engine that needs website to follow certain conditions and rules in order to be ranked SERP.

Suppose you uploaded online a dog photo. A human might explain it as "black colored dog, small sized dog, playing in the garden". But search engines will not understand the photo as like human being.

How to make a search engine understand a photo? The solution is; SEO allows webmasters to provide the idea or evidence that the search engines can use the content to understand easily. Adding proper structured content to your website is essential to Search Engine Optimization. In above example of dog, the solution is given the alt tag and title tag to photo. These tags are understood by the search engines easily.

Spidering and Indexing Problems

   Search engines are machine algorithm; they are not good at completing online forms like login forms. Any content containing hidden content behind the forms may remain hidden from search engines.

Website using a Content Management System (CMS) often creates duplicate versions of the same web page. The search engine robots crawl the entire original content in the webpage.

Errors in your website crawling directive (robots.txt) may lead to blocking search engines.
Poor link structure and content leads to fail of search engines to crawl all of the website content.

Content to Query Matching

Search query or text should be written in the format of people commonly used terms. Example: "food cooling units", for this keywords people commonly use "refrigerators".
Very important is Language and internationalization subtleties. For example, color as colour. Check the keyword what people are searching for and use exact match keyword in your website content.

Location targeting, like targeting content in "polish", when the maximum people who would visit your website are from Japan.

Mixed contextual signals: Suppose you post the title as "Mexico's best coffee" but the actual post is about "vacation resort or restaurants in Canada” which happen to serve great coffee. These types of mixed text or mixed posts create or send confusion signals to search engine robots.

The "Tree Falls in a Forest"

    Search Engine Optimization is not about getting the technical information of search engine friendly web development correct. Search engines are also about marketing. This is the most important concept to understand the functionality of search engines. You can build a perfect structured website, but the content can remain invisible or hidden to search engines unless you promote it.

The meaning of "tree falls in a forest" is that if no one is around to hear the sound, it may not be present at all. This translates to search engines and web content. In terms of SEO, if no one links to your web page content, the search engines may choose to ignore it.

Search engines themselves have no power to imagine (inherent gauge) of quality of the website or web page and no potential way to discover good pieces (part of web content) of content on the website. The power lies only with human beings to discover, comment and link to. Hence, the web content cannot simply be created; it must be shared, liked and talked about. Search engines are doing great job of promoting high quality content on the website that have become popular.

Source:

  http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/why-search-engine-marketing-is-necessary