Tuesday, February 26, 2013

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.