SEO Techniques for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of increasing the web site's exposure to different search engines. The goal of the search engine optimizer is to get top rankings on the search engine result page for search queries. Most of the internet users used to click on the first few results of a search, especially if their search needs were met with an exact find (maximum up to 3rd page of search engine result page). SEO techniques also help to bring new visitors to sites through referrals from many other sites and directories.

How it works!
Search engines use what is called a spider to reach out into the Internet to find new and updated websites. As a page is published, the spider stumbles upon the page depending on what words, images, video or other content is on the page. The spiders don’t actually recognize the images or the videos; they recognize the words in the description of the image or video. When someone does a search that includes these words, the search engine pulls that up in its results. These words are called keywords. The more often these keywords are used in a webpage the better chance the search engine will see it and put it up on the results. The more keywords, including combinations of keywords, the higher the page will show up in the search engine ranking.

The spider also used to refer to the Title and the Meta tags on the page, Heading, content and links to the site from other websites. But you have to make sure that you stock each of these areas well with your primary keywords (for which you are optimizing your site) but don’t overdo it because the spiders do seem to have a temper and pages do get banned. A 2% to 7% density of keywords is the preferred standard. Also it depends upon the page. If it sounds good and relevant to your page content, then there is no problem even if the percentage increases to 12.

This is why the webpage code is so important. Many people spend a lot of time making their web pages look visually appealing to people, but they don’t think about the spiders in the search engines. Spend more time on your web site’s code for search engine optimization and you will find yourself getting high rankings. I am not saying to create a page for any spider (or software), the page should be for the human visitors but should be well optimized from search engine's point of view.


SEO techniques for top ranking
Title: This is the name that you can see at the top of the window of your web browser (Blue Bar), also called the Title Bar. Make sure that your title is short and descriptive. It also needs to contain the targeted keywords that are relevant to your site. The search engines also use to show this title in the search engine results. Hence, it should clearly describe your sites content so that the users will be interested in coming to your site.

Keywords: Keywords are an important part of SEO techniques. Unfortunately many webmasters overdo it. Keywords are one of the most important factors in ranking high on search engines. You will find many tips on adding keywords, such as ALT tags, anchors and other areas. While these are meant to be used if you want to help boost your keywords, they should be relevant to the image or the place where you are linking. Many people try to stuff keywords into every possible place. As a general rule, I would say you can optimize one page with 3 keywords or phrases. I would recommend starting with one or two. But never overuse the keywords. Again, it is wise to put other relative key words (secondary & tertiary) that are similar but not quite the same as your main key words. The main benefit of using such keywords for bringing new visitors to your site through long tail key phrases. By having a wide variety and volume of key words in your webpage you may very well be the only result when someone uses one of those combinations of keywords in their search. This technique is very successful but many people do not use it. When trying to get new visitors to your site you will want to use as many strategies as possible. Using alternative keywords is a strategy that you should use for every page just like you use main keywords.

Meta tags: There are two parts to the Meta-tag:
1. Description
2. Keywords

The description should be short, but it should sound logical and descriptive to the reader. Many times this will be the text that is seen under your title during the search. You will want to give the reader a small overview of the page. Write something that will make them understand what the page is all about and force them want to click on your site.

The keywords will be the same keywords that you have thought of while running your SEO research. These are the same key words that are also in the text of your page.

Links: When other sites on the web link to your site, the search engine spider finds these links and counts it as a vote of support. The more quality pages that link to your page, higher ranking in the search engine. A great way to get one way links is directory submission. Also if you have unique and informative content on your page, then other sites will be interested in linking to your site and refer their visitors to your site.

Many websites don’t get visitors because of low search engine rankings. Use the above discussed SEO techniques to maximize your search engine rankings and achieve your objective with good number of visitors through organic results.

SEO Project - Optimization & Maintenance

SEO is a technique to increase organic traffic to a website. The main objective of SEO is to help people find the information (website) relevant to their search query. If they are looking for a keyword or a key phrase and your site's content is relevant to that searched term, then your site will show in the search engine results page and they will visit your site. Hence, SEO techniques help to get you targeted and relevant human visitors through organic methods.

Neither SEO is a rocket science nor are the techniques easy as many people think. There are many details to follow before optimizing a website. Most tasks are related to keywords, site design and architecture and at the end few off page promotions. To perform this sort of project, you will need to have some professional knowledge. On the other hand, if you prefer hiring an affordable web site marketing company or a search engine optimizer who takes on the project on behalf of clients to carry out it, then it is always good. And you will be able to find the most appropriate for you over the Internet. The role of a SEO company or an optimizer is to offer designs, new ideas, and extra information to guide its clients during the process of changing their websites.

SEO process does not only involve the optimization stage. You must also maintain your website updated by using SEO techniques. You can gain your position in the best search engines if the site is properly optimized. But again it is also difficult to sustain your position in the search engine result page. Although you can work persistently and hard to have a permanent position, it may change gradually. Therefore, you must face a SEO maintenance program. You surely make efforts to rank your website among the first positions, so it is advisable to have a person in charge of the site. Always remember, SEO is a continuous process.

SEO maintenance is not only to keep the same position but also improving it. Maintenance programs may include manual optimization of websites, content addition, blog posting, article submission, directory submission, link programs and competition analysis. Maintenance services are meant for websites that already have search engine rankings; they just want to ensure that they stay where they are and that they improve.

Proven SEO Techniques to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Getting quality and targeted traffic to the blog is one of the key objectives for any blogger. And this can be only possible if the blog is well optimized and search engine friendly so that the ranking in the search engine result page (SERP) increases and receives more organic traffic through search engines. To obtain better position in the SERP, there are few proven seo techniques and tips that can help to make the blog more search engine friendly.

Here I have discussed some of those proven seo techniques to help you get targeted traffic to your blog.

1. Content is King. Quality and informative content will keep your readers coming back to your blog more often looking for new and fresh content. Use catchy titles with one or two relevant keywords and also some relative keywords in the content so that you can get good ranking in the SERP for many long tail key phrases. You can also refer to any keyword suggestion tools available on the web to get an idea of all the relative keywords for your posts.

2. Update your blog regularly. It helps both from search engine as well as human visitor’s point of view. It Search engine spiders crawl your site more often so that the newer posts indexed quickly. Also your readers who do start trickling in have the urge to continue reading your posts. The more regularly you update your blog, the better it is from all aspects.

3. Start social bookmarking your blog and get it noticed in pinging sites and as these are places where bloggers can get extra traffic from other bloggers. It is essential to do this in order to get the traffic you deserve. Blog ping service notifies the weblog services such as Blog Search Engines and blog directories that your blog has been updated. Thus enabling them to index your blog fast and make your content available for a larger audience.

4. Start indexing your blog in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. so that your posts are crawled by the search engine spiders and your blog will rank for more number of keywords in the search engine result page.

5. Start submitting your blog to blog directories so that you get more number of back links for your blog. We all know links are one of the most important factors that can affect your ranking heavily and directory submission is one of the easiest ways of getting one way links.

6. Comment on other blogs of same niche as you but don't spam them with just 'nice blog' or 'nice post' as these comments don't have any weight. Try to engage with your fellow bloggers by leaving quality comments as that will inspire them to automatically visit your site where the comments link back to.

7. Place your Blog Url in forums and in your email signatures as this can bring extra and free traffic to your blog.

All the bloggers like to see visitors arriving at their blogs and putting their comments regarding the posts. And getting traffic to the blog does not happen automatically unless and until we do some promotional effort like I discussed here in this post. We have to promote it in order to gain the most of our blog.

Basic SEO Tips

The most important factor in seo techniques is the keyword for which you are optimizing your site. That is called as the targeted keyword. The most important thing you should know before you start optimizing your page is that the target keyword must be relevant to the content of your site. And also don't forget to include that keyword in different page element like the heading, meta tags and also use the same keyword as anchor text while linking to that page (within your site as well as linking from external sites). It is always difficult to get a top ranking for competitive keywords even if you have a good PR (page rank) and good number of quality backlinks. This is because of the lack of proper seo techniques.

Hence, you should know the following basic seo tips when targeting a keyword:

1. Never target your page with a single keyword. Use keyword combination. That means also use the relative searches for that particular keyword. It increases your sites relevancy for that keyword.

2. Use keyword suggestion tools to get an idea of secondary and tertiary keywords that people are searching. There are many popular keyword suggestion tools are available on the web like google adwords keyword tool, wordtracker etc. Some are free and some are paid. But, Google adwords keyword tool is a good one and also free.

3. Must use your keyword in heading tag, once or twice in the title and description. Do not repeat it excessively and use in such a way that it sounds good. It is against the search engine guidelines and your website can be penalized. Again, internet users always refer to the title and meta description before clicking on the site on SERP (Search Engine Result Page). So, it should be meaningful.

4. Try to keep the Title tag between 65 - 75 characters, and description should be up to 200-225 characters.

5. If you are using images, then insert alt text relevant to the image name. Use short text and if possible use keyword in the alt text.

6. Use keyword in anchor text and it must be relevant to the page content.

7. Avoid all spamming techniques like hidden text, tiny text in the body text. Also don't use excessive link building with irrelevant sites or keyword stuffing inside the site.

SEO is not a rocket science. Don't expect any break through result. Have patience. SEO is a continuous process. Keep on doing off-page seo techniques like blog posting, directory submission, article submission, and forum posting. This is why SEO is also known as Kaizen SEO means continuous incremental improvement. And remember Content is King. Hence, keep on adding good and informative content on your site relevant to your site's topic and visitors will be interested to visit your site again and again and also other sites on the web will be happy to link to your site and refer visitors to your page.

Good Luck.

SEO Techniques for more Online Traffic

If you want to attract online traffic to maximize your web site's exposure, you can't ignore Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN play a key role in getting maximum web traffic for a web site. Many studies have shown that a majority of web browsers prefer to visit sites shown by organic search results as compared to sponsored results. Hence, you have to optimize your web site if you are really concern about your web site's traffic.

SEO techniques will help you to get:
· Top rankings in the SERP

· Online Traffic

· Feed subscribers

· External Links

All the above things will contribute to enhance the value of your site as follows:

Top rankings in the SERP:

Relevant back links from quality sites will get your site achieve a better rank in the search engine result page. Once your page starts showing up in the top 10 or 20, more and more people will click on it and come to your site. So, this snowball effect will further enhance your site’s rankings.

Targeted Traffic:

You may have a great site with useful content and products/services but people won’t visit it unless they know about it. Proper SEO techniques will help popularize your site so that your site features in the search results of particular words. This will bring you the targeted traffic.

Feed subscribers:

A person who subscribes to your web feed will allow him/her to monitor your site’s changes using a feed reader. Feed readers are usually the people who are interested in your material. These people are considered the most loyal visitors to your site who have chosen to follow the content of your site on a regular basis. The feed subscribers of your site will help you to plan a strategy for wooing a broader and a general audience.

Links:

If your web site has a regular audience, chances are high that you will get links from them, especially those who offer related products/services online. Your loyal visitors can also recommend your site to their friends, thereby getting targeted traffic for you. As time passes by, more viewers will start coming to your site and induce more links to your web pages/site.

Take some time out to plan your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies to make the most of this online marketing technique. However, remember that there are no instantaneous results to show. Good SEO plans need time to implement and give you the desired results. It may take 3 – 6 months to achieve what you need through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So, have patience and let SEO magic work for your web site.

Questions to ask your Web Host

Now-a-days website became very essential for any business as the number of interent users are increasing day by day. And if you are planning to own a website for your business, you need to purchase a website from a Web Host. In this post, I have discussed few questions that you should ask the hosting company before you purchase a website. And their answers of these questions will determine if this is the right website solution for you.

Technical Support:
1. How strong is their technical support division?
2. What do they provide?
3. When are they available?
4. Does tech support cost extra?

Security:
5. How secure is the site?
6. What type of protection do they offer?
7. How can they insure that unauthorized users will not compromise the integrity of your Web site?

Storage:
8. How much storage do they offer?
9. A typical Web site uses between 20-30 MB.
10. Do they offer enough extra megabytes to for your business to grow into? 100MB is a good starting point.

Design:
14. Do they have a builder that you can manage easily?
15. What type of computer background do you need to design your site?
16. Do you have internal control over content and updates?

Email:
17. How many email aliases comes with your package?
18. Will they have your domain name in them for a more professional appearance?
19. What is the cost to add extra emails?
20. Are there any additional costs?

Search Engine Optimization:
21. Are search engine submissions included in your package?
22. How does it work?
23. Do you have internal control over content and updates?

Cost:
24. What are the costs involved?
25. What are the initial setup fees and what do you get exactly?
26. What are the monthly maintenance fees are what do they cover?
27. Are there any additional charges?
28. If so, what are they and why?

Contract:
29. Am I locked into a contract?
31. May I cancel at anytime?
32. Are there any penalty fees for switching or closing my account?
33. What happens to my content?

Value:
34. What makes them better than their competition?
35. Do they offer extra features, storage space, better technical support?
36. What exactly sets them apart?

For an added bit of information, if you are looking for web hosting company, then check out mckremie. They are a professional web hosting company that offers 24/7 US based tech support. Rated one of the best web hosting companies for personal and business websites with cPanel, MySQL, RoR, Fantastico accepting Paypal. To know more about mckremie, visit their website www.mckremie.com.

The End Of SEO

This new algorithm changes everything, effectively casting the professional SEO agencies out of business. Google have studied the art carefully and now add penalties to anyone they find who they consider are optimized too professionally. Now there are hundreds of little alarm bells built into the algorithm which automatically applies penalties to a site if they consider it to be trying too hard.

To read the full article on this topic, click here.........

Matt Cutts Shares Top 5 SEO Techniques

In a recent interview to USA today, Google Guy Matts Cutt shares top five SEO techniques that works well for search engine rankings or we can say ranking in Google. Matt Cutts also make a point to all webmasters not to overdo the techniques as that may lead to penalization or being banned in the search engines.

The top 5 SEO Techniques are:

Spotlight your search term on the page:

If you want to be found for your keyword(s), make sure that term is on the page you want to rank. The term should be at the top as well as peppered throughout your copy. After all content is the KING.

Fill in your TAGS:

The two most important tags are Title and Description b/c that’s what is displayed on the search results.
Get other sites to LINK to yours: This is one of the most important of the 100 factors Google considers when ranking sites.

Create a blog and post often:

This can help you get links.

Register for free tools:

Matt Cutts recommends using the tools at google.com/webmaster, as well as creating sitemap (XML, HTML & Text).

From the above five SEO techniques (mentioned by Matt Cutts), one thing is clear that Google still consider links to be one of the important factors, but not encouraging for link building. Hence, give more importance to your content and try to increase the number of quality links.

SEO Techniques for Web Designers

A beautiful design of a website can attract the users, but if it not properly optimized then no one will reach to the website to see the design. That means first we have to create a path. Once the path is created and visitors are coming to the site, then only we can speak about the design. An SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) optimizes a website that will help maximizing the site's exposure in search engines. But some of the seo knowledge will help the designers to make the website search engine as well as human friendly.

Here are some useful tips that will help designer to make search engine friendly website:

1. Try to focus on plain websites. It loads quickly and easily crawl by search engines.
2. Choose page name relevant to the page content and should be human-friendly. Also avoid underscore, use hyphen between the words.
3. The page should be content rich and keep the content inside the P tag.
4. Avoid use of table. If possible replace the table using div.
5. Optimize the images used on the website. It will help to increase the loading speed of images.
6. Add alt tags to the images and it should be relevant to the images (no spamming).
7. Avoid use of javascript. The javascript creates problem in crawling the pages by search engines. Use external javascript file.
8. For better navigation, use bread crumbs.
9. Create sitemap for a website. It help robots to go to any page from this page.
10. Do not add CSS in the web pages. It will make a web page heavy. Use external CSS file.
11. Remove useless text from the page like comments text.
12. Avoid use of frame.
13. Use text navigation instead of image navigation. Text navigation will help users and search engines to navigate easily and it will help to increase ranking of the page in the search engines by a particular keyword used as anchor text.
14. Keep the page size not more than 30-50 kb.
15. Use heading tags for the target keyword of the page and also for the heading of the page.

How to Improve Your Google Page Rank!

It is indispensable to have a high Google page rank (PR) for you website. This is because in order to get traffic to your site it has to be attractive to the search engines. A high PR is an indication that it is. When you consider that the most successful internet marketers achieve only 3% of conversion to sales from those who visit their websites, then the importance of a respectable page ranking and the attendant traffic becomes very important. By the way, the less successful internet marketers get only 1% conversions and those who get less usually give up on their internet marketing efforts.

Having established the importance of a good PR so that you have a good chance of exposure in top search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc and therefore a greater possibility of sales, you must optimize it for the search engines. This can be regarded as the main goal of the website owner and the webmaster. To get onto the first page of Google's search results for the keyword or the keyword phrase it what it's all about. At worst your site should be appearing on the second or third page. If it appears on any subsequent page you can pretty much accept that your website is invisible to the search engines.

It is therefore imperative to work hard to improve your Google PR. Put another way; you must not upset the Google search engines. It is not enough to work hard making your website interesting and informative. You have to make use of the best practice search engine optimization strategies to allow you to feature high in Google.

There are many SEO techniques for getting your website on top of search engine result page but there is no single best technique. You will have to take a multi-pronged approach. Use two, three or even more of these SEO techniques and you will achieve success in time.

Behind every successful website rated high on Google lies plenty of keyword research and keyword targeting. You should analyze the keyword density to sure that your content has just sufficient keywords and phrases, not too much. A 1-7% keyword density is about right. Experiment carefully and see what effect various densities have. Be careful of keyword stuffing. Google hates that and will blacklist your site.

Great content is critical to the success of your site for Google. Never forget this. Google uses "bots" or scripts that crawl through the websites seeing what is there. Original and unique content is the best. They also base your ranking on your traffic. Also work on getting links pointing to your website. Google PageRank is based on how popular your site is too and the number of inward back links is a definite indication. Remember that the more credible the site that linked you up the better. Credible websites have wait for it higher Google PR. Another way to get more links in order to improve your Google PR is to post your link in blogs and forums.

These are the SEO techniques used by webmasters to build the PR of the sites they manage. They also submit articles to article databases which have the website link attached to them. Also submit in directories to increase the PR as well as the link popularity. Anyone may use these articles as long as they include your URL at the bottom. Over time these articles propagate and earn you valuable back links. These are the tried and tested white hat SEO techniques that build Google PR.

Answers to the Questions on SEO

1. What are the most important elements of SEO?
The main elements are to ensure that the key content on site is readable by a search engine spider (i.e. in HTML text format) and that all pages on site are linked in some way via HTML text links. If this is done then your site has a chance to compete in search results. Once this is achieved then it is generally just a case of tweaking the wording, using headings for emphasis and organizing content around specific themes.

It is also crucial to give regard to page titles and the specific descriptive snippet (Meta description) that appears in search results. Having a bland or confusing listing in the results is as bad as not being there at all. The search results are the first point of sale for the business and should be treated that way.

2. How does the quality of a website impact on its search ranking?
Firstly quality encourages links. People search for quality content; people book mark quality content and people link to quality content. Ultimately it will be the relative volume (and quality) of links to your site that search engines record (as compared to a competitor) that will determine the ranking.

Secondly Google does not treat all links equally. When calculating the all important page rank it compares the content of the site providing the link with that of the destination and weights accordingly. The more relevant the association between the content on the two sites the greater value the link will be given. Therefore the higher the “quality” of the referral site the more value that will be passed on. Also Google allocates page ranking scores and these are also passed on via links. Therefore a site with “quality” page rank passes on more search engines listing value than one with a low score.

3. Should a SEO strategy take into account the differences between search engines and web directories?
In theory you could optimize for all different flavors of search engine and directory. At times the differentiation between SE and directory can also be a little hazy. Yahoo for example is, strictly speaking, a directory not a SE. However it is much more like a SE in operation than a pay to play web directory like Yellow Pages etc. So whilst you could tailor your strategy down to a really granular level based on every different type of SE and directory in practice the most cost effective way is to target Google as this has the most stringent requirements and generally speaking if you can crack Google you will also do well in the others.

With regards to the true directories I generally encourage clients to run some paid search ads to judge what are the high performing keywords and what wording works best in terms of delivering customers to the site and then use this as the basis for directory listings and refining descriptions etc for free results. So in this regard the strategy should be inclusive across all listing mediums.

4. What are some of the most common website flaws in terms of SEO?
· Key content in unreadable formats. i.e. images, flash movies, JavaScript etc
· Menu navigation that is unable to be followed by search engine spiders i.e. that using flash, images, JavaScript without having an alternate means of accessing via text links or central site map
· Bland and undersold page titles and descriptions. Every page on a web site is an opportunity to target increasingly granular themes and keywords. Many sites use a universal approach to page titles and descriptions and try and make them suit everyone and everything but the result is that they are attractive to no one.
· Lack of thought in content wording. Web copywriting is different to that required for offline purposes as it must target not only humans but search engine cataloging systems. Therefore wording needs to be tight and reinforce content themes and trigger words that someone is likely to search for.
· Attempts to spam search engines. The best results come from tightly organized and worded pages built around relevant themes and linked via consistent means to other similar pages. Excessive repetition and use of link farms etc are often counterproductive in the long term.

5. Is it better to submit a site to a search engine or let the search engine find it?
As long as you are not doing it repeatedly there is really no harm in submitting your site to a search engine although this will not necessarily speed up the indexing process. The best way to get indexed is to work to get links to your site on other sites that have already been picked up in Google and have reasonable page ranks that provide relative assurance that the Search Engines would spider them again.

One of the things that I generally get my clients to do (if appropriate) when a new site is launched is to run a few Google AdSense contextual ads on the site (at least for a little while). This will force Google to index the site so that it can serve appropriate contextual ads.

6. What sort of tactics constitutes ‘SEO spam’ and what are the consequences?
The difference between good SEO and bad SEO is often simply a question of degree. A few highly optimized landing pages can provide great results in delivering searchers deep into the site and streamline this process for all concerned. Taken to the extreme this can turn into link farms with pages of links bouncing users and spiders around annoyingly.
Generally speaking the following are things to be careful of:
· Link farming. Pages of links linking to each other and set up for the purposes of passing on search engine points rather than providing value to customers.
· Over optimizing through repetition. Just repeating the same keyword over and over provides little value. The key is to provide context not rubbish. Read it aloud if it sounds clumsy rewrite it.
· Invisible text. E.g. White text on a white background so that the search engines pick it up but is invisible to naked eye. Search engines are smart enough to pick this up now.
· Using redirects or other forms of cloaking to serve different content to search engine spiders than to browsers.

7. If a website is properly search engine optimized, is it really necessary to pay for search results?
The organic search indexing system is often slow. It can take up to 3 months for any site changes to get picked up therefore paying to play is often the only way to legitimately get quick results. Also with search marketing it is really a case of page one or oblivion. If the keyword that you are targeting is very popular and competitive then it will take longer to get to the first page of the search results. Paid search is often the only way to get there in the short term.

SEO and SEM (Paid Search Engine Marketing) should really be considered complimentary strategies because they can feed off each other. Running PPC ads enables you to get great feedback on what customers are looking for and the most successful sales pitches that deliver them to your site. These can then be fed into your onsite SEO to refine it. The idea being that you run SEM up until you can get in the page one listings for free and then you can divert the spend elsewhere.

8. What four search engines comprise 90%+ of all general (non site-specific) web search traffic?
Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask, though AOL would also be acceptable (AOL, however, pulls its search results from Google and is thus more of a portal that includes Google’s search engine than a true search engine itself).

9. Explain the concept - “the long tail of search.”
The long tail is an economic theory of demand. It posits that in the modern American economy, there are popular products and unpopular products in every sector and segment of demand and that, in any of those given sectors, a demand curve exists with a few popular products that have high demand and a great number of unpopular products that have a much smaller amount of demand per product. Long tail theory says that in any given demand curve, the “tail” or unpopular products, when combined, will have a greater amount of demand than the popular products at the “head.’

10. Name the three most important elements in the head section of an HTML document that are employed by search engines.
Title, Meta Description and Meta Robots are the big 3. Although Meta Robots isn’t essential to have, it’s certainly able to control spider and search activity. Meta keywords is another common answer, but it would rank as a distant 4th, as our experiments show that none of the major engines will rank a page for a keyword that is listed only in the Meta keywords tag.

11. How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
The engines all interpret content in an embedded IFrame as belonging to a separate document from the page displaying the IFrame content. Thus links and content inside IFrames refer to the page they come from, rather than the page they are placed on. For SEO, one of the biggest implications of this is that links inside an IFrame are interpreted as internal links (coming from the site the IFrame content is on) rather than external links (coming from the site embedding the IFrame).

13. What action does Google threaten against websites that sell links without the use of “nofollow”?
Google’s Matt Cutts has noted that pages and sites caught selling links for manipulative purposes may have their ability to pass PageRank (or other link juice weighting factors) removed.

14. What is the difference between local link popularity and global link popularity?
Local link popularity refers to links from sites in a specific topical neighborhood, while global link popularity doesn’t discriminate and counts all links from any site on the web.

15. Name four types of queries for which Google provides “instant answers” or “onebox results” ahead of the standard web results.
Flight searches, such as Seattle to Chicago; recipe searches such as chicken recipes; image searches such as those for Hopper paintings; stock quotes like GE stock quote and many more. Google lists them all on their features page. Of course, they neglected to mention our favorite.

16. Describe why flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than deep site architecture.
Flat architectures on websites allow spiders to crawl a large amount of pages without having to spider through many “clicks” or different pages to reach those links. A deep site architecture will force bots to crawl to many pages before being able to reach all of the content on a site. Flat site architecture provides three primary bonuses - first, search spiders are more likely to visit all of the content; second, the spiders are more likely to discover and index new content more quickly (as they don’t have to visit as many pages to be exposed to new content); third, PageRank and link juice is more effectively passed with fewer pages and more links rather than more pages with fewer links, helping to keep content ranking and out of the (now defunct) supplemental results.

17. What are most famous Directories, supported by google, name some directories, what is open directory project.
DMOZ, Yahoo dir
DMOZ supported by Google.
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. DMOZ is open directory project.

18. Types of link Exchange?
1 way, 2 way (reciprocal), 3 way.

19. Name top search engines.
Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, ASK, Altavista, search.com, lycos.com, hotbot.com.

20. From where you could get the traffic information?
Alexa.com

SEO Interview Questions

Going into an interview unprepared is foolish. And if you’re looking for an SEO position, the followings are some questions you must be familiar with before you head into it.

Technical

Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn’t need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.

1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. What do you think of PageRank?
4. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
5. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
6. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
7. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
8. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
9. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
10. Have you ever had something you’ve written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be stumbled?
11. Explain to me what META tags matter in today’s world.
12. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
13. If the company whose site you’ve been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
14. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important “on page” elements
15. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
16. What do you think about link buying?
17. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
18. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?
19. What role does a social medium play in an SEO strategy?
20. What things wouldn’t you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
21. What’s the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
22. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

Analysis
A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.

1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between users from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
5. If you’ve done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven’t been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
6. How many target keywords should a site have?
7. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
8. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?
9. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Industry Involvement

Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.

1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore - what is ‘Big Daddy’? —à Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
3. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
4. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
5. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
6. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
7. Who is Matt Cutts?
8. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?

Open-Ended
These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they’re actually a good opportunity to shine.

1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get “xyz” company listed for the keyword “Google” in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

In my next post I will discuss the answers of these questions.

Advantage of Organic SEO over PPC

Despite the fact that both organic SEO and PPC are part of the same system (Search Engine Marketing), there are a few essential factors that distinguish organic SEO from PPC and make it much better. Some of the benefits organic SEO has over PPC are discussed below.

Provides Long Term Solutions

Organic search results might be slow in listing the websites, but its listing is a much more stable and helpful in long run. The search listing which appears through organic search is a more permanent one than PPC which generally runs for a specified time span after which it dissolves and disappears.

Higher CTR

Research proves that the end users to have a tendency of clicking on the organic results more than the paid listings that appear on the search engine result pages. This makes the click through rates (CTR) of organic SEO almost 70% higher than those of the paid search results.

Quality Traffic

Since the organic SEO are mostly dependent on keywords, that are selected after a proper research and survey on user tendency and demographics is conducted, it suggests that the traffic too will be saturated and of good quality too. The search engine techniques is entirely based on keywords, the end users type in a keyword relevant to their search and the search engines display results that match with their requirements. This makes an evident that the users will only type what they are looking for, and will land into your page only if it is relevant to their search. Therefore, the possibility of having low quality traffic is comparatively low here.

More Sources of Traffic

Unlike PPC campaigns that only depend on keyword bidding, the organic SEO also involves a number of other techniques of attracting traffic as well which makes it double effective than the PPC. The natural or organic search also includes article submission, blog posting, link building, directory submission and many more off page promotions to help enhance the traffic flow to a website.

Low Cost Marketing

The last and the most important difference between organic search and PPC is that the former is a no cost search promotion technique. Organic SEO does not require you to spend any many on marketing, unlike PPC where, one has to keep paying the search engines every time a click is generated.

I would say Organic SEO is the best way of optimizing websites. You bring in traffic by using content that works and also by adding value via interactivity and a great user experience.

SEO Techniques - Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of any online business who wants to do well. Without SEO, your products and services may never reach the potential clients even if your products or services are the best among all others. If you are an SEO specialist then you must know about all the SEO techniques which are used for promotion of your site which include both ethical SEO techniques that is recommended by search engines, and also the unethical SEO techniques that are discouraged by the search engines.

White Hat SEO (The Recommended Way)
White hat SEO refers to the SEO techniques that goes with the guidelines laid down by search engines and are considered as ethical search engine optimization techniques. These include high quality and updated content, proper use of keywords and metadata, use of alt tags, descriptive file names, user friendly internal navigation structure, SEO link building including internal links, and other such SEO strategies which the search engines recommend. In white hat SEO techniques, the pages are built keeping the human visitors in mind. They do not try to deceive humans or the search engines. Implementing these natural search engine optimization techniques may take a little time and effort, but their results last a longer time and you don’t have to worry about having your site banned by search engines for use of deceptive practices.

Black Hat SEO (The Unethical Way)
Black hat SEO on the other hand refers to all the unethical search engine optimization techniques which the search engines discourage. These consist of keyword stuffing, hidden text, meta tag stuffing, doorway pages, hidden links, using link farms, cloaking, and other such search engine optimization techniques. The pages in black hat SEO are built not for humans but for the search engine spiders. They are designed to get better rankings on major search engines. The flip side is that they run the risk of being banned by the search engines once they are found out. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN believe that pages should be built for humans and provide them the information and data they are looking for. By using Black hat SEO techniques you build pages for the spiders to trick them and in turn give your visitors a bad experience.

Choosing Between the Two (The Grey Hat)
What SEO techniques you choose is entirely upon you. While white hat SEO will take you time and efforts, it will give long lasting results and can be helpful in long run. On the other hand, black hat SEO will probably give you much faster results, maybe even getting you in the top slot, but runs the risk of getting your site banned from the search engines. Standing in the middle, or using a mix of the two, can prove beneficial only if the amount of black hat SEO tactics incorporated in your search engine optimization strategy is the minimum basic.

As you increase your black hat tactics more, you increase your chances of being banned. On the other hand, using a few tactics to get quick results till your white hat SEO tactics start showing results may be okay if you are sure to remove the black hat techniques soon. But if you can, it would be best to avoid all the black hat techniques and stick to ethical search engine optimization. It would give you good results that last longer.

Needless to say, an ethical SEO company will follow only white hat methods and you can blindly rely upon them with their organic SEO services to keep your websites up on grounds of ethical search engine optimization.

SEO Techniques - Techniques that Need to be Avoided

The search engines are aware of the many sneaky ways that webmasters (or search engine optimizers) try to achieve high ranks. In SEO industry, these sneaky activities are called as spamming techniques. If search engines discover that you are trying to cheat them by any of the following black hat SEO techniques, your site may be penalized! Your rank may be downgraded, or your page or even your whole site could be banned. Even if your site is never caught and punished, it’s very likely, we dare say inevitable, that you’re tricky SEO techniques will eventually stop working. The followings are few of those Black Hat SEO techniques that have been on the search engines’ no-no list for so long that they can safely be labeled as “Eternally Bad for your Site”.

When a search engine robot visits your site, it expects to see the same content that any normal human visitor would see. Cloaking is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them special, custom-made pages that are different from what human visitors see and only optimized for getting traffic for a particular search term which is not relevant to the page's content. This thwarts the search engines in their attempt to deliver the most accurate search results to their users. In the vast universe of website technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not one of them.

Duplicate content Are you the kind of person who thinks, “If one aspirin works, why not take two?” If so, you might be thinking that if one paragraph of keyword-rich text will help your ranks, why not put it on every page in your site? Or worse, if one website brings you sales, why not make a bunch of identical websites with different names and get even more sales? The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the big headache it causes for searchers. If the search engines listed identical content multiple times, it would destroy the diversity of their results, which would destroy their usefulness to the searcher. So, if the search engines catch on to duplicate content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks.

Keyword stuffing is the technique of adding a keyword list to the visible text on your page is not exactly scintillating copy. I am not talking about overly optimized text, which may come off as pointless and dry. I am talking about repeating the same word or words over and over again so that your page looks like an industry-specific grocery list. At best, sites that do this cause eyestrain for their visitors. At worst, they’re risking penalties from the search engines. There’s a place for your keywords list. It’s called your Meta keywords tag. Avoid Keyword Stuffing at all costs.


The spamming techniques that I discussed above are needed to be avoided if you really want to build a Search Engine friendly site. A site should be build for human visitors not for search engine spiders.

Advantage of Organic Search Engine Rankings

PPC is the best way to get people to your website instantly. Still the benefits of organic search engines rankings can easily ignore the advantages of PPC. And when I say organic search engine rankings, I’m talking about the non-sponsored results you see on the left hand side of the screen when you do a search in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or your favorite search engine.

I want to take a few minutes here to explain why every webmaster needs to be spending at least a little time making sure their website is optimized for the search engines.

Ad Blindness

Almost 80% web users ignore PPC advertising. Although the Ads show up on the page, but the savvy Internet users don’t even see them. They’re only concerned with the “natural” or “organic” listings. That means that if you are using only PPC to generate revenue for your business, you’ll be busy fighting with all the other advertisers for a mere 15% of the market while those who focused on getting high search engine rankings (for organic listings) have 100% of market available to them.


Organic Listings More Trusted

There is also a trust factor for organic listings. People are naturally skeptical of advertisers. It’s just the nature of the beast. In fact, over 90% of Internet users trust the organic search engine results more than they trust sponsored results. As you may be starting to realize you’re facing an uphill battle when a visitor does decide to click on your PPC advertisement. Not only are most of users ignoring you, eliminating a big portion of your potential market, most of them are clicking on your ad with a lot of skepticism.


Organic Listings Are Free

And if the fact that your message is more trusted and not ignored with natural search engine rankings haven’t convinced you to at least give it a try, then you may want to know that natural search engine rankings are Free! You don’t have to pay to get a top search engine ranking, and you never have to pay a fee when someone clicks on a link to visit your website. While not all search engine rankings last, especially if you neglect them, some of them can last indefinitely. If you have a quality website that ranking in top 10 search engine rankings, then it is easy to maintain the position by just updating it frequently. But you have to maintain the relevancy of your site’s content, i.e. never focus on a single topic.

If you’re not already taking advantage of natural search engine rankings to drive traffic (and sales!) to your website, then it’s time to get started. And SEO Techniques is the process by which you can maximize your site’s exposure in different search engines and improve your ranking in organic listings.

SEO Techniques: Link Building

Inbound links are one of the main factors for ranking well for competitive keywords. But only number of inbound links can't do the job for you. Inbound links are only helpful when it is a one-way link or a relevant link for your site. That's why there is always two opinions regarding link building.

Link Building and Its History

It started off long back when Google implemented the Pagerank concept in the Search Algorithm. Webmasters all over the world started misusing them for their own benefit. Concepts like Link Farms and bad neighborhood came into effect. Thanks to Google that took evasive measures to tackle this kind of spam through their numerous updates.


Link Building for Google

From my experience I can say that it is really tough to make your way to the top ten in Google for competitive keywords. Google considers Link as a vote of support from a site to another site on the web. And for that you have to pick quality links. Editorial links are the preferred ones but even links given out by other sites are appreciated. Link bought through any kind of network or Paid Links are the typical links that can harm you in the process and the effect may vary from poor performance to getting banned from Google.


Link Building for Yahoo and MSN

For Yahoo and MSN the case is different. If you have proper structure with great navigation, content, and few numbers of links, then you have good chance to rank for fairly competitive keywords.


Important Point to remember while Link Building

1. Do not link out to bad neighborhood site.
2. Always check the link provided to you.
3. Before giving a link out to any site think how it would help your visitors.
4. Getting a link from related site is much more appreciated.
5. Check the Anchor Text and the position of the link.
6. Check the Anchor Text of the link pointing out to the site linking to you.
7. Prefer directories for best one way links.
8. Editorial links are preferred ahead of other links.


Effect of Links in Search Engine Ranking

The followings are the metrics that Search Engines consider when weighting links. All these can affects rankings positively or negatively.

1. Anchor text (when it matches queries, it can have a significant positive impact)
2. Placement on the page
3. PageRank of the linking page
4. Trust in the linking domain
5. Link structure in HTML (inside an image, javascript, standard a href, etc.) - although Javascript links are sometimes followed, they appear to provide only a fraction of the link weight that normal links grant. Likewise, links from images (and anchor text in the form of alt text) appears to provide somewhat less weight than standard HTML links.
6. Nature of the link (when it appeared, how long it stays on the page for, etc.) - can affect how much weight the link is given and be used to identify patterns that may indicate manipulation
7. Use of nofollow
8. Relevance of page content to linked-to page
9. Relevance of site to linked-to page
10. Text surrounding the link
11. Number of outbound links present in the linking page
12. Previous link relationships between the domains (if the page/site has already linked to the page/site in the past, it may be given less weight and this may also be used to identify and discount reciprocal linking schemes)
13. Hosting relationships (if the domains are hosted on the same IP address, or same c-block of IP addresses, the link may lose some of its weight)
14. Registration relationships (if the domains share registration information, it may be interpreted as less editorial and given less weight)


Factors Affecting Link Building

1. The traditional mutual linking between sites. This process is termed as reciprocal linking. However, the SEO’s are of the opinion that this strategy of link building has been diminished by Google. There is also a belief that the better strategy of building links with sites of relevant content.

2. The three-way link (also known as triangular linking) is the method of linking the site A and site B for a link back from another site. It is a much developed and modern strategy of link building than the two-way method. The Two-way linking is not in practice since they seem to be similar to the one-way linking to Google. However there are Search Engine optimizers who are of the opinion that the Google identifies three-way linking and there is often the risk of penalties.

3. This is the three-way link method where linking is done from a different site instead of a link from the site A. The benefit of this type of link building is that there is no need of the outbound links in case of the site A. However the SEO’s are of the opinion that site A might be have to suffer penalties from Google.

4. The four-way linking is favored by few webmasters. They have the same advantages and disadvantages like the number two and number three methods as discussed above.

5. Article links: An informative article with links displayed in the middle or at the end of the article. These articles are provided to the webmasters free of cost as content for their sites in return of the link in the site of the client. There is a belief that the publication of the article on different sites might result into some problem since it has the duplicate content and the links of the articles are also similar. A number of these articles are submitted to “article farms”. It is advisable to offer unique articles on the webmaster but producing many of the unique articles is often expensive.

6. One-way link is also considered to be effective. Even though these one way links come from the sites having low page rank these are considered to be effective. However SEO’s are of the opinion that one-way link from FFA’s and the directories are considered to be spam by Google. It is essential to find out related sites in order to avoid being marked as spam by Google. However, this method seldom works.

7. Buying Links - This is the technique of buying text links along with keywords. It is stated in the guidelines for webmasters that Google does not support buying of links. There is also a method of reporting against the sites that buy links. Few of the SEO’s think that Google creates this fear among people so that people buy Adwords instead of advertising somewhere else. The SEO’s also believe that buying banner ads is better than text links since Google cannot consider them as Spam. If the text based ads are sponsored link then text based ads are not a better idea. Some SEO are of the view that if there is no keyword in the link anything can be done for reputation. It is also possible to detect reputation from site where the banner is.

8. We consider A as the site that we are trying to promote. The best strategy is to create various information sites with relevant content on the different IP C-blocks in order to “take the fall”. If you follow this strategy then site A will receive links from links from other sites like site B, C and D. The sites B, C and D participate in the different linking activities with the purpose of creating Page Rank. This might be considered spam.

9. You can also build a site naturally. The best way is to create excellent content. It is an easy way to promote a site that is informative but is not ideal for commercial site. However it is pretty time-taking affair.

10. It is a combination of all the above strategies. However, Google can punish a site for any of the strategy and may not be aware of the strategy.

Negative SEO Techniques

SEO is the technique to maximize a site's exposure in different Search Engines. There are number of factors need to be taken into account while optimizing a website to be search engine and user friendly, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags, backlinks and many others. Following are some of the factors or techniques negatively affecting the SEO industry:

• Dynamically created pages

• Sub Domains

• Cloaking (or Masking)

• Spamdexing

• Link Spamming

• Page Jacking

• Mirrored (or duplicate) websites

• Hidden Text

• Doorway pages

1. Dynamically created pages

Dynamically created pages are web pages which have more than one parameter in a website URL. Such type of pages in a website is database driven. Multiple parameters in a dynamic URL (?, .php, .pl, .cgi extension) can often mean that a search engines spider will choose to ignore the document. So, such URLs are not very search engine friendly.

Google is presently able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because their web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, they limit the amount of dynamic pages they index. So, Search Engine representatives have long urged webmasters to limit dynamic parameters to two, optimally to one so that spiders will easily crawl them.

2. Sub Domains

Many large Web portals and online retailers structure their sites using subdomains. A subdomain lets you brand your different specialties with your primary domain name. Subdomains are considered to be independent web sites even though they may share the same IP address. But do check with your Web host to make sure you are sharing an IP address with legitimate sites. Otherwise, this could get your site banned from search engines. Some legitimate sites make the mistake of using duplicate content in their subdomains. This can also make the search engines treat duplicate content in subdomains particularly harshly.

3. Cloaking (or Masking)

Cloaking is the SEO process of delivering one version of a page to a user, and a different version to another user such as a search engine. The benefit is code and copyright protection. We can custom build a page for the user. If the user is a search engine, we want to give it our best most optimized stuff. If it is a user, we want to give it a pretty page that is tricked out for navigation and usability.

Mouse-over cloaking is a new SEO technique used widely now-a-days. When a visitor clicks on a website after performing a search query in the search engines, they are directed to another web page, but the search engines have indexed it highly. With just the slightest jostle of their mouse, the visitor is quickly re-directed to the site which has allegedly been “SEO optimized.”

4. Spamdexing

Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately and dishonestly manipulating search engines by SEO's to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results. Such as:

Metatag Stuffing: Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the website's content.

Keyword Stuffing: Repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Presently, search engines have the ability to analyze a page for Keyword stuffing and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level. The keyword density of a webpage should be between 2% - 7%.

5. Link Spamming

Link Spamming is the process of submission of pages that are intended to rank artificially high by various unethical techniques. These can include submitting hundreds of slightly different pages designed to rank high, small invisible text, or word scrambled pages. Such as:

Link farming: A set of web pages that have been built for the sole purpose of increasing the number of incoming links to a web site. Link farms are a known SEO spam tactic and sites that participate in them are likely to be penalized or banned from the major search engines.

6. Page Jacking

When your competitor gets a high ranking page under quality keywords, the first thing that will happen is your competitor's page gets stolen (called Page Jacking). It is the SEO process of duplicating a high ranking competitor’s page, but the page is redirected to your website. Many search engines, upon seeing a duplicate page will delete the competitor’s website from the directory leaving the fake page in its place.

7. Mirrored (or Duplicate) Websites

Mirrored websites are nothing but, creating duplicate sites having the same images & the content with the same number of pages in both the websites. In this case, one of the website stands a high chance of being rejected by the search engines for indexing.

8. Hidden Text

Hidden text is links with the same background color as that of the website. This SEO spam technique is used to increase your page rank of your website.A user to your site may accidentally land to this hidden link & the page thereafter.

9. Doorway pages

A doorway page is simply an additional page on your website that is created to target a specific keyword not related to the website and then submitted to the search engines. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a website and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include websites with unsavory or illegal content.

So be aware of the above explained negative factors while optimizing a website.

RSS Feed Optimization

In some ways RSS is very similar to HTML, the language commonly used to create websites. Just as with HTML, webmasters using traditional search engine optimization tactics when creating an RSS feed will find that their RSS feed receives additional exposure and interest.

Simple steps to optimize a RSS feed for search engines:

1) Title Should Contain Important Search Terms
To state the obvious, the title should be relevant and not misleading, while still emphasizing keywords. Ultimately, the title should entice the reader to read on, not mislead them.

2) Display RSS Feeds
Most webmasters display their feeds as content on their website. When displaying a feed be sure to use PHP, ASP or HTML so that search engines will spider the contents of the feed displayed. If using a template to display feeds, use header tags to define the appearance of the Channel Title and Item Titles. Many search engines weight header tags with more importance.

3) Internal & External Links
Within a feed you should always use the full path of any links, keeping in mind that other sites may syndicate the contents of the RSS feed. Links that are not local to the site should launch a new browser. While this is not specific to search engines it will help keep visitors on your site.

4) Link Text Should Emphasize Keywords
It is no longer a deep, dark secret that the text used for incoming links will help a site contextually define the keywords that the site appears for in the search engines. Keeping that in mind, be sure to use keywords in any link text that points back to your website.

5) My Yahoo and My MSN
This is surprisingly simple to do but often overlooked by publishers and webmasters. The fastest way to have an RSS feed spidered by Yahoo or MSN is to include the feed on a personal my.yahoo or my.msn home page. Simply create an account on the respective search engines and customize the home page to include your RSS feed. This is done by adding content and listing the URL to the RSS feed. Typically, within 24-48 hours the feed's contents will be spidered and indexed by Yahoo and MSN.

6) Theme Feeds
Feeds should be themed. This will help with themed links back to a publisher's website from anyone syndicating the feed's content.

7) Link Popularity
Increase link popularity by submitting the RSS feed, blog or podcast to the appropriate directories. The following directories allow submissions of specific kinds of RSS feeds. Be sure to follow the guidelines of each site and choose categories wisely.

Submit Podcasts - http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm

Submit RSS feeds - http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

Submit Blogs - http://www.blog-connection.com/submit-blogs.htm

8) RSS Feed Descriptions
RSS feed descriptions are generally summaries or introductions to other content. Often, feed creators will provide additional information on an HTML site, enticing the reader to click through for the full information if it is a topic that is of interest to them. Provide enough teaser copy that the reader can easily discern if the contents are something that is important to them.

9) Subscribe to Feeds
This might seem obvious, but a surprisingly large number of publishers do not subscribe to their own feed. This is a great way to visualize what your customers see, and experiment with formatting and integrating HTML into feeds.

10) Image Ads
Add your corporate logo to your RSS feed. Create a brand and enforce that brand by including the image in the RSS feed. The image will enhance your corporate identity and dress up the look of your feed by adding your corporate logo.

11) Alphabetical Rank
Many feed readers list feeds alphabetically in the reader. Feed channels that begin with A will naturally appear in the top of the feed list in most feed readers. If you wish to appear in the top of list of feeds that a reader has subscribed to, keep this tip in mind.

12) Meaningful Links
Each item in your feed should contain a unique URL associated with it. This will direct users to associated information. Many find using target URLs with the "#" symbol in the link to identify specific content useful.

Most marketers have a love-hate relationship with search engines. Search engines have the abilitiy to make even the most confident webmaster feel powerless . Let's face it - all of us have felt the wrath of the search engine powers-that-be at one time or another, and while it may be difficult to know what line was crossed or how we fell out of favor, following some basic guidelines will be helpful in optomizing feeds for search engines.

Tips on SEO Techniques

Keyword Research

Research the best keywords for your website - The first and most important step in SEO techniques. But this is a common that Optimizers do while choosing the keywords they want to optimize their website for. The best way to do this is to do some research. Use some of the tools available out there to find which keywords are the best for your particular website. These include tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Keyword Overture Tool, WordTracker, etc.

This is not always best to optimize for the most searched keywords. Sometimes it can be too generic. Suppose you have a site on Financial Planning that helps you to find financial planners. Then the keyword “financial planners” is too generic to be of any real use. But in addition to this it might also not be targeted enough. Again, “financial planners” can mean so many things to so many people. Therefore you should opt for some different, more targeted keywords like "find a financial planner".


Keyword in Title Tag

Insert your keyword in your title tag. You should use different and unique titles on each page of your website. The idea is that you should try to be creative and include your keyword when it makes sense. Don’t go overboard and stuff it in everywhere, Google will notice and most likely reduce your search ranking. Just do it where it makes sense.


Meta Tags (Meta Description, Meta Keywords)

Meta tags still have importance in SEO techniques. Search Engines use your Meta description tags in their search engine result page (SERP) and often users refer to your Meta tags before clicking on the links to your site in the SERP. Hence, you should optimize your Meta description properly (means your targeted keywords should be there in the description and clearly specifies what your site is all about).

Even there are some Search engines that still refer to your Meta keywords tag. So, don’t think they have no value. Although not as much as before, they are valuable especially if you don’t stuff them with irrelevant keywords.


Use Headers to emphasize your Keywords

Headers in the sections of your page content often highlight what the chapters are about. Hence, use Header tags to your advantage to separate out sections when it makes sense. And if possible, use your keyword in the section title, but don’t overdo, only use if it makes sense.


Addition of Alt Text

There are many websites have images but no alternative text for the images. Search Engines can’t parse your images. That's why they look at your alternative text for clues. So add alternative text. Put a comment stating what the image is about. Even you can include your keyword in the alt tags.


Keywords in the Content

Use your keyword in your content. If you don’t use, then how the search engines know about that keyword. And of course, use them when it is required. Many times, you will find posts in the forums and blogs on Keyword Density like what should be the keyword density in a page. From my personal experience I can say there is no fixed keyword density. You can use a keyword in your page as many times you want but should be meaningful and sound good.


Keywords in the Anchor Text

Google also uses the anchor text of a link to determine what a website is about and use it heavily as one of the ranking factors. The idea is that if a lot of websites are linking to yours with similar anchor text, then most likely that’s what you’re about. Anchor text is the textual part of the link that tells the people where they will be moving. But, don't use same anchor text in all your links, because search Engine may consider it as a spam.


Highlight the Keywords

It’s a known fact that most website visitors scan text. They look for bold text, italicized text. Basically whatever text that stands out. Google’s also figured this out and will give more weight to your text that’s highlighted in some way, such as bolded text. Hence use these techniques to make your text scannable, but use it to your advantage for SEO purposes when appropriate. If you have scannable text, check to see if it makes sense to add your keywords too.


Use of Keywords in the Filenames

Google also looks at the filenames to see what your WebPages are about. Hence, use keywords for the file names.


Internal Navigation Structure

Every page should be reachable within 2 links. Google will only look at your site within a limited depth. A good rule of thumb is to keep all your content within 1 to 2 links of your main page. In other words, you should be able to reach any page you want Google to index within 1 to 2 links from your main page. Anything beyond that is not likely to be indexed.


Competitors Analysis

Look at what your competitors are doing. Like which keywords they are targeting, list those sites that are linking to your competitors and what is the specialties in their sites. Once you know, use this knowledge to your advantage. Improve your own website.


Try to get External Links with your Keyword in the Anchor Text

On-page SEO techniques are not the only thing you do to increase your search engine rankings. Google has realized that the more people link to you with a specific anchor text, the more likely it’s what you’re about. Again, the links are considered as a vote of support to your site by the other sites and the basis of this the PageRank of your site is determined. And we all know PageRank has to do a lot for ranking in Google.


All the above seo techniques I discussed are really helpful for getting rank in the SERP. Using these SEO techniques in your site in an ethical manner will help you in achieving your goal.

SEO Techniques: On-page Optimization Tips

SEO Techniques is broadly divided into two categories.

1. On-page optimization

2. Off-page optimization

The on-page optimization is very important to make your site search engine friendly. The on-page SEO techniques maximize your site's exposure to the search engine and have a significant impact on your ranking in the SERP. The followings are some of the On-page optimization tips that can help you build a search engine friendly website.

1. Keyword in the Title

You should add your main keywords in the title tag. This is important to have these keywords in the title because to give the search engine spiders an idea that your web page is related to the topic of that keyword.

2. Keyword in the Meta Description

It is also very important to put these keywords within the meta description tag, this will add more relevance to your web page about the topic.

3. Headings

You may also add the primary keyword in the headings especially. You should also stick the main keyword at the top of your page.

4. Anchor Text used in Inner links

You should make the inner links with the anchor texts of the optimized keywords of every web page. Search engine consider it as one of the ranking factor and can really helpful for you to achieve top ranking in the SERP.

5. Bold keyword

You may bold the main keyword at least one time with in the web page.

6. Keyword Density

Distribute the main keyword through the page. Distribute your main keyword through the page as many times possible. Of course, don't forget about relevancy. Try to put the keywords in the content but it should meaningful and sounds good.

7. Alt Tag

Use Alt image text for the images in your page and put your keywords in these Alt tags.

8. Sitemap

You should have a sitemap for your site and the link to the sitemap should (recommended) present anywhere in the Home Page of your site. If possible have an XML sitemap for your site and submit it in Google. It allows Google to crawl your site more frequently and can put an impact on your ranking.

9. Internal Navigation Structure

Make your internal navigation structure user friendly. Use Breadcrumb in your site.

Remember search engine like sites that are made for human visitors, not for spiders. So, try to build a site that can make your visitors to visit your site again and again.

Important SEO Techniques

Search engine optimization is a technique that is used to achieve high rankings on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) in order to maximize your site's traffic. People might regard optimization as a big problem and waste of money. But optimization is the only thing which helps your website or your business to reach your potential customer. Hence, it is important to identify what SEO Techniques need to be performed. In this post you'll find a brief idea of few most important techniques of SEO.

Proper Title & Meta Tags

A title tag is an HTML code that appear in the top bar of your Web browser. It shows the words which describe your web page. Search engines use your title tag to explore your website. These are the words which appear in the clickable link on the SERP. Users decide whether your site will be relevant or not through these title tags. Your website can attain good search page ranking if it features searched keywords in the Title tag. Similarly, The meta description tag describes your site's content. It is important because some search engines use it as a site's summary on their results pages. The meta description tag should contain multiple keywords organized in a logical sentence. Place the keywords at the beginning of your description and close to each other to achieve the best possible rankings.

Site Submission

Submit your website in as many free directories and search engines as possible. Search engines are your medium to travel to your visitors hence pay special attention towards these engines. Make sure your site is well indexed in major search engine. It's not necessary that you will be featured in the first pages of search engines but if you focus on other factors then later you can be in the first page.

Reciprocal Links

Don't rely on one way link building. I am not saying one-way link will not be helpful, but practically it is really difficult to get one way links unless you have such content in your site. If you are getting some good sites that are relevant to your site, then there is no harm to exchange link with them. But, make sure your link should be exchanged properly and your links are visible.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the actual text part of a link and used by search engines as an important ranking factor.But putting same anchor text in every page may result in making you a spammer in search engine's eye. Have different anchor text and make sure you don't repeat this text inadvertently.

Site Map

A site map is a textually organized model of a Web site's content that allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for, just as a traditional geographical map helps people find places they are looking for in the real world. Site map is the most important step towards achieving a well optimized site. Site map enables search engines to know about your website. A well crafted site map helps your users to navigate easily within your website. I would suggest you to have both html (for Human and Yahoo) and xml (for Google) sitemap for your site.

Link Farm

Link farms are the link building farms which guarantee you to give thousands of links instantly. Try not to depend solely on link farms exchange links directly with the websites. This gives you the idea about the site and whether the particular link exchange will work for you or not.

Unique and Fresh Content

The information about a site is its content. Content is the king and hence it should be given a royal treatment. Your content should be distinct and relevant. Unique content increases your chances to attain a top PR in major search engines. Because, both human visitors or search engine spiders will come to you only when they find you different from the other websites.