SEO Expert Blog

7 Tips for Making The Most of The Sales Period

2011-12-21T05:40:00.000-08:00

As it’s nearly the January sales, we have drawn up a special report on sales including the helpful advice of an e-commerce specialist: Peggy André. “In some sectors, the January sales can represent 10 – 20% of the annual turnover”. A vitally important period therefore, which all e-merchants must “thoroughly prepare for.” The manager of Bagatelle.fr and member of the last PrestaShop Awards panel offers you these 7 tips for maximizing your sales in this period.

1) Attractive discounts

The sales allow you to sell off seasonal items and products that you do not intend to reorder. At this time of year, a lot of stores offer absolutely unbeatable discounts. “A reduction of less than 30% is not particularly attractive to Internet users who can get an immediate discount of 50 – 60% from many well known brands” Peggy André informs us. Don’t hesitate, therefore, to offer big discounts. The aim being to sell off your stock but also increase traffic on your site. You must take the attitude that “stock lying idle means less income for a company! So it is better to sell your products cheaply than for them to remain unsold for months.”

www.officemax.com

2) “Spoil” your most loyal customers

Make your best customers happy by offering them “a sales preview, with sale items sold exclusively to them before anybody else.” The objective: spoiling them so that they return to buy from your site. This practice is common. “Many ready-to-wear companies offer it to customers with loyalty cards – why not in e-commerce?” asks Peggy André. To decide which customers should benefit from this special event, look in your database and select “your biggest spenders and most regular buyers.”

3) Announce your sales

As for all the big commercial events of the year, remember to warn your customers of the imminent arrival of the sales. Peggy André recommends that you: “send your newsletter the day before or 2 days before the sales officially start to remind customers that your site will have fabulous sales with additional advantages just for them.” To encourage indecisive shoppers to come and buy at your store, offer “free P&P or promotional codes” in your newsletter.

www.newlook.com

4) Social networks

Facebook has proved to be a useful platform for informing your “fans of sale items and for carrying out teaser campaigns with money-off coupons offered at certain times of the day” notes the manager of Bagatelles. Encourage your Facebook community to shop with you by launching, for example “a competition to win extra discounts.” The aim of these actions: to tell users about your sales and therefore encourage your “fans” to visit your site.

5) Technical details

According to Peggy André you must pay particular attention to two technical details. First of all “make sure that your server can cope with the increased load when the sales officially start. Generally at 8a.m. on the morning of the first day, and the following weekend there is a sharp rise in visits and sales.” Software is available that allows you to test your server and know how many simultaneous connections it can handle. Don’t hesitate to contact your hoster and explain the situation, he will take the necessary action to increase the simultaneous connections capacity on your site. Then, “check with your bank that your EPT can contain the online payments without bugs. At Bagatelles, every year during the January sales, we observe a rise in visits worthy of Valentine’s Day or Mother or Father’s Day. Many Internet users stock up on presents for the year during this sales period!”

www.boohoo.com

6) Graphical aspects

As you do for the Christmas period, create a special layout on your site to let your customers know that the sales period has arrived. Peggy André recommends integrating into your store “a discount layout, a slider informing customers of the best deals, best sellers and top promotions.” Don’t hesitate to “go a bit overboard so that in just one glance the Internet user spots the good deals and decides to remain on your site to do his or her shopping.” As competition is tough during the sales you must at all costs present very advantageous offers and make sure that they are seen “even if it means making your design less attractive.” “Orange, fluorescent and GIFs have always increased sales during the sales period.” stresses Peggy André.

www.walmart.com

7) Returning goods

You must be aware that orders placed on the Internet come under distance selling. During the sales, the consumer can return his or her product within 7 days of receiving it, which is not necessarily the case for sales in stores, where some retailers do not allow products to be returned or exchanged. If you are not familiar with legislation concerning sales, we recommend that you have a look at www.legifrance.gouv.fr.

Creating site layouts and offers, writing newsletters - the sales periods require a considerable investment to be a success. As Peggy André points out, “It’s an important stage in the life of a business. There is no question of missing them out or not preparing for them thoroughly.” So take action by applying these 7 tips and you will see your turnover soar.

Article Source: Prestashop Blog

Christmas Ecommerce Guide

2011-11-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

Online retail continues to grow year-on-year, with the run up to Christmas being the peak of many retailers’ annual revenues. Predictions from the Centre for Retail Research have stated that 2011 will see a rise in online sales by 16.3 per cent this Christmas from 2010. This comes as no surprise as the online world provides consumers with an accessible channel allowing them to easily buy anything they need for Christmas, from CDs and DVDs to the more unusual gifts, at competitive prices. With this in mind, it is important that retailers are more prepared than ever to make the most of this time of year.

As we get closer to Christmas, it’s important that retailers of all sizes consider bespoke planning around seasonal goods. The planning and activity should have started already, but if it hasn’t, it’s still not too late for smaller retailers to really gear up for Christmas and ensure the make the most of consumers’ greater propensity to buy around this time of year.

This report details what these retailers should be doing when it comes to planning for Christmas, including steps that should have been taken 60 days prior and further steps that should be taken 45 days, 30 days and 15 days prior. The report offers essential tips around marketing and promotions, content and inventory and is aimed at anyone who is selling products online and looking to take advantage of the Christmas rush.

Planning for Christmas

Online retailers of all sizes should be thinking about Christmas as early as August, but they need to really start gearing up for it 60 days prior to the 25th December if possible, working towards the following deadlines in order to ensure they don’t become snowed under by the demand and volume of sales:

60 days prior to Christmas: This is the time for retailers to identify the entire inventory needed for the festive period. Whether this is ensuring that there is enough of the bestsellers in stock which are sold throughout the year, or items that are made available for the season such as Christmas decorations and specialist gifts
45 days prior to Christmas – Now that Christmas inventory is highlighted and ready, this is the time for retailers to double check that this entire inventory is listed and available. Many customers often get a head start on Christmas shopping and want to be assured that their chosen online stores have the products they are looking for
30 days prior to Christmas – With just a month to go, retailers must have 100 per cent inventory availability. This not only makes it easier when dealing with the volume of orders they will receive in a timely manner, but it ensures customer satisfaction when orders are accurate and completed
15 days prior to Christmas – For many consumers, just over two weeks until Christmas starts to become manic, however retailers at this time should ideally have sold and dispatched 50 per cent of their inventory for the season

If retailers don’t yet have plans in place, it’s still not too late for them to gear up for Christmas and take advantage of the huge opportunity. Some key tips for maximising sales opportunities include:

Get categories set up now
Run promotions around Cyber Monday & Black Friday – these are two dates in the online retail calendar when sales boom in the lead up to Christmas. Retailers can really maximise the sales they make by running promotions on both of these days that would appeal to the festive market
Review the impact of last year’s Q4 performance – taking the time to analyse the success of the previous Q4 performance is one of the most effective ways of gaining an understanding of what sales were like, what tactics were used and what worked well. This will put retailers in a good position to know what they should be doing this Christmas

Finally, retailers must remember to pull all the relevant seasonal content the day after Christmas. It is also key that the next page is pre-planned and ready to go up straight away, preparing themselves for the next round of sales.

Seasonal Marketing

Getting seasonal marketing techniques right isn’t as complicated as it would first seem, yet many smaller retailers are struggling to roll campaigns out successfully. With a host of diverse seasonal events throughout the year, whether it is Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Halloween or Back to School, retailers need to think strategically, as well as consider the quick wins when it comes to marketing and promotions to drive seasonal sales.

One area that many retailers often overlook is keyword optimisation on product listings. They should begin identifying and optimising selected seasonal keywords 60 days prior to the relevant event. It is simple to do and when done successfully it can lead to a 35-55 per cent uplift in traffic on eBay alone, allowing retailers to really maximise seasonal events. In addition, retailers should be making full use of custom pages if selling through eBay, as landing pages for search engines.

Around seasonal peaks retailers’ priorities are to increase traffic to their website and ultimately sales, as consumers are often more willing to spend their hard earned cash. To help in driving this retailers should consider the following four simple steps:

Create a custom page specifically for gifts – creating a page that displays gifts that are specific to a particular season allows customers to easily find and purchase what they are looking for
Use images to engage – using a selection of good quality images helps people identify what a product is likely to look like in real life, maximising the online shopping experience
Use small sentences – including short and snappy descriptors alongside images helps ensure the browsing experience is as simple and engaging as possible for the customer
Include FAQ, shipping and ‘about us’ pages – allowing the customer to easily access as much information as they may need before making a purchase is a essential to ensure browsing is converted into sales

Email marketing is increasingly being neglected and is another area where some smaller retailers fall down in seasonal marketing. However, its value cannot be under-estimated and it is a key promotional channel, particularly in the run up to Christmas. To maximise the effectiveness of email, retailers should be looking at the following timings:

45 days prior – This is when retailers should be sending reminder emails to their database regarding availability of festive stock
30 days prior – With shopping for the season in full swing, this is an ideal time for retailers to send out discount offers over email
15 days prior – With just over two weeks to go until Christmas or any other seasonal event, there is quite often many consumers who are still looking to compete their shopping lists. This is a great time to send an email out offering free shipping or other deals to encourage last minute sales.

On a final note, it’s important to remember with all seasonal marketing to keep messages consistent across all channels through which you’re selling and communicating – whether that be a website, third-party retail channels, social media or physical and electronic mailers.

Conclusion

Despite the increased revenue opportunities to be had in the run up to Christmas, it seems that some online retailers are still struggling to take advantage of increased consumer spend. While activity should really begin in late October, it is not too late for these retailers to turn this around and reap the benefits here. Inventory is possibly the lowest hanging fruit, with retailers just needing to ensure that they get the balance of timing and availability right.

However, in such a competitive space as online retail, just getting your seasonal inventory right is not enough, it is crucial to focus on promotion and the user experience as well. Seasonal marketing is an area where some retailers can struggle, and the first thing they should be focusing on is findability; optimising content for search engines on seasonal keywords and creating dedicated landing pages.

Email marketing with seasonal promotions is also crucial, particularly around the busiest shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Finally, the basics of a good online user experience can also not be ignored and retailers must ensure that they take steps including creating custom pages for gifts, using engaging images and offering FAQ, shipping and ‘about us’ pages.

By investing the time in take these reasonably basic steps, retailers of all sizes can ensure they take their share of the online Christmas spend.

Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics

2011-11-21T07:58:00.000-08:00

How to use Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics. Check these step by steps.

Ecommerce Tracking Part 1: How it Works

This post is the first in a series of e-commerce transaction tracking with Google Analytics. Why is e-commerce tracking important? Well, transaction data is a vital piece of information when analyzing online business performance.

Sure, it’s great to measure things like conversion rate, but revenue is much more tangible to many business owners. Having the e-commerce data in your web analytics application makes it easier to perform analysis. Do you need to set up e-commerce tracking? No, but it sure helps.

The Big Pictures

E-commerce tracking is based on the same principal as standard pageview tracking. JavaScript code sends the data to a Google Analytic servers by requesting an invisible gif file. The big difference is that e-commerce data is sent rather than pageview data.

But how does Google Analytics get the e-commerce data? That’s the tricky part. You, the site owner, must create some type of code that inserts the transaction data into the GA JavaScript. Sounds tricky, huh? Well, its not that bad.

Step by Step: How it Works

Let’s break it down and walk through what actually happens.

The visitor submits their transaction to your server.
Your server receives the transaction data and processes the transaction. This may include a number of steps at the server level, such as sending a confirmation email, checking a credit card number, etc.
After processing the transaction the server prepares to send the receipt page back to the visitor. While preparing the receipt page your server must extract some the transaction data and insert it into the Google Analytics JavaScript. This is the code that you must create.
The receipt page is sent to the visitor’s browser.
While the receipt page renders in the visitor’s browser the e-commerce data is sent to Google Analytics via special GA JavaScript.
Here’s a basic diagram of the process. Again, the biggest challenge during implementation is adding code to your web server that inserts the transaction data, in the appropriate format, into the receipt page. I’ll cover the setup in part 2 of this series.

What Data can be Tracked?

Google Analytics collect two types of e-commerce data: transaction data and item data. Transaction data describes the overall transaction (transaction ID, total sale, tax, shipping, etc.) while item data describes the items purchased in the transaction (sku, description, category, etc.). All of this data eventually ends up in GA reports. Here’s a complete list of the data:

Transaction Data

Transaction ID: your internal transaction ID [required]
Affiliate or store name
Total
Tax
Shipping
City
State or region
Country

Item Data

Transaction ID: same as in transaction data [required]
SKU
Product name
Product category or product variation
Unit price [required]
Quantity [required]

A few notes about the data. First, the geo-location data is no longer used by Google Analytics. The new version of GA tries to identify where the buyer is located using an IP address lookup.

Also, you should avoid using any non-alpha numeric characters in the data. Especially in the numeric fields. Do not add a currency identifier (i.e. dollar sign) in the total, tax or shipping fields. this can cause problems with the data.

Source: Analytics Blog

Amazon WebStore - SEO Friendly eCommerce Platform

2011-11-16T08:05:00.000-08:00

If you are looking for an SEO friendly eCommerce platform for your online storefront and Amazon WebStore is the place - just what you are looking for.

The Recently updated Amazon WebStore 2.0 platform offers a breadth of features allowing you to sell online in an easy and affordable manner – while having world-class SEO functionality in the palm of your hand.

Here some helpful SEO features of the Amazon WebStore eCommerce storefront system.

SEO Features of Amazon WebStore:

Ability to add custom Title, Keyword and Description META tags
Built in Google Analytics tracking variables in cart
All custom pages URL’s are automatically named using keywords from page name
Text linking structure with breadcrumb navigation throughout
Product pages automatically use product title for page META Title tag
Modern SEO friendly CSS coding behind the WebStore system

Getting People to Your Website

Attracting new visitors to your website is an ongoing process, but Amazon Webstore can help by providing the search engine optimization (SEO) tools and other features you need to start positioning your eCommerce Web store where consumers might find it.

Optimize your Web pages to help search engine spiders correctly index your site
Use automatic submissions to shopping engines (Google Product Search, etc) to keep your listings updated
Integrate email marketing resources to inform customers about new products or current sales

Keep Them on the Site

Internet customers have a very short attention span, and you only have a few seconds to convince your customers to say and consider your products. When you build a Web store, you need to present a professional and aesthetically pleasing store front, and it needs to be easy to make a purchase. Amazon Webstore can help you develop this kind of website experience for your customers.

eCommerce templates let you customize your website to match your individual brand
Quickly upload or modify new product descriptions and eye-catching images
Recommendations widgets offer related products or accessories
Featured products make it easy to highlight your most popular items

These are just a sampling of the many great SEO features built into the Amazon WebStore 2.0 system to help your business become a success online.

In addition to excellent SEO features, selling on your custom Amazon WebStore

Easy to use features:

No merchant account needed – Amazon handles payment processing
No shipping account needed with FBA – Amazon ships your products
No costly Web hosting account – Amazon hosts your webs
CMS control panel allowing you to easily update your own storefront

Close the Sale

Getting new traffic to your website is only the first step. You have to give your customers reason to buy from you instead of the competition, and you have to make the path to a purchase as smooth as possible. You can use our eCommerce resources, like Checkout by Amazon, to add convenience to the purchasing process and remove some of the barriers between the customer and the sale.

Upcoming Google Product Search Feed Specification and Policy Changes

2011-09-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

As google announced in July, the new Google Product Search Feed Specification and Policies will go into effect on September 22, 2011. After this date, accounts that do not comply with the new requirements may be suspended.

New tools to help you prepare

First, use the new Test Data Feed feature in Google Merchant Center (under “Data Feeds”) to test whether your updated feed complies with the new requirements. You will be able to download a full error report and resolve any issues prior to submitting your actual live feed. Rest assured, your test feed won’t appear on Google Product Search.
For additional guidance, you can now view our new video tutorials:
Google revamping the "Data Quality" tab in Google Merchant Center to enable you to quickly view the most critical data quality errors, and learn how to fix them (coming soon).

Understanding the new requirements

Google received a few questions about specific attributes and have addressed these below. It’s a lot to read, but should save you time in the long run. Also, before you cancel vacation for your IT staff, please note that many of the requirements only apply to certain countries and categories.

Google Product Category (aka GPC): This attribute ensures that your products appear in the right category (you wouldn’t want that Harry Potter DVD showing up under “Books”) and that Google apply the correct set of enforcement rules for a given category.
- GPC is only required for feeds targeting the US, UK, Germany, France or Japan
- You don’t necessarily have to send this attribute to google. It is only required for items that belong to one of the following seven categories:
  1. Apparel & Accessories > Clothing
  2. Apparel & Accessories > Shoes
  3. Apparel & Accessories
  4. Media > Books
  5. Media > DVDs & Movies
  6. Media > Music
  7. Software > Video Game Software
- For items falling under these categories, you must include one of these seven values appropriately for each item.
- More granular categorization is always preferred, but don’t stress out about this. If you can follow the level of categorization above, then you’ve satisfied our requirements.

Images: We made image_link required for all products. Images are especially important for product in the “Apparel & Accessories” category, where shoppers love to see the different variations of a product.

Required worldwide (except Japan)
For products that fall under “Apparel & Accessories” (and all corresponding sub-categories), we require unique images for products that differ by the variant attribute ‘color’, or ‘pattern’, or ‘material.’ No one likes seeing a black sweater when they click on the red one.
We recommend sending separate images for variant products in other categories as well, but these are only required for “Apparel & Accessories.”

Apparel/ Variants: Variety is the spice of life, and google working to create a richer shopping experience for apparel & accessories that come in multiple colors, patterns, sizes, etc.

Apparel variants are only required for feeds targeting the US. For feeds targeting other countries, the attributes are recommended and may be required in the future.
Variant-level information is required only for products in the “'Apparel & Accessories' category, and all related subcategories
You only need to send us data for variant attributes if your product varies by that specific attribute. So, if your shirts are all made of cotton, there’s no need to send the “Material” attribute. However, if your shirts were available in three colors and three sizes, you would send google nine separate line items, varying by color and size.
There is no penalty for not sending variant level data for other categories
If you include variants, you also need to ensure that you send an “item_group_id” to connect those variants and that these group of variants share the same common title. More on this below.

Item_Group_ID: Google use this attribute to cluster together all the variants you send us for a given item. Sort of like Crazy Glue for variants.

This attribute is required only for variant Apparel products in the US.
If you have a “Parent SKU” shared by all variants of a product, you can provide that as the value for 'item group id'.
If you send us an item_group_id attribute, we will automatically look for variant attributes. Conversely, if you did send Google Item_group_id, you should ensure you send Google at least one variant attribute.

Size: This is an important Variant attribute for “Apparel & Accessories.”

Size is only required for feeds targeting the US.
Separate your products into different line items in the feed (each line will have a different “size” attribute, and maybe even vary by other attributes)
There’s no need to send separate product images for separate sizes (unless the appearance of the item changes because of the size)

Please refer back to google detailed Product Feed Specification and Help Center for more information. I hope these tips will help you be more fully prepared to make the most of Google Product Search as i head into the most important selling season of the year for online retailers.

Article Source: Googelmarchantblog

How to Track Facebook Ads Traffic on Google Analytics

2011-08-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

How to Track Facebook Ads Traffic on Google Analytics

Social Shopping - Exploring Sales Opportunities in Social Comminuties

2011-07-07T08:32:00.001-07:00

The social networking waters are gradually making their way to every part of the marketing hub, invading almost every part of our lives. Social shopping is another phenomenon that is taking over the marketing world. Social shopping platform is a true market place, where users can meet up with other people, engage into conversation and may also get down to trading any item they want to dispose off. Moreover, they can discuss over the internet while shopping for a product, share their experiences. One more thing that can be done is a live environment where sales personnel can directly engage a customer in a chat and then shape his opinion.

We have been hearing of different brands integrating with Facebook in order to take their social marketing to another level, gain more followers and word of mouth. Online shopping stores such as Levis, Amazon, Pandora and many others are linking with Facebook to boost the social shopping experience, and with that marketers are now closer to the hearts and minds of the buyers like never before.

However, social shopping concept is fully adopted by majority of retailers. Facebook rolling out new services like Open Graph to integrate with almost every kind of social media that is available on the internet; the shopping world is in for a treat. Facebook is using all the user data it has, very smartly. Facebook connect is already a part of many famous online stores, where the users' interests are taken in accordance. More than anything, it brings convenience and time saving for the customers. Where friends had to set a time to go out and shop for something, they can now just log in from where ever they are and shop together.

Just as Pandora uses Facebook integration to give its users a more personalized music experience via their social graph, similarly, Levis opted for Facebook Open Graph and demonstrated that user social graph and

'Like' button is indeed highly applicable to e-commerce and social shopping.

Integration with Facebook caters to clients' needs

Facebook Open Graph helps in understanding the mind-set of buyers; they integrate your website, while Facebook log-in registration makes it easier for the user, providing a simplified experience. When you connect with Facebook and add personalized features, it gives a significant impression on users when they see what their friends 'like' and review. Also, you can enhance reviews on your site with social content giving users a chance to comment on the posts, this further gives them an opportunity to post feedbacks on their walls. Maintaining your website homepage and personalizing it by surfacing the most recent feedbacks from users, gives an authenticated touch to it.

'TheFind' too being one of the second largest shopping search engines, also integrated with Facebook to provide a complete personalized search to its users. My personal favorite is Amazon connecting with Facebook and leveraging with it immensely. Buyers can now see the list of gifts keeping in mind their preferences and interests. They even show the birthday notification along with a gift suggestion. With your Facebook friends' profile that lists their favorite books, movies and TV shows, it is a very cool feature that excites the users.

And my next article will be "Amazon and ebay store intigritaion" with Facebook.

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Update your Google Basefeed With New Attributes

2011-05-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

If you're a Google Product Search provider, you've always known that Google classify attributes into three categories: "required," "recommended" and "optional." Google has recently updated the list of attributes in each category to make it easier for providers to submit their product information and prioritize the attributes relevant to their products. Here is an updated list of attribute requirements, along with some information on what the categories mean.

Required attributes are attributes that you're, well, required to include for all your items. Google won't be able to process and approve items in your feed that are missing required attributes. The following is a list of required attributes:

description

link

price

title

Recommended attributes are ones that Google strongly recommend including for your data feeds, and Google consider them as important as required attributes. However, Google realize that not all providers and items have this information available; therefore, if your feed contains items without this information, Google will still process them, but it will be more difficult to ensure that they appear for relevant search queries. The following is a list of recommended attributes:

brand

condition

image_link

isbn

mpn

upc

All other attributes are optional attributes. Optional attributes give you more ways to describe your items and additionally help shoppers find your products.

Google hope that this update will make it easier for you to create data feeds and prioritize the time spent on them. For more information on these attributes, you can visit our feed guidelines here. Also, keep your eyes out for status messages on the data feeds dashboard that will provide additional guidance on the attributes Google is recommending for your items.

To see attribute requirements for submitting item types other than Products, please visit the data feed overview in the Help Center. and details about All google basefeed attributes Follow this link. ( google basefeed attributes).

Article Source:- Google Base Blog

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You May take Interest:
Google Merchant Center Replaces Google Base for Retailers
Google Checkout and Google Base - How to Sell your items for free!

Google Panda Update - Directly From Google

2011-05-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

Google’s Panda update left a slew of victims in the wake of its warpath (the war, of course being on shallow and low-quality content). While Google has dropped some hints here and there on its philosophies for what it considers to be low quality, the company has now been clearer than ever as to what it’s looking at.

“Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year,” writes Google Fellow Amit Singhal on the Google Webmaster Central blog. “In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.”

Google lists the following as “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality’ of a page or an article”:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?
Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
How much quality control is done on content?
Does the article describe both sides of a story?
Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

The company is careful to note that it’s not disclosing actual ranking signals used in its algorithms, but these questions will help you “step into Google’s mindset.” These questions are things that Google says it asks itself as it writes algorithms.

Singhal also reminds webmasters, “One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.”

We’ve already seen victims of the update respond by taking this approach. For one, Demand Media announced a big new clean-up initiative, in which it is cleaning house on user-generated content used on its eHow site – deleting some articles, while sending others back through the editorial process.

Why Facebook Could Dominate Ecommerce

2011-02-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

Day by day, Facebook’s tentacles continue to spread and pull in more of the web into its domain. Facebook Deals marked its step into the world of discounts and group buying. Now its got its sights set on the wider world of ecommerce. And its competitors need to be afraid. Very afraid.

The integrated Facebook store

Brands and businesses have been using Facebook to boost traffic to their websites for some time.

But posting links isnt the only way to sell on Facebook. There’s now a steady stream of brands and businesses setting up shop and selling directly, without users having to leave the site.

The popular fashion retailer ASOS was the first to get the ball rolling, last month, with a fully transactional Facebook store. French Connection and Dove now have plans to follow suit. These are just the first pioneers of the many brands and businesses that are likely to follow.

Even the mighty Amazon isn’t too big to ignore Facebook’s potential. It recently bought Quidsi to help it launch Facebook stores of its own, so it can use the site as a sales opporunity rather than a direct competitor.

A social shopping experience that’s difficult to replicate

The reasons for creating an online store on Facebook are obvious: it has 30 million users in the UK alone, offers can be spread virally and it’s where people are spending large chunks of their online time.

Neither does creating an online store have to be expensive. Applications, such as Storenvy and ShopIgniter, make it relatively simple to add a store tab to your Facebook page.

Perhaps the key reason why creating Facebook store is a no brainer is because Facebook delivers a social shopping experience that is very difficult to replicate.

Trying to build a social shopping site outside of Facebook would be an expensive, slow and risky challenge. Not only do you have to attract users in their millions, but you also have to persuade them to start spending as much time on the site as they do on Facebook.

The fact is that Facebook has such a massive head start on its rivals (with 600 million users and counting) that it could dominate the world of ecommerce, let alone social shopping, in the years to come.

Article Source:- http://socialmediatoday.com

Improve Your Christmas Ecommerce Sales

2010-10-30T04:01:00.000-07:00

The list below takes you through some simple but key steps to make sure you are ready to capture Christmas sales.

1. Boost Sales with Best Sellers
Review your best sellers list and ensure these products are positioned prominently on your websites home page, giving customers a short cut to your leading lines. Don’t forget to suggest additional products from this page, as almost everything needs batteries, power cords and extensions.

2. Make the Most of Past Trends
Review last year’s sales statistics to discover seasonal trends in sales and identify important milestones such as best selling weekends, order times and volumes. These statistics can be used to schedule updates at times where traffic is at its lowest to ensure sales are not impacted and can highlight when additional staff is required for your sales and support teams.

3. Master your Mail shots
Pull out all of your email contacts from your back-office and create an email shot to attract past customers back to your website. The lead up to Christmas can be a very busy time and human minds usually need refreshing.

4. Give your websites a festive theme
Pile on the pressure and update your templates with Christmas themed elements to highlight the imminent festivities. Everyone recognises the iconic Christmas tree!

5. Control your promo codes
Have a promo code box on your basket? Stop people from leaving your site in search of these illusive codes by linking to pages on your website that offer small discounts such as free delivery and 5% off. Keep those customers within the sales funnel.

6. Advertise your last delivery date
Make sure you promote your last delivery date on every page of your website to ensure that you keep selling right up until the very last available second.

7. Have a pre-Christmas sale
You may have a lot of old stock that you are trying to push out and make room for the new. There is a simple solution to this and it involves putting together pre-Christmas offers to entice your customers to buy.

8. Send a voucher to past customers in a Christmas card
Make use of your websites voucher code functionality and reintroduce your products to past clients by sending them a simple Christmas card containing a voucher code for a small discount. They will realise they are loved and you may just boost your sales.

9. Review your returns policy
At the top of your homepage you will no doubt display a huge legalese returns policy. Add in some simple bullet points that explain your policy in plain English to help alleviate customer anxiety. When customers are busy they need quick facts.

10. Stagger your offers
Don’t throw all of your promotions on the site in one go. Promote a staggered sale weekly/daily and rotate set offers, encouraging customers to return day after day. Promotional discount codes work well as people tend to pass this news onto others, creating natural word of mouth activity.

The Top 7 Facebook and Twitter Strategies

2010-09-21T02:03:00.000-07:00

The Top 7 Facebook and Twitter Strategies that are Working Right Now

One of the great things about the work I do is that I have a bird's eye view of what's working and what's not when it comes to Social media. Every so often I like to give sort of a "state of the union" on Facebook and Twitter best practices, because as I am sure you know, social media is constantly growing, changing and evolving.

As you'll see, some of the strategies I am recommending are tried and true - they have been working since day one and will probably continue to for the foreseeable future.

[Links From PR9 Sites!]

However, there may be a few here that you've not ever considered - or may even be surprised by. But they are what I see as being the biggest keys to success and results for business owners on the two hottest social networks on the planet: Facebook and Twitter.

1. Find Your Peeps

What this means is that you want to become part of the community you are looking to serve. The first step of course is to be clear on whom it is you want to serve and what problem you are solving for them. Once you know that, the goal is to go where they are hanging out.

There are specific tools you can use to easily find and interact with your target market. Two of my favorites for Twitter are wefollow.com and search.twitter.com.

2. Concentrate on Conversing and Building Relationships, instead of Broadcasting and Selling

One of the most common yet biggest mistakes that people make when they are first introduced to social media is to focus on pushing their product or service in a spammy way. That approach fails miserably in social media because most people are there to build relationships and interact.

There's nothing wrong with letting others know what's going on with you or your business sometimes -- just be sure to intersperse your tweets or Facebook updates with some two-way conversation.

3. Use a Facebook Personal Profile AND a Facebook Business Page Together

This might be a little "controversial" - and don't get me wrong, your business SHOULD have a Page -- but when you have a personal profile, you are able to interact with other people much more easily.

[1000 Visitors to Your Site!]

As a business Page, a Page can't go comment on another person's Wall or profile or in their Gróup or on THEIR Page AS that Page. You are really contained inside the space of your Page. This might be something to consider because a lot of the magic of Facebook and the relationship-building and rapport-building comes from that ability to interact.

4. Cross-Post and Cross Promote

Once you've decided to make social media a part of your marketing strategy, you don't want to keep it to yourself.

There are lots of ways to spread the word. For example, you'll want to advertise your social presence on your blog, add links to your email signature and use one social media platform to post to another.

5. Use a Social Media Dashboard like Hootsuite and Other Productivity Tools to Accomplish More in Less Time

Hootsuite.com is my hands-down favorite, free social media tool, and the reason why is because it does so many different things. For example, you can use it to update many social networks at once, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; you can use it to pre-schedule tweets, status updates and more.

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6. Get Them on the List

In most cases, people aren't going to purchase from you right off from sites like Facebook and Twitter. You need to shift your thinking from "how can I get this person to purchase from me or hire me now?" to "how can I bring this person into my community and strengthen the relationship with them on an ongoing basis?"

One of the best ways to do this is to give people a way to provide their email address via your blog or website so that you have permission to keep in touch and build an ongoing relationship with them.

7. Measure and Track Your Social Media Results

Measuring the ROI of social media isn't exactly cut and dry. I am often asked how you can tell whether the time you've spent on social media activities is really making a difference.

Some of the best metrics? Blog comments, blog subscribers, newsletter subscribers, social media profile engagement, number of friends and followers and website traffic to name a few.

No matter who your target market is, you can be sure that at least some segment of them is using social media. The important thing is to understand that social media is a great way to get in front of that target audience.

And remember, you may not be able to equate your interactions to dollars now, but what you are doing is planting seeds which can have big payoffs later on.

Most of the strategies I've mentioned here aren't really "strategies" unless you keep applying them over time - so stick with it to reap those results you've been searching for.

16 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Keep You Ahead

2010-09-16T04:39:00.000-07:00

A typical E-commerce website contains a few hundred pages. An E-commerce giant like Amazon contains thousands of products and millions of web pages. Optimizing a website like Amazon is not tough; it just requires a strong SEO strategy.

Optimizing an Ecommerce site is slightly different from optimizing a static website. You need to plan and construct your optimization strategy well in advance. This will help save you a lot of time and effort in the future.

16 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Keep Your Website Ahead in Rankings and Traffic

1. Maintain a Uniform and Clean Website Structure: The home page of your website should reflect the product categories; while all the inner pages should follow a common webpage structure.
[Lifetime Links from PR8 Pages!]

2. Use a Unique Title Tag: Every product page should have a unique title. An Ecommerce site can contain any number of web pages. You can ask the programmer to code the title from the page content and product name. This makes your SEO more dynamic.

3. Select an Appropriate Keyword: The keywords must be unique for every webpage. They must reflect the important phrases within the webpage content. For an Ecommerce site, you can ask the programmer to select keywords from the content and product name.

4. Create a Relevant Description Per Web Page: The description of a web page is the snippet which appears in the SERPS. Every visitor reads the snippet and then clicks on the search result. It is very important to include a description relevant to the webpage content.

5. Include Breadcrumbs for All Inner Pages: A breadcrumb is like a secondary navigation structure. It helps the visitor to navigate back to the main product category page. A breadcrumb also helps in the internal linking of the website. Overall, including a breadcrumb makes the website SEO friendly.
[Rapid Paid Inclusion - Add Your URL in 48 Hours!]

6. Use a Heading Tag: Searchbots assign a lot of importance to the heading tag. The heading tag is SEO friendly and can be used to format the title of the web page content.

7. Avoid Usage of Flash: Avoid using flash on every web page of your Ecommerce website. This will expand the site loading time. If the use of flash is inevitable, include textual content in the flash. Search engines are capable of reading the text in the flash file.

8. Optimize Images: Add the Alt tag to all the images of your website. Search engines cannot read images. The Alt tag is a means of ensuring that the search engines read the alternate text for images.

9. Optimize Anchor Text: Anchor text appears between the anchor opening and closing tag. It is good practice to use keywords as the anchor text.

10. Create an SEO Friendly URL Structure: The default URL structure of a dynamic website contains parameters. Search engines are not capable of understanding these parameters. A good URL structure must contain words separated by hyphens.
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11. Generate a XML Sitemap: A XML sitemap contains all the URLs present in the website and makes it easy for searchbots to find and index all web pages. If the number of web pages on a site is large, you can create a number of XML sitemaps and then submit these sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. E.g. sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml.

12. Limit the Number of Outbound Links: Always link to a safe and secure website. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking out to, use the no follow attribute.

13. Submít to Search Directories: Forward your website URL to good quality search directories. Most of the search directories take a few weeks to link back to a site. Fill in the details of the submission form carefully, so that the administrator accepts the submission.

14. Submít to Article Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites: Article submission is the quickest way of obtaining high quality backlinks. You need to select the do follow bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them. Growth in traffic is a plus point of submitting to social bookmarking sites.

15. Integrate a Secure Payment Gateway: A secure payment gateway is the heart of an Ecommerce website. Get a trust seal from Verisign, TrustE, etc. Visitors will be more likely to trust your site and to make an online payment.

16. Track User Behavior with a Good Analytics Tool: You can track and analyze visitor behavior with a good analytics tool. You need to select an analytics tool based on your requirements. If your Ecommerce website operates on a large scale, you can opt for a paid analytics tool. Otherwise you can use a variety of free tools to obtain the best results.

It is very easy to rank well and get quality traffic with these tips. The trick is to maintain the balance of the site being SEO and user friendly.

Increase the Conversion in e-Commerce

2010-08-10T03:39:00.001-07:00

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

Methods to Increase the Conversion in e-Commerce

Among the many methods to increase the Conversion rate, these are the most relevant:
clear distinction of the website for a certain Conversion goal (e.g. "increase sign-ins for newsletter")
better content (e.g. text, picture, video) of the website that clearly target versus the conversion goal
increase Usability to reduce the barriers towards the Conversion goal and thus reduce the abortion rate
Good site navigation structure to help users find and browser without thinking too much about where to click
Show credibility signs like 3rd party trust logos and good site design to increase trust level of visitor
Use AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) to move the user through the conversion funnel
Use third party certification sites such as IBCIM.ORG

Conversion Rate

2010-08-10T03:36:00.001-07:00

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

Conversion rate

In internet marketing, conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. The Conversion rate is defined as follows:

Successful conversions are interpreted differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers, for example, a successful conversion may constitute the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, however, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download, or other activity that occurs due to a subtle or direct request from the content creator for the visitor to take the action.

Duplicate Content Issues Solved by Google With Canonical URL Link Tag

2010-06-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

In February (2009) Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a new HTML tag. The new rel="canonical" tag is designed to help reduce duplicate pages by documenting the preferred URL for a group of very similar pages. Duplicate content is a major problem for Search Engines and searchers alike. Having duplicate content on your site can lead to penalties in search rankings.

What is a Canonical Page?

Definition: Canonical Page is a preferred (authoritative) page among a group of pages that have identical or almost identical content. See Examples below for multiple home pages and Content Management System scenarios.

Goals of the new tag

The aim is to provide webmasters with a method to use to solve duplicate content crawl errors. Thus you can now specify a preferred version of a set of similar pages and ensure that link popularity is consolidated in your preferred page.

What you can now do is to indicate your preferred URL to the crawlers using an HTML link tag. This will result in better search results and higher rankings!

The Link Tag

The tag allows webmasters to designate a preferred page among a set of identical pages. It is used inside a element and is specified as
rel="canonical" rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://yourpreferredpage">

The tag is used like this:

link rel="canonical" rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://your_company_domain/product.aspx?item=Canned-Yellow-Peaches"

Rules for Using the New Tag

It is a suggestion and is NOT a command for the crawlers.
You can use relative or absolute URLs in the rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="yourdomain.com" tag part
The domain in the rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="yourdomain.com" MUST be the same domain as your preferred (canonical) page

EXAMPLE 1 - Multiple Home Page References

For example the four URLs below all lead to the SAME PAGE (a very common scenario):

http://my_company_site.com

http://www.my_company_site.com

http://www.my_company_site.com /default.htm

http://www.my_company_site.com /default. aspx

Suppose you as webmaster choose to use the second link above as your preferred page. Thus if you had a choice you would prefer if your PagePank value and your SEO rankings would all be channelled into that one page.

You can now do just that using the rel="canonical" tag in the other 3 pages!

For the example above, this would look like:

EXAMPLE 2 - Auto Generated Content from Content Management Systems or Online Store software

Besides the examples for identical Home Pages given above, the link tag should also be used for pages having URLs that differ slightly because of having extra parameters like: session ids, sort orders, link etc.

http://www. my_company_site.com/product.aspx?item= Canned-Yellow-Peaches

http://www. my_company_site.com/product.aspx?item= Canned-Yellow-Peaches&page=check-out.aspx&ID=1234456

http://www. my_company_site.com/product.aspx?item= Canned-Yellow-Peaches&OrderID=ABC123

The two links above would be a good place to use the following canonical tag:

Add the tag to any pages on your website that would produce the product info for the Canned Yellow Peaches when called from various places on the site, for example just before checkout or as a link from a shopping cart as opposed to when the product is simply displayed on its primary page.

References:

1) Google Webmaster Central: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

2) Google Webmasters/Site Owners Help:www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394&topic=15262

3) Yahoo Search Blog: ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/

4) Live Search Webmaster Center Blog:blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx

Article Source: Articlebase.com

Using Google Webmaster Tools to Find Low Hanging Fruit

2010-06-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to uncover some "low hanging fruit" for getting a bit more traffic to your website. The First step of course is you have to get a webmaster account in Google and verify your site. You can put the keyword "Google webmasters tools" in the Google search bar and find out how to register for your webmaster account. You can then also follow the instructions to verify your site

One of the features of the webmaster tool is that it will show you all the major search terms that your site appeared in over a selected time period. In addition to the search terms it will show you the following for each term:

Number of impressions: The number of times someone searched using that search term in Google over the specified time period
Click through rate: How frequently the visitor clicked on your search engine listing
Average position: Your sites average ranking during that time period.

You also can drill down for each term and see specific data for each range of rankings. For most search terms, your site ranking will move up and down, so sometimes it is helpful to see the data for each specific ranking.

I use the average ranking to sort my results. For most sites, you will see that you rank in a lot more search terms than what you optimized for (assuming you did some optimization). What I am specifically looking for is search terms that:

Have not been optimized
Are ranking in the top 20
Have a fair amount of impressions
And are relevant to my business

Yes, these terms are in all probability going to be longer tail search terms, but these can be a gold mine for your business.

I am going to pay particular attention to terms that rank in positions 2-5 and terms that rank near the top of the second page. The reason for this is that these are the areas that get the greatest gain in traffic when you improve search engine ranking. For example if you go from the top of the second page to the bottom of the first, you can expect your click through rate to triple or even quadruple. Granted, in most cases we are talking about long tail search terms that don't have huge volumes. Likewise any movement from the fifth position up will generate significant traffic increases. Going from 5th position to 3rd position will double your traffic, going from 3rd position to 1st position will more than quadruple your click through rate.

The key factor is that these are terms that were not optimized for, so in theory, it may not take much to improve their ranking. By using the Google webmaster tool, you can discover what web page to review. Perhaps all you have to do is modify the title tag, add some content or maybe just create a deep text link. For most long tail search terms, the result should be a slight improvement in rankings. I previously used this method by Google Analytics and manually putting terms in the search bar, but with some of Google Webmaster tools newer features, the process is a lot easier.

Example: For an ecommerce site, we discovered that the site was currently ranking #12 in a long tail search term. There were about 24 visits a month to the site for that search term. By some very rudimentary optimization of the webpage we got the term to rank #9. The monthly traffic increased to over 120 visits, and resulted in one additional order per month at average sales of $350.00 and generated about $4000.00 dollars of additional revenue per year. Thanks to Google Webmaster Tools this method becomes very easy.

Article Source:- EzineArticles.com

BreadCrumbs Navigation for SEO

2010-05-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

SEO or search engine optimization is all about making your website as search friendly as possible. One of the basic methods of making your website search friendly is to always provide the search engines with an important, contextual clue as to the topic of the linked page. This is where the importance of breadcrumbs comes in. How did this term breadcrumb come about in the list of SEO Glossary? Well, it is taken from the trail of breadcrumbs left behind by the characters Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

Ok so what are breadcrumbs? Breadcrumbs are navigational links that appear below the page header. They are paths that let a user to orient within the website. These links provide a single hierarchical path even though there may be more than one path to access a webpage. Good SEO practices must choose the most frequently used route, or the route with the most appropriate context. They do not necessarily have to follow the directory structure.

For effective search engine optimization of web sites and usefulness of a website one must do the following with regards to breadcrumbs:

Incorporate breadcrumbs into online catalogs
Checkout catalogs
Have keyword-rich anchor text
Limit the number of crumbs to 6 or fewer
Avoid use of abbreviations
Capitalize the first letter of each word
Use full title when it is short
Titles must be short
Do not follow a spider's path for the breadcrumb.

Thus there are three types of web breadcrumbs: There are path breadcrumbs that are dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to reach a page; location breadcrumbs that are static pages located in the website hierarchy, and attribute breadcrumbs that give information on the category of the current web page.

Article Source:- EzineArticles.com

The Blogger Template Designer

2010-03-31T00:25:00.001-07:00

permalink: http://a2zsem.blogspot.com/2010/03/blogger-template-designer.html

clipped from www.google.com

The Blogger Template Designer

Today we’re taking a big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. We even made a video with jaunty music to show it off:

Here’s what we’re launching today to Blogger in Draft:

15 new, highly-customizable templates from our design team, split into four families: Simple, Picture Window, Awesome Inc, and Watermark

One-, two-, and three-column layouts for each template, with complete control over the size and arrangement of the columns

Hundreds of background images and patterns from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace

Go to http://draft.blogger.com/ to log in to Blogger in Draft. (If you’ve never been there before, Blogger in Draft is just like regular Blogger, except with new, in-development features like this one.) Click on your blog’s “Layout” link to go to the Layout tab. The link to the Template Designer is at the end of the row of sub-tabs.

Create Pages in Blogger

2010-02-18T08:19:00.000-08:00

Blogger now makes it easy to create Pages linked from your blog.

This feature lets you easily publish static information on stand-alone pages. For example, you can create an About This Blog page that discusses the evolution of your blog, or a Contact Me page that provides directions, a phone number, and a map to your location.

Here Steps:-

Step-1

Go To Dashboard of your Blogger Account and Click on your Blog layout

You create a page similar to how you write a blog post.

Step2:-

From Blogger click the Posting.

Step-3

Edit Pages tab

step-4

then click New Page.

(Note: you can create up to 10 pages.)

Once your page is published, you can link to it from the new Pageswidget. The Pages widget lets you add links to your pages as tabs at the top of your blog, or as links in your blog's sidebar.

In the Pages widget, you can decide which pages will be linked and in what order they will appear. You can also choose whether you want new pages to appear automatically in the Pages widget by checking or unchecking the box to the left of Add new Pages by default.

Finally, for those of you that have custom templates, your custom template may not automatically support Pages as horizontal "tabs". If you are familiar with HTML, follow these instructions on how to add Pages to your custom template.

permalink - http://a2zsem.blogspot.com/2010/02/create-pages-in-blogger.html

Article Source:- http://buzz.blogger.com

Old Content for Better Search Rankings and Getting Fresh Links

2010-02-08T06:41:00.000-08:00

You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don't count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.

Do you still get links to old content? Tell us why you think that is.

Google's Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody.

"In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time," he says. (Emphasis added)

Now, this isn't exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to the ever-changing ways of SEO), it could be something that really hasn't resonated. Businesses have always been told about the power of links, but even if you got a lot of significant links a year or two ago, that doesn't mean your content will continue to perform well based on that. Here discussed the value of "link velocity" and Google's need for freshness in the past:

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we may gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

But the Web has changed, become more of a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking, embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.

Do you think link freshness should play a role in search engine rankings? Let us know.

So how do you keep getting "fresh" links?

If you want fresh links, there are a number of things you can do. For one, keep putting out content. Write content that has staying power. You can link to your old content when appropriate. Always promote the sharing of your content. Include buttons to make it easy for people to share your content on their social network of choice. You may want to make sure your old content is presented in the same template as your new content so it has the same sharing features. People still may find their way to that old content, and they may want to share it if encouraged.

Go back over old content, and look for stuff that is still relevant. You can update stories with new posts adding a fresher take, linking to the original. Encourage readers to follow the link and read the original article, which they may then link to themselves.

Leave commenting on for ongoing discussion. This can keep an old post relevant. Just because you wrote an article a year ago, does not mean that people will still not add to it, and sometimes people will link to articles based on comments that are left.

Share old posts through social networks if they are still about relevant topics. You don't want to just start flooding your Twitter account with tweets to all of your old content, but if you have an older article that is relevant to a current discussion, you may share it, as your take on the subject. A follower who has not seen it before, or perhaps has forgotten about it, may find it worth linking to themselves. Can you think of other ways to get more link value out of old content?

Google Analytics IQ Raises Pass Mark 75% to 80%

2010-01-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

Google has announced that it is raising the bar in its Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test and that analysts must now gain 80% to pass. The previous pass mark was 75%.

The new pass mark won’t affect anyone who is already Google Analytics qualified that achieved a score of less than 80%, but they will still need to score at least 80% when it comes to renewing their qualification after 18 months.

Google has decided to raise the bar because an increasing number of businesses all over the world are relying in web analytics

This is a preview of "Google Analytics IQ Raises Pass Mark "

For details or to start the course, visit ConversionUniversity.com

Google I/O 2009 - Search Friendly Development

2010-01-24T23:46:00.000-08:00

How Google Rates Facebook and Twitter links

2010-01-15T01:48:00.000-08:00

The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It's just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can't crawl it, and it can't assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can't fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

"At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we'd treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that," says Cutts. "It's not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it's not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank."

There you have it. Matt's response probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it's always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

Article Source:- Webpronews.com

Google's One Minute Guide to Search-Based Keywords

2010-01-03T08:27:00.000-08:00

Google has put together a one-minute guide to using its Search-based Keyword tool. The tool was launched just over a year ago in beta. It lets paid search advertisers see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their site.

"Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords," says Dan Friedman of Google's Inside AdWords Crew. "This means that by including all keywords that are relevant to your product or service in your campaigns, you can ensure you can ensure that you will reach a greater set of potential customers. To help you do this, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which aren't yet included in your AdWords campaigns."

Earlier this year, Google made some improvements to the search-based keyword tool. The company not only expanded the reach to Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and New Zealand in addition to the US and the UK, but users can also now select the currency they'd like to see suggested bids in on the setting page.

Google also added some customization features to the tool this year that could lead to more targeted results for users. These include language/country-specific results and ad/search share filters.

Article Source:- www.webpronews.com

Some Tricky Question Answers From Google

2009-12-27T08:11:00.000-08:00

Recently, during a live chat Question & Answer s , Googlers Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye, among others, faced the burning questions of webmasters around the world. Together, they put to rest some fears and myths, and confirmed some speculations.

Below are the meatier results, with the straightest answers given first, followed by responses that were a bit on the ambiguous side, which we took the liberty of translating. Did you know there are about 200 factors that go into determining a site’s ranking in the search results? How about that Google made 450 tweaks to its algorithm last year?

Only one question during that session received conflicting answers from Googlers and wasn’t reconciled: Does the age of a website/domain affect its ranking?

Ohye answered this way: a site's reputation can be a indicator to search engines, but of course, it's not everything. Having a site for a long period of time can establish credibility with users, and as a search engine we also want to reflect this type of credibility. Of course, newer domains can also gain users and credibility. It seems like running a good site is a bit like running a reputable business. So yes, if your domain has been credible for years it can help. If you buy an old domain and put all your content on it in hopes of getting instant rankings, that's not the best idea.

But, when the question was rephrased from another webmaster, Cutts answered: In the majority of cases, it actually doesn't matter--we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information. Especially if you're a mom/pop site, we try to find ways to rank your site even if your site is newer or doesn't have many links. I think it is fair for Google to use that as a signal in some circumstances, and I try never to rule a signal out completely, but I wouldn't obsess about it.

Official translation: Sometimes, when we say it does.

GOOGLE STRAIGHT TALK

Do 301 redirects carry over PageRank?

Where appropriate, ranking signals will be transferred across 301 redirects (if the same page has moved from one URL to another). This may take some time, so you should probably leave the redirect in place as long as you have control over the URL.

How many 301 redirects are acceptable?

It's ok to chain a few together. The HTTP 1.0 standard allows for a maximum of 5 redirects for a URL, so keep it minimal.

Why do pages translated into different languages each have different rankings in their respective engines?

Google looks at content on a URL-by-URL basis, so even if you have translated top content from one language to another, Google might not treat it the same way as they would treat the original content. It's also possible that the translated content is not as relevant as other original content in that language. Generally speaking, making sure that your content is as unique and compelling as possible for the users in that target market is the best thing to do.

Do backlinks from bad sites negatively affect my PageRank?

Those links might be positively affecting your PageRank (PageRank does not go down from "bad" links like those from adult sites). In general, you don't have to worry about bad links like that which point to your site that aren't under your control.

How often does your search algorithm change?

We change the algorithms all the time - last year we had over 450 changes.

Could sharing an IP address with a bad site get my site penalized?

The situations where it would matter are when the server is overloaded (can't respond to your visitors) and when it's incorrectly configured (not returning your site to your visitors). But otherwise that is no longer a concern.

Does Google have a problem with rank-checking software?

Rank-checking software is against Google’s Terms of Service and could result in blocking your IP address, and it doesn’t really help, especially when it comes to personalized or geotargeted results.

CIRCUITOUS ROUTES AND TRANSLATIONS

Question: Is there PageRank boost from .edu or .gov links?

Google’s Answer: You don't get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you're not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn't have any PageRank.

Translation: If the .edu or .gov page is linked to, then yes, because that webpage now has some authority, just like with any (non-.gov or .edu) page.

Question: Does a page load time play a crucial role in Google Page Ranking? If yes how important is it?

Google’s Answer: I think the more important issue here is user experience. If your site loads fast, your users will be happy; if it loads slow, users will be less happy. Make your users happy, right?

Translation: Yes, and as important as 200 other factors.

Question: Aaron D'Souza of the Search Quality team was reported as stating that publishing the same content on two separate geotargeted paths under your domain will not trigger the dupe content filters. Is this correct?

Google’s Answer: In general, in a case like that, we'd try to pick the best page based on various factors, including geotargeting and language choices. If that page is one which is also available for other geotargeting/language choices, we will generally try to pick the version that our algorithms feel makes the most sense.

Translation: Yes, we think.

Question: I have reported sites that clearly have paid links (e.g. the backlink page says "Advertising" above the link), but Google does not seem to take action. Why would that be the case? These are .orgs who are clearly selling their .org juice.

Google’s Answer: While paid links and spam reports are being taken very seriously by Google, the results may not be seen immediately for users or even not at all. This does not mean no action is being taken on the offending sites. Also, the TLD of the sites should not be a factor being taken into account. For this reason reporting both, web spam and PageRank passing link selling makes sense and contributes in an important way to the quality of Google's index.

Translation, partly based on .gov/.edu response: Google treats all top level domains the same, so a .org would have no more juice than a .com or .info. Further, clearly marked paid links (ones on pages labeled “Advertising”) are not necessarily violations of Google’s guidelines. If the links you reported were found to be nofollow links, then no action would be necessary. But keep trying to sabotage the competition. Business is war.

Question: Is it true that the fewer the links FROM your website, the more influence they have on the sites receiving those links?

Google’s Answer: PageRank is split up over the links from a page, but I would recommend not concentrating on this (as you won't be able to "measure" and act upon it anyway) and instead making your site as usable as possible for your visitors.

Translation: Yes, the more you link the more the link juice passed on is diluted, but don’t go trying to figure out the formula in order to game the system. We’ll figure you out. We’re Google.

Question: Does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by Google?

Google’s answer: Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings :-) Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger

Translation: Yes.

Question: Recently, you removed this suggestion: "Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!" from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?

Google’s Answer: There's always the chance that we'll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the "directory" recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren't great for users. Right now we haven't changed how we're weighting directory links--we've only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Translation: Possibly.

Question: Until recentley (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?

Google’s Answer: In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it's hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you'd see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience. If you're thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it's nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.

Article Source:- webpronews.com

Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

2009-12-24T06:57:00.000-08:00

As Google's search engine competitors often bring up, searchers want more than just "ten blue links" these days. Of course it has been quite a while now since search results from any of the big three were only ten blue links for most searches. We are well into the era of blended search.

Google calls this "Universal" search, but the concept is generally the same among Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Results incorporate different forms of online media. Every day, we see image results, news results, video results, local results, blog results, and more sprinkled throughout search results for any given query. That's just how it is now.

The nature of blended search requires that webmasters not only optimize their sites for search in general, but for separate and individual search engines. As SEO Dave Naylor pointed out at SES Chicago, blended or universal search results can reduce traffic for "traditional" sites. These results usually catch the user's eye, and may draw them away from organic listings (this is one of the reasons why local search optimization is getting more difficult).

That said, there are tremendous advantages to blended search results, obviously for the user, but even for the webmaster and/or business.

According to Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products at Yahoo, who spoke on this subject at the conference, the value of blended, mixed media search results comes from:

- a more comprehensive search experience

- guiding searchers to the right results

- a broader range of SEO opportunities

- taking control of your brand

- increasing qualified clicks

Just break it down by the areas you have a shot at ranking in. Can you get indexed in news search? Image search? Blog search? Forgive me for quoting Too $hort, but "Get in where you fit in." Can you do video and make it helpful and relevant to users? Do it and optimize for video. The more categories of media that the search engines are incorporating into results (that you can justify getting involved with), the more cracks you have at additional results page real estate.

Article Source:- Webpronews.com

Social Media Time Management Strategy

2009-11-23T06:36:00.000-08:00

This is the last in our series on Social Media Time Management, but you’ll really find that these are less ideas about managing just social media and more ideas for managing online life in general. It’s a balancing act. And ultimately, you’re in the driver’s seat.

1) Manage Disruptions

The key to managing disruptions is to have daily priorities. Sounds simple, but isn’t. Pick three things that you have to get done today, and focus relentlessly on those. (Hint: they should always be tied into your bigger picture goals, or you’re wasting time). If that means you have to say “I’m blogging for an hour”, do that, and let nothing but emergencies stand in your way.

Realistically, unexpected stuff pops up. Document it, find a home for it so you can address it later, and give yourself permission to forget it until the time comes where it makes the priority list. If you have to address it now, take note of what you’re working on and come straight back to it when you’re done.

2) Control Information Overload

Stop trying to be everywhere. Just stop. In social media, information overload is yours to own and manage. Pick your two or three social sites and, unless your JOB is to spot the next big things, stick with them. Adopt new tools or strategies only when there is a compelling business reason to do so.

Subscribe only to the blogs you read, and unsub from the ones you don’t, without apology. Delete email you aren’t going to respond to (be honest), and never use your inbox as a to-do list (see #6). Turn your IM off when you’re trying to work. Lots of ideas getting in the way of execution? Create a parking lot for them so you can capture them and get them out of your mind. Visit this once a week, and see if any ideas on the paper warrant a move to reality.

3) Leverage Tools

Use a desktop tool like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, CoTweet or HootSuite to streamline your Twitter use. Blog using a fluid tool like WordPress that has a suite of plugins to make your life easier, and use the scheduling function to write posts in advance. Make folders in Google Reader so you can prioritize your blog reviewing depending on how much time you have available.

However, resist the urge to automate your interactions. Automate and consolidate everything you can up to that point, but the engagement on social sites needs to be you, not a robot. THIS is where you need to spend the time.

4) Annotate and Share

If you don’t have one already, get a Delicious.com account and use it for your bookmarks. I say bookmark freely, even if you never get back to reading it. If you want to find something, it’s easier to go back to it. If you don’t, your links can be a valuable resource of information to others (and you can send them to your specific tags if you get repeated requests for the same information).

Use sites like Slideshare.net to share your presentations, and get ideas or frameworks for ones of your own. Try Flickr Creative Commons for sourcing images and sharing your own. Get to know and love the collaborative power of Google Docs or Zoho, so you don’t have to send stuff around in emails. Leverage your intranet or project tools like Basecamp to share information. The less time you spend looking for stuff, the more time you have to DO stuff.

5) Sometimes Templates are Okay

If you’re asked the same question several times a day in an email, write up a little framework of a response that you can personalize for each recipient, but that contains the bulk of the information you need to share. Same with Twitter. No, this doesn’t mean an autobot, this means having a set of standard links on hand or responses to common questions that you can respond to as needed without having to recreate it every time.

Build an FAQ page on your site to point people do. Create sharable documents that contain frequently requested information and have them on ready five in a folder for easy access. Build your tags in Delicious so that you can send people there for broad categories of related information, like statistics or case studies.

6) Wrangle Task Management

When you’re processing email or items in social media, every time a task pops up, you need a place to put it. I use Things for Mac, but there are lots of programs that will work, even the (gasp) task list in Outlook.

When you’re overwhelmed by what you’re supposed to do (say, the notes from a seminar you just attended or the volume of stuff in your inbox), process one thing at a time and ask yourself “What do I need to do with this as a next step?”. Whatever that task is, create an item for it on your task list and archive the rest of the information for later reference. Bonus step? Tag the items on your list that are doable in less than five minutes so you can take time each day (say, 35 to 45 minutes) to plow through a handful of those.

7) Communicate Expectations

Sometimes, you don’t have the answer. Sometimes, you don’t have the time to get to something right now, but you will at some point. Honesty and humility go a long way to helping manage expectations for responsiveness online. Try these:

“I’d love to get that information to you, but I need 48 hours. Will that be okay, or do you need it sooner?”
“I don’t have the answer to that, but I’d like to send your request to someone who does and have them respond. Is that okay?”
“Hey there, I got your note but need a little time to respond. I’ll be back to you within the day.”
To your boss, perhaps: “I’d like to complete this project, but here’s the information/resources I’m missing to get it done…”

This is another reason why it’s crucial to infuse some humanity into your conversations online, so folks know that you’re just a person over there, not a superhero or a robot. You need time to spend with your kid, feed the dog, spend with your spouse, read a book. Yes, you should still do those things. Being sure that folks know you’re responsive in a reasonable fashion but not going to be able to handle things ’round the clock is super important.

8 ) Establish Routines

If you have regular tasks and tactics to focus on, you’ll want to try and carve out time for them. Some examples:

* Blogging

* Reviewing and responding to email

* Listening and Monitoring (unless you have a dedicated staff person for this)

* Reporting and Analysis

* Checking in on social networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums, Community sites

If you set aside specific hours in your day, turn off other distractions. (Yes, it’s okay to close your email program). Put your phone on Do Not Disturb or let it go to voicemail. Even 30 minutes of focused time on a single task, on a regular basis can ramp up your productivity. It is NOT “inauthentic” to set times to interact on your chosen social networks. It’s all a matter of balancing priorities.

9) Unplug.

Please. Get offline. Go outside. Take a bath. Play with your kid. Go to the movies. Or go to an in-person event or Tweetup. There is nothing that will derail your social media efforts more than never walking away from them.

You need perspective from an unplugged view so you priorities stay in focus. You need time to scribble your goals on paper, or just think. Productivity isn’t always about how many balls you’re juggling. Sometimes, it’s about very careful editing of how you do – or don’t – spend your time.

So, I’m sure you have tips and tricks for how you manage all of your social media efforts. Where do you draw the lines and say enough is enough? How do you prioritize, and are you allowing yourself to set realistic limitations and goals? I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

You can Get More details on this topic in this blog.. :- onecoolsite.wordpress.com

Article Source:- socialmediatoday.com

Google Commerce Search - A festive season launch by Google

2009-11-06T03:38:00.000-08:00

Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Commerce Search: Finding holiday gifts faster

Google launched one of the unique search functionality Google Commerce Search for the people going for online marketing this festive season and making them available with the right product. Google claims to make the e-commerce searching much easier then using Google's own web search result.

Google Commerce Search is a powerful search solution designed specifically with online retail enterprises in mind. Now you can improve your shopping experience with fast, intuitive Google search technology.

Using Google Commerce Search you can,

* find the right products faster
* segregate the results by category, price, brand or other attributes
* suggest user-friendly spelling options and synonyms
* increase website conversions and sales
* promote chosen products within search results
* install search solution in days, and scale effortlessly
* customize, track, and optimize performance

Google Commerce Search is an online search technology, providing online retailers to meet the rise in demand from the holiday rush without having to devote extra time or resources to worrying about their capacity or infrastructure, and giving an edge to shoppers to find what they need faster.

Article Source:- tusharvickkie.blogspot.com

Google Gives You A Privacy Dashboard To Manage your Google Services

2009-11-05T07:50:00.000-08:00

The more Google products you use, the more data it collects about everything you do online—your search history, your emails, the blogs and news sites you read, which videos you watch on YouTube, your news alerts, tasks ,and even shopping lists. For some of these, you need to explicitly grant Google permission to keep track of data associated with your profile.

But it’s hard to keep up with everything Google is tracking.

So now the company is launching a Google Dashboard, which will give you a high-level summary of everything Google knows about you by virtue of the Google products you use. This might include how many emails are in your inbox, recent subject lines, which YouTube video you’ve watched lately (yes, all of them), appointments on your calendar, and more.

If you want more detailed data, it sends you to the particular data repository for that product. And for security purposes it does not create a second database of all the data, it just brings it up in your browser without restoring it server-side.

The Dashboard is only for Google products which require you to sign in with your Google account. It does not include cookie-based data Google collects through DoubleClick ads or other ads. For that, you need to go to the Ad Preference Manager, which has its own issues.

You can see the list of all the products the Dashboard keeps track of below.

Account & profile
Web-history
Gmail
Docs
Calendar
YouTube
Blogger
iGoogle
Latitude
Reader
Talk
Health
Orkut
Picasa
Shopping List
Voice
Contacts
Alerts
Finance
Friend Connect
Tasks
Custom search engines
Mobile Sync

How Bing Rank Tweets?

2009-10-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has made deals with both Facebook and Twitter, which will see Bing feature updates from both networks in real-time search efforts. To me, this says that social media just became an even bigger part of search engine marketing, particularly with Google also on board with Twitter and rumored to be talking to Facebook.

Bing has already made a beta version of its Twitter search available to users at bing.com/twitter. The most interesting aspect of Bing's Twitter search is that it offers something plain old Twitter Search (formerly Summize) doesn't. That is a relevancy factor (or at least an attempted relevancy factor).

Twitter Search only shows you results displayed chronologically, which has really always seemed to be the essence of real-time search to me anyway. But Bing has a "Best Match" option, which attempts to give certain tweets more weight than others.

How do you put relevancy on "real-time" results though? "Real-time" is based on time (obviously). The phrase even has the word "time" in it. A search for "SEO For ECommerce" on Bing's Twitter Search gives me different results for "most recent" and for "best match". I can't see that the "best match" results are any better than the "most recent" results, however.

Google Does Not Use Meta Keywords for Site Ranking

2009-10-16T01:55:00.000-07:00

Google’s Search Quality Expert Matt Cutts has just explained a shocking truth about how Google ranks web sites on its main site – it does not consider keywords meta tag after all. In other words, whatever keywords meta tag you use, it will not affect how well you site will rank on a particular keywords on their respective Google SERPs.According to Matt, Google started disregarding keywords meta tags when webmasters started abusing its use. Particularly when many have started stuffing the keywords meta tag with irrelevant keywords even if the site does not really contain any information relating to those keywords.

The good news is that the other meta tags are not as unuseful as the keywords meta tags. The “description” meta tags for instance is being used by Google in displaying search results snippets for websites that are displayed on Google SERPs.

Anyway, if you have stuffed your websites keywords meta tag, you don’t really need to delete it as Matt says that Google might find it useful in the years to come. And besides, those keywords are used for other purposes than web site ranking on Google search, right?

More Details you can get your answer direct from Matt Cutts here

Article Source:- googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Google Merchant Center Replaces Google Base for Retailers

2009-09-30T04:33:00.000-07:00

Introduces the Google Merchant Center for Products

Google has split Google Base into two separate entities - Google Base and the new Google Merchant Center. The Merchant Center will replace Google Base for users who submit product-type items to Google.

"If you submit products to Google, Google Merchant Center is now the place to upload your feeds, check on the status of your items, and get information on the performance of your listings," says Google Merchant Center Product Manager Loannis Kalafatis.

Google Base remains available for other types of structured content, but according to Google the Merchant Center is better optimized for product listings.

"In general, the Merchant Center interface is very similar to the Google Base interface, so we hope it's easy to transition," says Kalafatis.

Google says they will continue to add features and improve the tools for uploading and managing product listings with the Merchant Center. Users can use the same Google account information to sign in to the Merchant Center that they used for Google Base. Existing data feeds, items, FTP settings, etc. will be there waiting.

Non-product items users previously submitted to Google Base will stay there. Google says if you used Google Base for both products and non-products in the past, you will have to reset your FTP settings in Google Base.

Google Base and the Google Merchant Center have separate terms of service. The terms for the Merchant Center can be found here. There is a FAQ page here.

Article Source:- www.webpronews.com

Twitter Verses Facebook - Is a Simple Approach Always Better?

2009-09-25T07:35:00.000-07:00

If you are new to the social media world, you may be wondering just what the differences are between the major platforms Twitter and Facebook. Social media platforms have revolutionized the way in which individuals and businesses communicate and market online. While these platforms may have initially been dominated by the world of teenagers initially, the primary users today on both platforms are entrepreneurs between the ages of 35-55.

Twitter's Simple Approach Dominates

Why is this platform's overly simplistic approach taking the internet by storm? Twitter is a microblogging platform, allowing individuals and businesses to share information, thoughts, comments, resources and marketing material with not only their direct list of followers, but the entire Twitterverse. Members can create as many user profiles as they wish, customizing each one as they wish. And, users can post as often as they choose.

While some members join to simply strengthen their communication with their friends, family and colleagues, most members are looking to share information, resources and to market their products and services with like-minded individuals. Users work to build their list of followers, which had been made even easier with automatic friend adder tools, many of which are free. So, within no-time, Twitter users can build a list of 100s, or thousands of followers, each of which could be a potential referral source, customer or client.

The growing mass appeal of this platform is its simple and easy to use system. And, as any business owner understands, free marketing which is also effective is always the best method to leverage.

Facebook Begins to Make a Move

As millions of users continue to turn to Twitter, Facebook has begun to make a move in an attempt to compete for users. Facebook lite is a simplified system, working similarly to the Twitter live feed system. Users can easily view their own live feeds and the live feeds of their friends. Why is Facebook launching this new feed? Most suggest that it is a direct attack on Twitter. While Facebook has more interface options than Twitter, it is considered to be more complex. So, in an attempt to remain ever-competitive, the organization is scaling back in order to compete.

Both sites offer features and benefits which individuals and businesses find appealing. And, when leveraged correctly, both platforms offer the ability to market and grow an organization.

Social media is 'growing up'- it's not just for teens anymore. Will we see more sites that encourage true online interaction, compared to time waster games/applications that sit in between proper communication?

Article Source:- www.ezinearticles.com

Little SEO Tips For Your eCommerce Shopping Cart

2009-09-07T04:43:00.000-07:00

One way to drive traffic to your eCommerce shopping cart site is by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Getting your eCommerce site listed high in search engines such as Google and Yahoo will bring valuable hits to your site. The traffic generated by SEO is normally very targeted, for example if someone searches for 'product x' and your site come up as the top listing the user that is going to be visiting your site is likely to be very interested purchasing 'product x'.

Structure and Validation

Following the correct HTML (or XHTML) structure on your site is very important. You should make sure you use the correct header, html, body tags etc and use them in the correct order. There are plenty of good article on this around on the internet, the practice is called on page SEO, you just need to make sure that your shopping cart software follows the correct HTML structure. You might be surprised to find that a number of popular internet store solutions are not deployed with valid HTML structure.

SEO Friendly URLs

The structure of the links (or URLs) on your site is important using URL structures that read like

http:///my-category/my-product

as opposed to

http:///?product_id=xsslkjl&cat_id=3424

are generally accepted to increase your search engine rankings. There is much debate about how much this kind of search engine optimisation improves your rankings but the undeniable benefit of this is that when your page appears in search engine listings, the URL is included. If your URL is readable by a human then there is more chance the person is going to click on your link. Search engines also highlight the search terms in bold in the results the more of your listing to can get to appear in bold the better.

Maximise Descriptions

Search Engines deploy software robots to search the internet looking for pages, they are normally referred to as 'Spiders'. Spiders love text, the more and more relevant the text on your site is then higher your chances of getting listed high in search engines is. Make sure your product and category descriptions are as in-depth as they can be, but keep in mind that you're descriptions are going to be read by people who want to buy the products, so don't make them full of gibberish just to that there is text for the spiders. Accurate and detailed product descriptions have also been shown to increase the likely hood a customer will make a purchase from your store.

Alternative Descriptions and Titles

Including alternative descriptions and titles for your products is a good idea. If you're products is called 'The XYZ48882' then there is a possibility that someone searching for your product might not be aware that it's called this, especially if it's a small portable coffee machine. Including alternative more user friendly products titles will help the spiders and then, in-turn, customers find you. It's a good idea to do some keyword research when choosing alternative descriptions. A keyword research tool will be able to tell you what descriptions people are searching for and give you a good idea which descriptions and titles to choose.

By employing these tips we have no doubt you will be able to increase the search engine traffic that your site generates.

Article Source:- www.ezinearticles.com

Is Your Ecommerce Store Being Lost in the Search Engines?

2009-09-07T04:38:00.000-07:00

Content management systems have taken the updating of your website away from the designer and into your hand but in doing this may lead your website to be lost in the search engines. Search engines love HTML pages and most content management systems are not built using this language. The reason this is the case is that HTML alone has not got the flexibility to create modern complex websites. Most modern sites are built using PHP or asp. In the case of PHP it creates what is called query strings that some search engines cannot understand. This can have an effect on how well your pages are indexed by a search engine. Also this does not look good to your visitors and can be hard to remember when using them in advertising.

A good content management system however will rewrite your PHP into search engine and visitor friendly URL’s. This will help search engines index your page better and can help your search engine optimisation efforts and in turn will help you gain better results in the search engine results pages.

The other thing that may not be editable is your Meta data this also helps the search determine what your pages are about. Some content management systems repeat the Meta across all pages which are not good for the search engines or your search engine optimisation efforts. Again a good content management system will allow you to edit this data or even in some cases even write it for you.

If you are getting a website designed you should ask your developer about the above points as this can really set your website back in the search engines. The search engines are where most websites get their traffic and sales. So if your website is not placed well in the search engines then you could be loosing out on a lot of sales to your competitors.

If you already have a content management system then you should really speak to your designer and see if these changes can be implemented as your website needs to inform the search engines to what your content is about. This in return will help your website receive better rankings and in turn help make your website more sales.

Article Source:- www.ezinearticles.com

Straight From Google: What You Need To Know | Matt Cutts WordCamp San Francisco 2009 Favorite

2009-08-31T02:37:00.000-07:00

More Details visit Matt Cuts Blog

Jump Into the Twitter Craze Before It's Too Late

2009-08-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

A lot of advertising and public relation firms are united in telling SME's that the best solution for getting a better foothold on the Internet is to leverage Twitter as a tool to spread the word about your product. They regard Twitter as the answer to the need for advertising that is at the same time free yet very effective. But is Twitter as cracked up as they would like business owners to believe?

The short answer is yes. There is simply no reason why you should not ride the Twitter wave. The only way drive your business towards success is to leverage Twitter and use it as a tool to make as many people as possible notice your product. Twitter growth already rivals social media giants like Facebook and Myspace. The Twitter craze isn't nearly at its peak yet so you shouldn't miss the chance to be part of such a fast growing company and advertise your business!

Although advertising on Twitter has been getting a lot of flak, here are three reasons why you should stay on it if you already have an account, or create a new one:

Twitter has a following that exceeds most blogsites. That said, there is a greater possibility that someone will get to read about you and your business opportunity. If you use Twitter correctly and treat your followers well, they will act as your own advertising team, marketing and tweeting about you and your product without you paying them or forcing them to do so. You may not know right off the bat why you need to use this service right now; maybe you're doing well business-wise, but you don't want to miss the chance to get demographically relevant people into your following. Any chance that you can pull someone into your website is one that you should not miss.

Twitter has been getting a lot of love from Google. After tweaking a few things on the title tags last March, Twitter has been getting a lot of SEO backup from Google. Many Twitter profiles are listed on page one, even up to the first five links. So getting on Twitter is like hitting a couple of birds with just one well aimed pitch: you can get advertising and directly interact with your prospects while getting effective and highly desirable SEO.

Lastly, rapid Twitter growth has allowed the site to become a wide and open playing field. Since it was created in 2006, the site is easy to access and is not yet filled with ads from sponsors and users. Therefore, the time to use this social media service to advertise is now.

There are so many reasons why you should leverage Twitter. Other than you have nothing to lose (it's free!) and all to gain, Twitter is just a more engaging and fun way to advertise your company!

Article Source:- www.ezinearticles.com

Google Checkout and Google Base - How to Sell your items for free!

2009-08-27T01:20:00.000-07:00

What is Google Base?

Google Base is a free product made by the folks at Google.com. It allows anyone with or without a web site to reach potential customers. You can submit a variety of different types of web site content, allowing you to reach your potential customers without even having to have a web site, if this is something you desire. The massive potential on the internet has made it possible to save both time and money while working to increase your business at the same time.

You can place your entire store inventory in Google Base and reach an audience all over the globe via Google, Froogle, and Google Maps, whichever applies to the content you are uploading.

What is Google Checkout?

Google Checkout is the latest and greatest invention from Google. It is helpful and convenient to both merchants and buyers. For those who are shopping, Google Checkout provides you with a secure, convenient and fast method to make payments online. From one login, you can shop at web sites all over the vast expanse of the internet without ever having to leave home.

For merchants, Google Checkout allows you to easily integrate sales on your web site with a variety of methods that are both easy and convenient to use. It also works directly with AdWords that will help your potential customers find you quickly and easily.

How do they work together?

The two combined make for one extremely convenient method for offering your customers and potential customers a great way to find and buy your products with the ease and speed that many internet users have come to expect when shopping online. All you have to do is sign up for both services using one convenient login and you are ready to go. Even without a web page, you can upload your products and allow your customers to make purchases from you using Google Checkout.

Why should I use Google Base with Google Checkout?

As you can see there are many benefits to using both of these Google services together. Here is a run down of all the benefits you can expect with Google Base and Google Checkout.

1. Gain even more exposure for your products. Combining Google services can help you reach a greater customer base than you would just by having a web site.

2. Save time and money. If you do not have the knowledge or the funds to create a web site right now, you can still begin making money by using Google Base and posting your products for all Google users to find.

3. Fast, Convenient, and Safe. Combining Google Base with Google Checkout provides your customers with a quick and easy to use method for buying your products. They will be comforted in knowing they can do everything in one shot.

4. Accept debit and credit cards without the extra hassle. Google checkout allows your customers to use their credit card or debit card with the MasterCard, Visa, Discover, or American Express insignia to purchase your items.

More tips on Google base visit google base blog

Article Source:- www.ezinearticles.com

Google Base feed Submission (Link in description)

Be an Expert in Social Media Marketing

2009-08-26T01:03:00.000-07:00

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is one of the new buzzwords that have appeared across web marketing sites over the last few years. It is considered as an attractive marketing tool that can help you in getting more traffic, attention and links. In fact, it is defined as the representative of a creative perspective on marketing over social networking websites. It is the process of promoting your business or website through social media channels.

In past few years, factors like low economical costs and high returns of social media marketing has helped to gain its popularity at rapid pace. Generally, it may take you thousands of dollars to buy many links, but social media has the ability to give you that for free. In addition to this, social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. The best part is it does not interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can fit entirely with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines. Moreover, the branding of your website is yet another great benefit. Branding is a key to bring success in web marketing, and social media is an excellent option for helping visitors to see your website.

Social Media Marketing also helps in making money online. The more you spread knowledge and awareness about the business or product, the more it pulls crowd to the business. It is certainly a good thing for those business-minded individuals, who desire to see their business grow through social interactions on the internet. So, now if you wish to be an expert in social media marketing, you need to learn a few social media marketing tips, and apply them to your efforts. Simple tips can create lasting results, and sometimes propel a product or business to instant success.

Here are some tips that can help you to be a better SMO expert:

Find a relevant community - Hanging out in a community irrelevant to your website interests will get you nowhere.

Try to be an active participant - Make sure, you post on related message forums, blogs, and submit article to similarly article directories. Show your potential customers why your business is the one that can help grow professionally.

Remain Consistent - Your identity should not vary a great deal from one social media site to another. Be more consistent and maintain a professional appearance. Create trust in your business by supporting them in the similar manner, in spite of where you may be approached.

Make More Friends - Make as many friends as possible who have similar interests as you. Friends who are interested in your products and services will happily tell their friends, refer your site as well.

These simple tips can help in creating lasting results. At times, it may help website promotion or propel your business or product to instant success. But, you need to remember that instant success is the exception not the rule.

Article Source:- www.ezinearticles.com

The 10 Most Important Statistics For Ecommerce Websites

2009-08-24T08:24:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard the maxim “you don’t lose wait by weighing yourself?” However, I actually take issue with this statement. Not in regards to weight loss, but rather in reference to monitoring web analytics. Every time I check my site stats and see improvement, I’m motivated to create even better results.

Below I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be the most important metrics to monitor for eCommerce sites.

Landing Page Bounce Rates: A bounce occurs when a visitor visits a page on your site, and immediately clicks away and goes no further. High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors including excessive loading times, irrelevant content, unattractive site design, etc. Be sure to monitor your bounce rates on all your important entry pages including your home page and any SEO or PPC landing pages.

Landing Page Load Times: As mentioned above, excessive page load time can wreak havoc on your bounce rates. Monitor your page load times on different connection speeds with a free tool from WebSiteOptimization.com

New Visitor Conversion Rate: Most online retailers rarely differentiate between their new and return visitor conversion rates. By isolating the new visitor conversion rate, you’ll be able to see a clearer picture of what’s happening when first time visitors land on your site from search engines or other ad campaigns.

Return Visitor Conversion Rate: Unfortunately, not everyone buys on the first visit. The next best thing, however, is getting them back to your site. By analyzing your return visitor conversion rate, you’ll see how likely you are to convert your return traffic. Most likely, you’ll find that your return visitor conversion rate is the higher of the two.

Orders Per Customer Per Year: Come up with a calculation of how many times a customer order per given time period. This serves as a good tool for determining how much you can afford to spend on marketing or re-marketing.

Page views / Visit: Page views per visit can reflect how well your site engages your audience. An increasing number of page views per visit can indicate that your content is interesting, therefore visitors are spending more time browsing it. However, a high page views per visit metric can also indicate unnecessarily complication processes such as checkout or product browsing.

Items / Order: If your site has a suggested product feature to encourage add-ons, you would benefit by tracking how many items you sell per order.

Average Order Value: While your target average order value will vary greatly based on your industry, it would be wise to monitor this metric over time. Ideally, you’d like to see a year over year increase.

Traffic Sources: Google analytics breaks visit sources into 3 categories: Direct visits (from typing your URL directly), Search engines visits (both S.E.O. and P.P.C.), and referring sites (any other sites linking to yours). Obviously, the percentage of visits from each of these sources will vary for every site. However, as your brand grows, you’d like to see more visits coming from direct URL entry. These tend to convert better.
Shopping Cart/Checkout Abandonment Rate: Measure what percentage of visitors abandon the shopping process at each step in your checkout. For example, how many abandon after adding an item to the cart? After entering shipping & billing info? After entering credit card info? Too high of an abandonment rate could signal a serious checkout problem.

Article Source :- www.ezinearticles.com

Twitter Marketing Strategies - Tweeting With the Best in the Business

2009-08-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

As the cost of advertising increases with the decline in economic spending, small business social marketing plans are including the twitter marketing strategy for social media optimization. The advantages that a twitter marketing strategy offers small business owners is reflected in the interest generated with such social media optimization services as micro-blogs through social marketing outlets.

Utilizing your twitter marketing strategy. At first glance, twitter seems like just another social networking platform for idle prattle with no real purpose. On the contrary, a carefully planned twitter marketing strategy is emerging as a key tool in the small business marketing world.

* Networking. The primary goal for implementing a twitter marketing strategy is to improve networking with both current and future customers. Through various search options, subscribers can connect with others with like interests and professional goals.

* Promotion. Twitter is the perfect place to apply your social marketing plan and tell the world the latest news about your professional advancements without a huge investment of time or money. With limited allowable space, posts let you cut to the chase without the obligatory customer schmoozing beforehand.

* Reach. The possibilities are endless for attracting and reaching interested customers. Not only can you search for potential customers, they can search for you to fulfill a specific marketing need.

* Timeliness. Using a twitter marketing strategy just makes sense in a world where the need for immediate information is at its highest. Tweets are instantly posted and received by followers for an ongoing real-time discussion.

Although tweets, twitter's clever name for their micro-blog posts, are limited to a maximum of 140 characters, much social media optimization can be achieved with just the right construction in such a limited space.

Follow the leader. An effective twitter marketing strategy understands how twitter cleverly encourages its subscribers to "follow" other subscribers and vice versa. A self-assigned icon, or avatar, is displayed to represent subscribers and grouped under twitter-designated headings "followers" and "following."

* Twitter search. By accessing search.twitter.com, subscribers can customize their twitter marketing strategy, beginning with searches of one another in one of two ways: - Basic search. Type in your search term and all results meeting your criteria are returned.

- Advanced search. Queries can be search specific based on 'words,' 'people,' 'places,' 'dates,' 'attitudes,' and 'other.'

* Twellow. Twellow is an online search engine directory of twitter subscribers.

- Twellow categories. Similar to a site directory, Twellow categories allow twitter subscribers to search for subscribers based on specific categories provided by Twellow.

- Twellowhood. The demographic categorization of twitter subscribers, available in the United States and Canada. With the help of maps and zooms, subscribers can search for and connect with fellow subscribers from selected locations.

The Twitter marketing strategy is a reality for all levels of marketing professionals who see social media optimization as a valuable means to an end. Social media strategies that include social marketing platforms such as twitter can only improve the results that online social networking can provide for small business owners.

Article Source:- www.ezinearticles.com

Collection of Twitter Bird Vector Graphics,Twitter Bird Icons,Logos, Twitter Bird icon Download

2009-07-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody , Are you Looking for Twitter bird logo ? Twitter bird icons ? Twitter bird in vector, then, here is a treat for you and for your blogs, websites. Add cool Twitter graphic in your website/blog , you can encourage your site visitors to follow you on twitter.

Here is my collection of cute Twitter bird vector logos,Twitter icon sets,etc. All these are 100% Free to download.

Cute Twitter Bird Vector Art - by Smashing Magazine

Format : Vector (.eps), photoshop (.psd)

Twitter Bird Follow me Button : by IconTexto

Format : png

Tweet Tweet Vector Icon set : by Productive Dreams

Format: Vector (psd) , png

Free Twitter Bird Icon : by TheDesignSuperHero

Format : png

Twitter Bird Icon set : by Productive Dreams

Free Twitter Birds : by Luc Latulippe

Format : vector (eps)

Twitter Social Bookmarking Icon : by IconTexto

5 Steps to Make the Most of Your SEO Investment

2009-01-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

A Perfect SEO Plan Will give you the perfect Result.

Planning: A solid plan of action is a necessary component to any successful SEO program. Before beginning an effort to optimize content for better search visibility, be sure you have clarified specific goals and expectations. This will help you to decide which SEO tactics will be most effective, what internal resources will be necessary and what metrics will be used to measure success.

Resources: Assess your resources to ensure you can actually implement your SEO program. The most common reason for an unsuccessful SEO effort is failure of implementation. Take stock of available budget (yours or another department that will be affected) talent pool and any existing media assets that can be leveraged. You will need to determine if you have the resources to complete your ideal SEO plan on your own, or if you will need to enlist the services of a SEO agency (like E-campaigners

Measurement: Organize a process to measure the results of your program. You will want to be able to tie your measurements of success directly back to your SEO tactics. If increasing leads was the initial goal for your program, this may mean using an analytics package to determine the origin of your online leads. If you choose to work with an agency, be sure to select one with a strong record of measurable SEO success.

Promotion: A well-optimized website will increase your search engine rankings and help your target audience find your services over that of competitors. However, a solid SEO program does not end there. Make the most of search engine optimization by promoting useful content. Place your URL on your business card, in your email signature, and promote it online beyond the search engines in social networks, blogs, forums and anywhere that it can be useful. It will be passed along and linked to, sending traffic and further increasing search visibility.

Innovation: Don’t rely on what has always worked, or assume that your initial optimization will last forever. The online world is constantly changing, and this extends to optimization best practices. A solid SEO program is an ongoing investment that requires you to adapt and innovate to ensure your website stays at the top of the rankings and top of mind with your consumers.

With a solid search engine optimization plan, the right resources, measurements of success, promotion, and innovation, companies large and small can not only weather the current economic challenges, but achieve new growth and revenue goals.

Losing Google Organic Traffic

2008-09-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

I run a large, well-established website that has been around for years, generating millions of visitors per month across thousands of pages of documents. We have always been diligent about tracking all of our website metrics so that we understand user behavior, where our audience is coming from, and can use the data in order to improve user experience.

Recently we have been experiencing *very* erratic Google organic traffic which jumps up and down by 40% to 16%. The cycle has now repeated itself 6 times over about 6 weeks time. While there have been times in the past where our Google organic traffic has increased and decreased, it always has done it in a measured manner; we have never before seen erratic behavior from Google.

While we are constantly in the process of refining our site, the only major change over the last couple months has been to our “Meta keyword modification” . Then I checked make my meta relevancy to 70% to 80%.. but still I am facing same problame..

Exactly what I have noticed...

"A website is virtually ranked just the way it use to in their local search results but if searched for the same keyword some where else in the world, the website is no where to be seen, causing a huge drop in organic search traffic. "

I think It may be the cause of droping Organic Search Traffic..

Any ideas about what might be going on here?

Thanks!

Gyana

Benifit of Blog Marketing

2008-07-07T03:26:00.000-07:00

Here are a set of benefits I often find myself explaining to people wondering about the search engine optimization benefits of having a blog.

Structured content - Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorize content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
Crawlable URLs - Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
Internal links - Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long tail phrases.
Inbound link magnet - One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other - much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.
RSS - Links to RSS feed urls that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
Fresh content - Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
Active community - Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.
Non-Search traffic - I think the greatest benefit of having an active blog has little to do with improving your search engine rankings though. The best thing about blogs is that they allow you to generate substantial amounts of traffic via RSS and links that have NOTHING to do with search engines. My recommendation to marketers in 2007 is to pursue traffic alternatives to search engines as aggresively as their budgets and marketing programs will allow. The result will be incremental increases in site traffic with search engine referred traffic an added bonus, if not correspondingly enhanced.

Bonus benefit of a blog:
Blog & RSS Directories - With a blog and corresponding RSS feed(s), your site can now benefit from visibility within blog and RSS search engines. Web sites without feeds (your competition maybe?) are not included in these kinds of directories and search engines

Some Blog Optimization TIps

2008-07-07T03:04:00.000-07:00

Here are a few of the blog optimization tips Hope .. It will help you.. what are you saying..

Ensure your feeds are showing the full post, not just excerpts.
Up the number of items in your feed from 10 to 20 to give users more.
Consider promoting other feeds such as categories & comments.
Be sure your blog has a good internal linking structure. This can be done through category names, tag names or linking to your other posts inside new posts.
The date archives are kind of pointless, instead, use good categories or tags to organize content.
Promote your top 10 posts.
Add nofollow to date based archives and comments links to help redirect search engines to other, more valuable, areas of your blog.
Claim your blog at Technorati.
Use the SEO Title Tag plugin.
When naming your blog, use keywords if possible as that’ll help out in the log run.
Consider having a sticky post on the homepage.
Social networks encourage feed distribution which is an easy way to promote your feeds.
FeedBurner PRO features are now free.
The XML stitemap protocol supports feeds.
FeedBurner tip, turn on item views, clicks and enclosure downloads.
The auto-discovery tag ‘advertises’ your feeds availability to browsers and bots.
If doing podcast, include show notes on your blog so search engines can index the content.
Everyone has a blog. Estimated 93.8 million blogs and there may soon more blogs than websites.
It’s now about performance and results, not just having a blog.

The best item out of the SEO Through Blogs & Feed session was an example where a company promoted their product through other blogs. The company themselves didn’t even have a blog, but pitched bloggers that may be interested in posting about their product and had much success generating buzz, traffic and revenue through blogs. You no longer need a blog as being able to leverage other authoritative blogs can give you the results you’re looking for.

I’m always amazed at the items that come up in discussion at the blog sessions at conferences. I’ve been to a few and some topics are very similar while others promote new angles that hadn’t been discussed before. It really goes to show you how blogs are evolving and the power and possibility behind them.

Find More..... More 52 Blog Optimization Tips...

Stop Getting Links And Start Building Connections

2008-04-13T00:41:00.000-07:00

Read This Subject Please leave your comment:-

Until you evolve your thinking about what "links" REALLY are, you risk wasting your precious time and resources on work that will lose its value in the long run.

Ever since Google invented Page Rank, human behavior has determined what websites were really "about" and which ones were more relevant than others.

Page Rank did this by giving webmasters and site owners the ability to "vote" for the sites they liked with their links.

But now, with things like social bookmarking and content tagging, EVERY web user gets to vote on the relevancy of content - not just webmasters and site owners. Anyone can Digg, anyone can StumbleUpon, anyone can blog.

And that's a great thing for marketers.

After all, it's the PEOPLE on the web that we really want to reach anyway. A spider program will crawl any and all links it finds, but it won't ever take out a credit card and BUY anything.

PEOPLE won't just click on any and every link. But they WILL click on the ones that are meaningful - the ones that promise value on the other side - the ones that are recommended by respected members of their online communities.

So with that in mind, the REAL "home run" link building campaigns from now on will continue to focus on the usual stuff: anchor text, deep linking, page rank, all that.

But successful campaigns are ALSO going to focus on finding and engaging these "tribes" wherever they are, and using your links to connect them with content that is VALUABLE to them.

So STOP GETTING LINKS... and START BUILDING CONNECTIONS!

When "tribes" form on the web, they do so more or less to gather around a theme, or topic, or idea. They gather to talk about it and collect links to resources that are of common interest.

Your goal is to find and participate in those conversations.Contribute and provide REAL value, and in the process, you'll garner attention to yourself. Of course, you can then use that attention to get traffic to your sites, get subscribers to your lists, get readers for your blog, etc.

What will happen is that you don't just become a participant in these conversations. If you provide real value, and solid resources to these tribes, you will become a TOPIC of conversation. Members of your chosen tribe will talk about YOU, and talk about YOUR resources.

Now, enough theory - let's get into some real-world examples of how you can start putting this to work in your business starting today.

We talked about blogs earlier. Now it's important to understand what kind of role bloggers can play in their respective tribes. The bloggers are the noisemakers - they initiate discussions, distribute news, and act as a kind of general mouthpiece for their tribes.

As such, they can be a valuable asset to leverage in getting attention for your own offers, right?

So if you want to make some inroads into a particular tribe you've identified, find the people who are blogging on topics relevant to that tribe's interests.

Read their stuff. REALLY READ IT. Then comment.

Make it a BIG comment. Add value.

Did you agree?
Did you disagree?
Can you elaborate on anything they said?
Can you refute anything they said?
Remember, we want to focus on ADDING VALUE to THEIR website.

Only THEN is it going to be "okay" in the eyes of the tribe. Posting a worthless comment will get your work either quickly deleted, or if it's a moderated blog, it won't show up at all. If you can comment and come up with a REALLY GOOD reason to link back to one of your own resources, THEN do it. Otherwise, prepare to get nowhere fast.

How do you avoid wasting time? There's a "sniff test" I like to recommend to people when considering whether you SHOULD link back to yourself from a blog comment.

If you left out ALL link text and your link ONLY said "read more" - would it actually provide value? Would it be a continuation of the conversation the blogger started? If so, cool!

Post that link.

If not, don't quit!

Go to your site/blog/store and MAKE a resource or post that WILL continue and expand that conversation. Let their post be part one, and your write part two on your own blog. Does that make sense? This is what I mean by PARTICIPATING in the conversation.

Let me give you a real-world parallel. Say you're a blue widget vendor, and you're at a widget convention and you have a booth at the trade show. It's the end of a long day of exhibiting, and the show is winding down. People are collecting into their little cliques and maybe deciding where to go to dinner or whatever, but you overhear some chatter about your own product, blue widgets.

These people are your target audience, they couldn't possibly be a more appropriate tribe for you to try to speak to about your offer.

So how do you approach them?

Do you just elbow into their conversation circle, business card in hand, shouting "Hey! I sell blue widgets! Buy blue widgets from me!"

No, of course not. It's rude. You'll get ignored at best, and told EXACTLY where to put your blue widget at worst.

So what's the right way?

"Hey guys - did I hear you talking about blue widgets? Awesome! Did you know they are 99% more effective than red widgets of the same size? Yeah! I read that just last week in a report my company put out. You can find it on this website if you want to have a look. The URL is on my card there. My name's Andy, by the way. Nice to meet you! I look forward to talking more about widgets with you next time I see you!"

See?

Not so hard, and you get this crowd to like you by PARTICIPATING and EXPANDING their conversation. By contributing a valuable resource that is relevant to what they were ALREADY talking about, you can actually BECOME a new topic of conversation.

So, now you should have a better idea about how to tactfully make headway into tribal conversations when you find them.

But I bet I know what you're asking... how DO you find them?

Of course, you can do Google blog searches, or crawl social bookmarking sites looking for relevant tags. And that's great, you'll find a lot of potential conversations there.

But let's not forget. This might be "Web 2.0" but some things remain necessary in any link-building campaign. You MUST focus your efforts efficiently, so you should spend your time and resources on sites that will give you some good old fashioned SEO benefit AND get you involved in your niche's tribes.

So that means you have to go in and scrub your list of potential comment targets for factors like high PR, cache date, Alexa rank, etc. - all the things you would normally look for if you were purchasing a link, right?

More importantly, when we're talking about blogs, you need to make sure that comments aren't automatically nofollowed.

And of course, that's very tedious and time-consuming. You need to keep a spreadsheet, and collect all that info from various toolbars, you need to check out their source code to find out if their links are rel=nofollow. Now, even though it's a pain to do that work manually, I guarantee you it's worthwhile to identify the 20% of sites out there that will get you the 80% of the possible benefit.

Now, here's the part where I work a whammy on you and tell you about some spanking new product that will save you all the backbreaking work and time spent on researching these blogs. SURPRISE!
(Not really).

Yeah, I DO want to tell you about a tool that will make this super simple, and super fast.

BUT before you go grumbling off in a huff - don't sweat it. It's f-ree - 100%.

A lot of you have probably heard me speak about (or even with) Jason on the subject of articles and syndication for the purpose of link building. Jason's been in that game for a long time, and has built some of the best and most-used software to help with those methods.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't using at least one of the tools he's developed in every single one of my businesses.

And now, I'm going to start using THIS one - it's called "Comment Kahuna" and it will prove to be a LIFESAVER when you get serious about using blog comments in your "Web 2.0" linking strategies.

He's got a sweet video on his site showing exactly how it works, but I'll give you the quick version.

Type in some keywords.
Find some blogs that match those keywords.
You'll know which ones will pass link juice, AND how much
(the software sniffs for nofollow tags and PR rank).
Automatically post your comment on those blogs right from the
software interface.

That's it. No cross-referencing a bunch of statistics, no time wasted on blogs that won't pass on value. Plus, there's easy and quick posting, letting you move onto the other parts of your business that need attention.

Now, I have a warning for you. This tool COULD allow you to become a comment spammer, but I'm not giving you this resource so you can go out and tick off all the bloggers out there.

These bloggers are potential allies - if you help their websites be BETTER by contributing good stuff, they can become evangelists for your cause. There is no better form of word-of-mouth than when the tribal noisemakers start singing your praises.

So PLEASE - use this tool responsibly. In fact, you shouldn't use it exclusively to link back to your own stuff. Identify ways to build connections between related tribes. Strengthen those contextual and semantic connections. Improve the sites you comment on by strengthening the network of links between them.

Why on earth would I want to waste time working on some other site's links, Rakesh?

Good question. If you increase the value and authority of sites like these by linking them to each other, your OWN links to your OWN stuff become even more valuable.

If you're commenting on all the blogs your tribes frequent, and you're cross-linking your comments, you start to spread that traffic around. You get a chance for repeated messaging, and you increase your chances of saying something that will really resonate with individuals.

Now, you don't even have to find an existing niche. You can actually start to link together a cohesive and highly populated niche simply by effectively connecting these related tribes together.

Does that make sense?
Now, if Comment Kahuna didn't make this stuff so easy, I wouldn't recommend you waste ANY time on this advanced cross-linking stuff. You simply wouldn't have the time.

But that's the beauty of this tool. It is so fast at doing the grunt work, it allows you to REALLY get creative in the way you distribute your messages and offers to your audience.

Think about how you discuss things with members of your own tribes. Are you a member of any niche communities - based around hobbies, or maybe even a professional network? How does your tribe discover resources? How do you share them?

Answer those questions, and then figure out how you can get your taget market's tribes to discover YOUR stuff and make your stuff WORTH sharing.

Stop getting links, and start building connections.

What do you guys think? Have I given you some food for thought? Here's your chance to take a crack at this.... See you Next Time..

PART-2
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So, In the above Posts , we talked about how you need to rethink your linking strategy to focus on building real connections rather than just plastering links all over creation.

Here's a summary of how I think we can ethically and profitably build connections in our niches:

1. Identify "tribes" of people with common interests that we want to target with our messaging.

2. Find the bloggers in those tribes who have readership and influence, and who regularly write about your niche topics.

3. Of those tribal blogs, identify the ones that will also give you SEO benefit through linking (primarily, blogs that don't add rel=nofollow to links in their comments).

4. Comment on these bloggers' posts and REALLY contribute and add value. Link not only to your own resources on the subject, but help strengthen the tribe itself by cross-linking these bloggers to each other.

That's it. By practicing this kind of linking, you not only get the SEO benefit of keyword-rich links in your comments, but you visibly serve a community of active web users.

You strengthen tribal communities in your niche by connecting people to information they really want, whether you're the source of that information or not.

On top of that, you will trigger really strong reciprocity and goodwill in the bloggers whose sites you contribute to regularly. You add value to THEIR sites with your comments, and you send THEM traffic by recommending their sites to other readers.

Pretty soon, the most visible and influential members of your target tribes are going to jump at the chance to work with you.

Here's where we'll take your new CONNECTION-building strategy to the next level.

We're going to talk about Article Marketing. Now, I know most of you are already familiar with article marketing to some degree. But this (just like last time) will put a new and different spin on what you may have tried.

The most common article marketing practice involves placing articles up on major article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleCity. And that's great. If you're already placing your niche articles there, keep doing it. If you're not, you should start.

The main reason you want articles in those directories is because the search engines love them, and it's quite likely your articles will rank for your keywords if you wrote them well. If those pages rank high, and they link back to you, it's an instant SEO boost. It's because of that SEO benefit that posting articles to directories is still a worthwhile and vital part of an SEO link-building strategy.

Now, some folks proclaim that by putting your stuff in these article directories, webmasters who need content will pick your stuff and publish it on their site or in an email newsletter, with your link intact. You get instant traffic! Hooray!

Well, the sad fact is that most of the time, your content WILL get picked up from article directories, but it'll be unscrupulous webmasters who scrape out all your links and use their own. You may get an occasional ethical webmaster who really does use those directories according to the terms and conditions, but in my experience - it's becoming rarer and rarer.

So, that being the case - YES - put articles on the directories - all the articles you have EXCEPT your very best ones.

Put the lower-end keyword-targeting stuff up on the directories, but reserve the long, feature-style human interest ones , for your new allies.

That's right - we're going to take your best articles and approach your tribal bloggers (especially the ones with blogs that have some authority). If they're active members of their tribes, and they're active posters, they know it can get tough to come up with good content to keep their readers happy.

If you're already a solid contributor to their sites, now is the time to offer them a UNIQUE and UNPUBLISHEDarticle for their site. They get f'ree, high-quality material that their readers will value, and you get a byline with links back to your own site.

This is one of the most powerful traffic generation methods I know. Of course you get the machine-benefits of SEO in this case, because you're getting your links on niche authority sites.

But the real benefit is that you are putting your best content in front of your most qualified audience, and while you're at it, you're building powerful alliances with influential members of your niche.

Do you think this sounds hard?

"How will I get all these guys to want to post my articles?"

You know what? You only need ONE to post for you. Then, you contact the other possible targets and either send an email to say,

"Hey - I wrote an article about blue widgets that your readers might like and John Doe over at the Widgets Blog was kind enough to publish it for me. I just thought I'd let you know so you can hook your readers up. If you're interested in publishing any of my future articles about blue widgets, I'd love to speak to you about a unique, unpublished article I'm working on right now. Thanks!"

After you get the first one, the rest should be happy to line up to share in the f'ree quality content you want to provide to their readers.

So where can you go from here?

If you're already regularly having your content published on different niche blogs, why not try to leverage for more prominent placement? Maybe work out a deal for a permanent homepage link? Why not seal a deal for a regular recurring spot so you can start to REALLY engage that blog's audience?

Are you more worried about your bottom line rather than exposure?

If you have an affiliate program, do you think it would be hard to sign these publishers up? You're already giving them great content - do you think they'd be opposed to getting paid to publish it? Some might, sure. But most of the time, you'll have a much more friendship-based relationship with these guys rather than a business one.

And if they see they get paid for something they were already doing, I can almost guarantee that they'll be more willing to mail for you or post for you every single time you ask.

Remember, you've been a long-time contributor by this point. You started with commenting, continued with unique content, and proceeded to full on linking and affiliate relationships.

If our last newsletter was about building connections instead of links, this newsletter is about cultivating and strengthening those connections.

You want to find all the sites that cater to your niche and weave your own stuff through them. And if you use a little brainpower, it's not even that hard. You're simply creating mutually beneficial situations, and everyone really does win!

We're really going for the long-term strategies here - by really spending time in your niches, you get to know the players, and more importantly, they get to know YOU. You become the preferred provider of your product or service because you're one of THEM. You're a trusted and active member of their tribe - not some out-of-towner with a snake-oil pitch.

Never forget - markets are people.

What "Web 2.0" is doing now more than ever is allowing those people to talk to each other, so find where they gather, and join the conversation.
Contribute regularly and wisely, and you'll even begin to STEER some of those conversations your way.

If you cultivate the relationships you build through contributing, then your business will be the first and last name on the lips of your tribe when they decide to buy... or better yet, when they make a recommendation. :)

PART - 3
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Before we get into Part 3, I wanted to let you know we're going to be talking about Traffic Kahuna, which Jason Potash and company are releasing today.

In the previous parts of this series, we focused on the idea that as internet marketers, we need to:

Stop building links, and start building connections.

We talked about how through creating connections between ideas, and developing relationships with site owners and bloggers, we can essentially take on a shepherd role in our niche markets.
We can steer the tribes we target by helping them develop their niche interest.

If we use this strategy wisely and ethically, we can practically use OTHER people’s web properties as part of our own lead generating funnel.

We are no longer perceived as an outside force - like a door-to-door salesman imposing on their community.We instead become a valued member of that community, associated
not with marketing messages, but rather with being a valuable resource of information - as well as a provider of products and services.

See, by making our own connections in our marketplaces, we can capitalize on other people's resources to do all kinds of things: We can better educate consumers on our chosen topic, slowly
turning them from someone with a mild interest into a hot prospect.

We can create an impression of expertise by portraying a consistent personality across multiple "tribal" sites in our niche markets.

And of course, let's not forget that even though we've changed our thinking - we are actually STILL building links. Now, if you've been following along, we recommended a f'ree tool called "Comment Kahuna" that when used correctly, can help you efficiently engage your chosen audience and save you a LOT of research time.

Well, the same folks that made "Comment Kahuna" are releasing a service today at noon called "Traffic Kahuna" and I think that it will prove to be an incredibly valuable resource for
helping us create quality CONNECTIONS with our consumers AS WELL AS building quality links for the Search Engine spiders.

Remember how I spoke to you about how we can consider internet communities as "tribes" - small groups that cluster around common interests.

Well, what Jason and company have done is shepherded their own "tribe" around a common interest, just as I've been trying to teach you to do. Their tribe consists of webmasters that collectively operate over 1000 websites and actively post to over 500 blogs.
And here's where this tribe becomes valuable to you:

The common interest of all these site owners is a hunger for QUALITY CONTENT.

In exchange for this quality content, they're willing to trade QUALITY real estate on their sites (pages that have a high PR) and they're willing to give QUALITY one way links (with no “nofollow” tags).

Now, I'm sure you've seen this kind of "link building" network before, but the flaws in those systems were numerous.

The primary problem is that most of the blogs and sites in those networks were primarily owned by the network operators, and they existed ONLY as content billboards for their members.

The sites in those networks really had no traffic of their own, no communities of value that visited regularly.

Add to that the fact that the network operators were typically unwilling or unable to police the submissions from their customers.

So, what you ended up with were spammy sites, filled with unrelated, untargeted, duplicated posts, and worse - just crummy content.

Sure, you may have been able to get some limited benefit from those links as you're essentially "tricking" the search spiders into thinking you're popular with all those links.

Heck, it's probably still working pretty well. But that's a short term strategy. Over time, any PR value those network sites may have had is quickly leached away, and any REAL value you may have tried to provide is leached away and wasted as lazy, unethical marketers bury your stuff in worthless crap. See, that old way was focused on getting LINKS, but had no thought at all towards building the kinds of valuable CONNECTIONS that web users actually want to see.
And that's why Traffic Kahuna is different. Jason and crew KNOW the problems of using that old Web 1.0 "link-getting" model. After all, they've been using content syndication for the SEO benefit for years. They are recognized experts in that area.

Traffic Kahuna OVERCOMES all of those problems and it does it by providing a HUMAN-GUIDED focus on QUALITY.

See, the sites in the Traffic Kahuna network are all REAL sites with REAL audiences. They aren't just billboards for plastering up whatever anyone feels like. All these sites have a real interest in maintaining their audiences by providing fresh, and VALUABLE content.

Because of that, an article, review, and link from THESE sites are for the long term. They won't be buried by spam, because they will be part of a targeted resource aimed at SPECIFIC niche communities. These are sites built not just for spiders, but for TRIBES.

Webmasters have joined this network because they want to better serve their VISITORS. They are NOT just added by the network owners to provide a place for their customers to put more links.

Now, the Kahuna folks know that these webmasters are already busy, or else they wouldn't have a need for an automated, QUALITY content solution.

And that's why on the Kahuna side of this community there are actual GUIDELINES for quality content, ENFORCED by human editors.

Jason and the gang are FULLY COMMITTED to shepherding this tribe, and their aim is to BUILD QUALITY CONNECTIONS between marketers like you and me, and webmasters who already cater to the tribes we want to target.

In the same way that the f'ree Comment Kahuna tool allows you to find related blogs and post to them, Traffic Kahuna is going to allow you to bypass a lot of what I talked about in Part 2, and give you a DIRECT outlet to these valuable community sites.

You'll have a centralized place to manage your content, and YOU decide where to place it and what links you want. Of course, you need to meet their guidelines for quality, but I'm assuming
if you've kept up with this series, you know that quality is of the utmost importance anyway. I don't think any of our readers are out to junk up the internet.

But here is the BIGGEST reason I think Traffic Kahuna will succeed - both in the short AND long term: It's because they NEED you. And I don't just mean that Jason and crew need your money to line their pockets.

You are HALF the equation - without marketers and vendors that have messages they want to spread, the network has NO VALUE for the "tribe" of content-hungry webmasters.

They are creating a real, mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship - one built on an expectation of quality and trust. The very foundation of what they aim to do is JUST what I've been telling you.

They don't sell links - they foster CONNECTIONS.

And if it was from anyone else but Jason Potash, I wouldn't be so trusting that it could be pulled off.

Jason has the same attitude as I do - as ALL of StomperNet does - when it comes to content. Good marketing is about finding a group of people that want the same thing, and then giving it to them. And though SEO is one method of doing that by manipulating search results - the REAL focus should always include going to where the people ARE and interacting with them directly.

Traffic Kahuna aims to do that and MORE, and they open to the public today.

Now, don't think that the f'ree Comment Kahuna tool was some sort of take-back. You can keep right on using that tool as long as you want. But if you are finding it valuable - do your business a favor and give Traffic Kahuna a shot.

This network has the same kinds of values that we used when building our exclusive StomperSCORE system, so if you're not a StomperNet member, this is probably as close as you can get to having the same kind of benefit.

Technorati Profile

SEO Basics Guide - SEO For Freshers

2008-03-19T01:31:00.000-07:00

Introduction to SEO

This document is intended for webmasters and site owners who want to investigate the issues of seo (search engine optimization) and promotion of their resources. It is mainly aimed at beginners, although I hope that experienced webmasters will also find something new and interesting here. There are many articles on seo on the Internet and this text is an attempt to gather some of this information into a single consistent document.

Information presented in this text can be divided into several parts:
- Clear-cut seo recommendations, practical guidelines.
- Theoretical information that we think any seo specialist should know.
- Seo tips, observations, recommendations from experience, other seo sources, etc.
1. General seo information
1.1 History of search engines
In the early days of Internet development, its users were a privileged minority and the amount of available information was relatively small. Access was mainly restricted to employees of various universities and laboratories who used it to access scientific information. In those days, the problem of finding information on the Internet was not nearly as critical as it is now.

Site directories were one of the first methods used to facilitate access to information resources on the network. Links to these resources were grouped by topic. Yahoo was the first project of this kind opened in April 1994. As the number of sites in the Yahoo directory inexorably increased, the developers of Yahoo made the directory searchable. Of course, it was not a search engine in its true form because searching was limited to those resources who’s listings were put into the directory. It did not actively seek out resources and the concept of seo was yet to arrive.

Such link directories have been used extensively in the past, but nowadays they have lost much of their popularity. The reason is simple – even modern directories with lots of resources only provide information on a tiny fraction of the Internet. For example, the largest directory on the network is currently DMOZ (or Open Directory Project). It contains information on about five million resources. Compare this with the Google search engine database containing more than eight billion documents.

The WebCrawler project started in 1994 and was the first full-featured search engine. The Lycos and AltaVista search engines appeared in 1995 and for many years Alta Vista was the major player in this field.

In 1997 Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google as a research project at Stanford University. Google is now the most popular search engine in the world.

Currently, there are three leading international search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They each have their own databases and search algorithms. Many other search engines use results originating from these three major search engines and the same seo expertise can be applied to all of them. For example, the AOL search engine (search.aol.com) uses the Google database while AltaVista, Lycos and AllTheWeb all use the Yahoo database.

1.2 Common search engine principles
To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:

Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.

Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.

Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler.

Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages.

Results engine – extracts search results from the database.

Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.

Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same.

Spider. This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code.

Crawler. This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine.

Indexer. This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.

Database. This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine.

Results Engine. The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail.

Web server. The search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.

2. Internal ranking factors
Several factors influence the position of a site in the search results. They can be divided into external and internal ranking factors. Internal ranking factors are those that are controlled by seo aware website owners (text, layout, etc.) and will be described next.

2.1 Web page layout factors relevant to seo
2.1.1 Amount of text on a page

A page consisting of just a few sentences is less likely to get to the top of a search engine list. Search engines favor sites that have a high information content. Generally, you should try to increase the text content of your site in the interest of seo. The optimum page size is 500-3000 words (or 2000 to 20,000 characters).

Search engine visibility is increased as the amount of page text increases due to the increased likelihood of occasional and accidental search queries causing it to be listed. This factor sometimes results in a large number of visitors.

2.1.2 Number of keywords on a page

Keywords must be used at least three to four times in the page text. The upper limit depends on the overall page size – the larger the page, the more keyword repetitions can be made. Keyword phrases (word combinations consisting of several keywords) are worth a separate mention. The best seo results are observed when a keyword phrase is used several times in the text with all keywords in the phrase arranged in exactly the same order. In addition, all of the words from the phrase should be used separately several times in the remaining text. There should also be some difference (dispersion) in the number of entries for each of these repeated words.
Let us take an example. Suppose we optimize a page for the phrase "seo software” (one of our seo keywords for this site) It would be good to use the phrase “seo software” in the text 10 times, the word “seo” 7 times elsewhere in the text and the word “software” 5 times. The numbers here are for illustration only, but they show the general seo idea quite well.

2.1.3 Keyword density and seo

Keyword page density is a measure of the relative frequency of the word in the text expressed as a percentage. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%. If the density of a keyword is too low, the search engine will not pay much attention to it. If the density is too high, the search engine may activate its spam filter. If this happens, the page will be penalized and its position in search listings will be deliberately lowered.

The optimum value for keyword density is 5-7%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits. In practice, a keyword density of more than 7-8% does not seem to have any negative seo consequences. However, it is not necessary and can reduce the legibility of the content from a user’s viewpoint.
2.1.4 Location of keywords on a page

A very short rule for seo experts – the closer a keyword or keyword phrase is to the beginning of a document, the more significant it becomes for the search engine.

2.1.5 Text format and seo

Search engines pay special attention to page text that is highlighted or given special formatting. We recommend:

- use keywords in headings. Headings are text highlighted with the «H» HTML tags. The «h1» and «h2» tags are most effective. Currently, the use of CSS allows you to redefine the appearance of text highlighted with these tags. This means that «H» tags are used less than nowadays, but are still very important in seo work.;

- Highlight keywords with bold fonts. Do not highlight the entire text! Just highlight each keyword two or three times on the page. Use the «strong» tag for highlighting instead of the more traditional «B» bold tag.

2.1.6 «TITLE» tag
This is one of the most important tags for search engines. Make use of this fact in your seo work. Keywords must be used in the TITLE tag. The link to your site that is normally displayed in search results will contain text derived from the TITLE tag. It functions as a sort of virtual business card for your pages. Often, the TITLE tag text is the first information about your website that the user sees. This is why it should not only contain keywords, but also be informative and attractive. You want the searcher to be tempted to click on your listed link and navigate to your website. As a rule, 50-80 characters from the TITLE tag are displayed in search results and so you should limit the size of the title to this length.

2.1.7 Keywords in links
A simple seo rule – use keywords in the text of page links that refer to other pages on your site and to any external Internet resources. Keywords in such links can slightly enhance page rank.

2.1.8 «ALT» attributes in images
Any page image has a special optional attribute known as "alternative text.” It is specified using the HTML «ALT» tag. This text will be displayed if the browser fails to download the image or if the browser image display is disabled. Search engines save the value of image ALT attributes when they parse (index) pages, but do not use it to rank search results.

Currently, the Google search engine takes into account text in the ALT attributes of those images that are links to other pages. The ALT attributes of other images are ignored. There is no information regarding other search engines, but we can assume that the situation is similar. We consider that keywords can and should be used in ALT attributes, but this practice is not vital for seo purposes.

2.1.9 Description Meta tag
This is used to specify page descriptions. It does not influence the seo ranking process but it is very important. A lot of search engines (including the largest one – Google) display information from this tag in their search results if this tag is present on a page and if its content matches the content of the page and the search query.

Experience has shown that a high position in search results does not always guarantee large numbers of visitors. For example, if your competitors' search result description is more attractive than the one for your site then search engine users may choose their resource instead of yours. That is why it is important that your Description Meta tag text be brief, but informative and attractive. It must also contain keywords appropriate to the page.

2.1.10 Keywords Meta tag
This Meta tag was initially used to specify keywords for pages but it is hardly ever used by search engines now. It is often ignored in seo projects. However, it would be advisable to specify this tag just in case there is a revival in its use. The following rule must be observed for this tag: only keywords actually used in the page text must be added to it.

2.2 Site structure
2.2.1 Number of pages

The general seo rule is: the more, the better. Increasing the number of pages on your website increases the visibility of the site to search engines. Also, if new information is being constantly added to the site, search engines consider this as development and expansion of the site. This may give additional advantages in ranking. You should periodically publish more information on your site – news, press releases, articles, useful tips, etc.

2.2.2 Navigation menu

As a rule, any site has a navigation menu. Use keywords in menu links, it will give additional seo significance to the pages to which the links refer.

2.2.3 Keywords in page names

Some seo experts consider that using keywords in the name of a HTML page file may have a positive effect on its search result position.

2.2.4 Avoid subdirectories

If there are not too many pages on your site (up to a couple of dozen), it is best to place them all in the root directory of your site. Search engines consider such pages to be more important than ones in subdirectories.

2.2.5 One page – one keyword phrase

For maximum seo try to optimize each page for its own keyword phrase. Sometimes you can choose two or three related phrases, but you should certainly not try to optimize a page for 5-10 phrases at once. Such phrases would probably produce no effect on page rank.

2.2.6 Seo and the Main page

Optimize the main page of your site (domain name, index.html) for word combinations that are most important. This page is most likely to get to the top of search engine lists. My seo observations suggest that the main page may account for up to 30-40% percent of the total search traffic for some sites

2.3 Common seo mistakes

2.3.1 Graphic header
Very often sites are designed with a graphic header. Often, we see an image of the company logo occupying the full-page width. Do not do it! The upper part of a page is a very valuable place where you should insert your most important keywords for best seo. In case of a graphic image, that prime position is wasted since search engines can not make use of images. Sometimes you may come across completely absurd situations: the header contains text information, but to make its appearance more attractive, it is created in the form of an image. The text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and so it will not contribute toward the page rank. If you must present a logo, the best way is to use a hybrid approach – place the graphic logo at the top of each page and size it so that it does not occupy its entire width. Use a text header to make up the rest of the width.

2.3.2 Graphic navigation menu

The situation is similar to the previous one – internal links on your site should contain keywords, which will give an additional advantage in seo ranking. If your navigation menu consists of graphic elements to make it more attractive, search engines will not be able to index the text of its links. If it is not possible to avoid using a graphic menu, at least remember to specify correct ALT attributes for all images.

2.3.3 Script navigation

Sometimes scripts are used for site navigation. As an seo worker, you should understand that search engines cannot read or execute scripts. Thus, a link specified with the help of a script will not be available to the search engine, the search robot will not follow it and so parts of your site will not be indexed. If you use site navigation scripts then you must provide regular HTML duplicates to make them visible to everyone – your human visitors and the search robots.

2.3.4 Session identifier

Some sites use session identifiers. This means that each visitor gets a unique parameter (&session_id=) when he or she arrives at the site. This ID is added to the address of each page visited on the site. Session IDs help site owners to collect useful statistics, including information about visitors' behavior. However, from the point of view of a search robot, a page with a new address is a brand new page. This means that, each time the search robot comes to such a site, it will get a new session identifier and will consider the pages as new ones whenever it visits them.

Search engines do have algorithms for consolidating mirrors and pages with the same content. Sites with session IDs should, therefore, be recognized and indexed correctly. However, it is difficult to index such sites and sometimes they may be indexed incorrectly, which has an adverse effect on seo page ranking. If you are interested in seo for your site, I recommend that you avoid session identifiers if possible.

2.3.5 Redirects

Redirects make site analysis more difficult for search robots, with resulting adverse effects on seo. Do not use redirects unless there is a clear reason for doing so.

2.3.6 Hidden text, a deceptive seo method
The last two issues are not really mistakes but deliberate attempts to deceive search engines using illicit seo methods. Hidden text (when the text color coincides with the background color, for example) allows site owners to cram a page with their desired keywords without affecting page logic or visual layout. Such text is invisible to human visitors but will be seen by search robots. The use of such deceptive optimization methods may result in banning of the site. It could be excluded from the index (database) of the search engine.

2.3.7 One-pixel links, seo deception

This is another deceptive seo technique. Search engines consider the use of tiny, almost invisible, graphic image links just one pixel wide and high as an attempt at deception, which may lead to a site ban.

3 External ranking factors

3.1 Why inbound links to sites are taken into account
As you can see from the previous section, many factors influencing the ranking process are under the control of webmasters. If these were the only factors then it would be impossible for search engines to distinguish between a genuine high-quality document and a page created specifically to achieve high search ranking but containing no useful information. For this reason, an analysis of inbound links to the page being evaluated is one of the key factors in page ranking. This is the only factor that is not controlled by the site owner.

It makes sense to assume that interesting sites will have more inbound links. This is because owners of other sites on the Internet will tend to have published links to a site if they think it is a worthwhile resource. The search engine will use this inbound link criterion in its evaluation of document significance.

Therefore, two main factors influence how pages are stored by the search engine and sorted for display in search results:

- Relevance, as described in the previous section on internal ranking factors.

- Number and quality of inbound links, also known as link citation, link popularity or citation index. This will be described in the next section.
3.2 Link importance (citation index, link popularity)

You can easily see that simply counting the number of inbound links does not give us enough information to evaluate a site. It is obvious that a link from www.microsoft.com should mean much more than a link from some homepage like www.hostingcompany.com/~myhomepage.html. You have to take into account link importance as well as number of links.

Search engines use the notion of citation index to evaluate the number and quality of inbound links to a site. Citation index is a numeric estimate of the popularity of a resource expressed as an absolute value representing page importance. Each search engine uses its own algorithms to estimate a page citation index. As a rule, these values are not published.

As well as the absolute citation index value, a scaled citation index is sometimes used. This relative value indicates the popularity of a page relative to the popularity of other pages on the Internet. You will find a detailed description of citation indexes and the algorithms used for their estimation in the next sections.

3.3 Link text (anchor text)

The link text of any inbound site link is vitally important in search result ranking. The anchor (or link) text is the text between the HTML tags «A» and «/A» and is displayed as the text that you click in a browser to go to a new page. If the link text contains appropriate keywords, the search engine regards it as an additional and highly significant recommendation that the site actually contains valuable information relevant to the search query.

3.4 Relevance of referring pages

As well as link text, search engines also take into account the overall information content of each referring page.

Example: Suppose we are using seo to promote a car sales resource. In this case a link from a site about car repairs will have much more importance that a similar link from a site about gardening. The first link is published on a resource having a similar topic so it will be more important for search engines.

3.5 Google PageRank – theoretical basics

The Google company was the first company to patent the system of taking into account inbound links. The algorithm was named PageRank. In this section, we will describe this algorithm and how it can influence search result ranking.

PageRank is estimated separately for each web page and is determined by the PageRank (citation) of other pages referring to it. It is a kind of “virtuous circle.” The main task is to find the criterion that determines page importance. In the case of PageRank, it is the possible frequency of visits to a page.

I shall now describe how user’s behavior when following links to surf the network is modeled. It is assumed that the user starts viewing sites from some random page. Then he or she follows links to other web resources. There is always a possibility that the user may leave a site without following any outbound link and start viewing documents from a random page. The PageRank algorithm estimates the probability of this event as 0.15 at each step. The probability that our user continues surfing by following one of the links available on the current page is therefore 0.85, assuming that all links are equal in this case. If he or she continues surfing indefinitely, popular pages will be visited many more times than the less popular pages.

The PageRank of a specified web page is thus defined as the probability that a user may visit the web page. It follows that, the sum of probabilities for all existing web pages is exactly one because the user is assumed to be visiting at least one Internet page at any given moment.

Since it is not always convenient to work with these probabilities the PageRank can be mathematically transformed into a more easily understood number for viewing. For instance, we are used to seeing a PageRank number between zero and ten on the Google Toolbar.

According to the ranking model described above:
- Each page on the Net (even if there are no inbound links to it) initially has a PageRank greater than zero, although it will be very small. There is a tiny chance that a user may accidentally navigate to it.
- Each page that has outbound links distributes part of its PageRank to the referenced page. The PageRank contributed to these linked-to pages is inversely proportional to the total number of links on the linked-from page – the more links it has, the lower the PageRank allocated to each linked-to page.
- PageRank A “damping factor” is applied to this process so that the total distributed page rank is reduced by 15%. This is equivalent to the probability, described above, that the user will not visit any of the linked-to pages but will navigate to an unrelated website.

Let us now see how this PageRank process might influence the process of ranking search results. We say “might” because the pure PageRank algorithm just described has not been used in the Google algorithm for quite a while now. We will discuss a more current and sophisticated version shortly. There is nothing difficult about the PageRank influence – after the search engine finds a number of relevant documents (using internal text criteria), they can be sorted according to the PageRank since it would be logical to suppose that a document having a larger number of high-quality inbound links contains the most valuable information.

Thus, the PageRank algorithm "pushes up" those documents that are most popular outside the search engine as well.

3.6 Google PageRank – practical use
Currently, PageRank is not used directly in the Google algorithm. This is to be expected since pure PageRank characterizes only the number and the quality of inbound links to a site, but it completely ignores the text of links and the information content of referring pages. These factors are important in page ranking and they are taken into account in later versions of the algorithm. It is thought that the current Google ranking algorithm ranks pages according to thematic PageRank. In other words, it emphasizes the importance of links from pages with content related by similar topics or themes. The exact details of this algorithm are known only to Google developers.

You can determine the PageRank value for any web page with the help of the Google ToolBar that shows a PageRank value within the range from 0 to 10. It should be noted that the Google ToolBar does not show the exact PageRank probability value, but the PageRank range a particular site is in. Each range (from 0 to 10) is defined according to a logarithmic scale.

Here is an example: each page has a real PageRank value known only to Google. To derive a displayed PageRank range for their ToolBar, they use a logarithmic scale as shown in this table
Real PR ToolBar PR
1-10 1
10-100 2
100-1000 3
1000-10.000 4
Etc.

This shows that the PageRank ranges displayed on the Google ToolBar are not all equal. It is easy, for example, to increase PageRank from one to two, while it is much more difficult to increase it from six to seven.

In practice, PageRank is mainly used for two purposes:

1. Quick check of the sites popularity. PageRank does not give exact information about referring pages, but it allows you to quickly and easily get a feel for the sites popularity level and to follow trends that may result from your seo work. You can use the following “Rule of thumb” measures for English language sites: PR 4-5 is typical for most sites with average popularity. PR 6 indicates a very popular site while PR 7 is almost unreachable for a regular webmaster. You should congratulate yourself if you manage to achieve it. PR 8, 9, 10 can only be achieved by the sites of large companies such as Microsoft, Google, etc. PageRank is also useful when exchanging links and in similar situations. You can compare the quality of the pages offered in the exchange with pages from your own site to decide if the exchange should be accepted.

2. Evaluation of the competitiveness level for a search query is a vital part of seo work. Although PageRank is not used directly in the ranking algorithms, it allows you to indirectly evaluate relative site competitiveness for a particular query. For example, if the search engine displays sites with PageRank 6-7 in the top search results, a site with PageRank 4 is not likely to get to the top of the results list using the same search query.

It is important to recognize that the PageRank values displayed on the Google ToolBar are recalculated only occasionally (every few months) so the Google ToolBar displays somewhat outdated information. This means that the Google search engine tracks changes in inbound links much faster than these changes are reflected on the Google ToolBar.

3.7 Increasing link popularity

3.7.1 Submitting to general purpose directories

On the Internet, many directories contain links to other network resources grouped by topics. The process of adding your site information to them is called submission.

Such directories can be paid or free of charge, they may require a backlink from your site or they may have no such requirement. The number of visitors to these directories is not large so they will not send a significant number to your site. However, search engines count links from these directories and this may enhance your sites search result placement.

Important! Only those directories that publish a direct link to your site are worthwhile from a seo point of view. Script driven directories are almost useless. This point deserves a more detailed explanation. There are two methods for publishing a link. A direct link is published as a standard HTML construction («A href=...», etc.). Alternatively, links can be published with the help of various scripts, redirects and so on. Search engines understand only those links that are specified directly in HTML code. That is why the seo value of a directory that does not publish a direct link to your site is close to zero.

You should not submit your site to FFA (free-for-all) directories. Such directories automatically publish links related to any search topic and are ignored by search engines. The only thing an FFA directory entry will give you is an increase in spam sent to your published e-mail address. Actually, this is the main purpose of FFA directories.

Be wary of promises from various programs and seo services that submit your resource to hundreds of thousands of search engines and directories. There are no more than a hundred or so genuinely useful directories on the Net – this is the number to take seriously and professional seo submission services work with this number of directories. If a seo service promises submissions to enormous numbers of resources, it simply means that the submission database mainly consists of FFA archives and other useless resources.

Give preference to manual or semiautomatic seo submission; do not rely completely on automatic processes. Submitting sites under human control is generally much more efficient than fully automatic submission. The value of submitting a site to paid directories or publishing a backlink should be considered individually for each directory. In most cases, it does not make much sense, but there may be exceptions.

Submitting sites to directories does not often result in a dramatic effect on site traffic, but it slightly increases the visibility of your site for search engines. This useful seo option is available to everyone and does not require a lot of time and expense, so do not overlook it when promoting your project.

3.7.2 DMOZ directory

The DMOZ directory (www.dmoz.org) or the Open Directory Project is the largest directory on the Internet. There are many copies of the main DMOZ site and so, if you submit your site to the DMOZ directory, you will get a valuable link from the directory itself as well as dozens of additional links from related resources. This means that the DMOZ directory is of great value to a seo aware webmaster.

It is not easy to get your site into the DMOZ directory; there is an element of luck involved. Your site may appear in the directory a few minutes after it has been submitted or it may take months to appear.

If you submitted your site details correctly and in the appropriate category then it should eventually appear. If it does not appear after a reasonable time then you can try contacting the editor of your category with a question about your request (the DMOZ site gives you such opportunity). Of course, there are no guarantees, but it may help. DMOZ directory submissions are free of charge for all sites, including commercial ones.

Here are my final recommendations regarding site submissions to DMOZ. Read all site requirements, descriptions, etc. to avoid violating the submission rules. Such a violation will most likely result in a refusal to consider your request. Please remember, presence in the DMOZ directory is desirable, but not obligatory. Do not despair if you fail to get into this directory. It is possible to reach top positions in search results without this directory – many sites do.

3.7.3 Link exchange

The essence of link exchanges is that you use a special page to publish links to other sites and get similar backlinks from them. Search engines do not like link exchanges because, in many cases, they distort search results and do not provide anything useful to Internet users. However, it is still an effective way to increase link popularity if you observe several simple rules.

- Exchange links with sites that are related by topic. Exchanging links with unrelated sites is ineffective and unpopular.

- Before exchanging, make sure that your link will be published on a “good” page. This means that the page must have a reasonable PageRank (3-4 or higher is recommended), it must be available for indexing by search engines, the link must be direct, the total number of links on the page must not exceed 50, and so on.

- Do not create large link directories on your site. The idea of such a directory seems attractive because it gives you an opportunity to exchange links with many sites on various topics. You will have a topic category for each listed site. However, when trying to optimize your site you are looking for link quality rather than quantity and there are some potential pitfalls. No seo aware webmaster will publish a quality link to you if he receives a worthless link from your directory “link farm” in return. Generally, the PageRank of pages from such directories leaves a lot to be desired. In addition, search engines do not like these directories at all. There have even been cases where sites were banned for using such directories.

- Use a separate page on the site for link exchanges. It must have a reasonable PageRank and it must be indexed by search engines, etc. Do not publish more than 50 links on one page (otherwise search engines may fail to take some of the links into account). This will help you to find other seo aware partners for link exchanges.

- Search engines try to track mutual links. That is why you should, if possible, publish backlinks on a domain/site other than the one you are trying to promote. The best variant is when you promote the resource site1.com and publish backlinks on the resource site2.com.

- Exchange links with caution. Webmasters who are not quite honest will often remove your links from their resources after a while. Check your backlinks from time to time.

3.7.4 Press releases, news feeds, thematic resources

This section is about site marketing rather than pure seo. There are many information resources and news feeds that publish press releases and news on various topics. Such sites can supply you with direct visitors and also increase your sites popularity. If you do not find it easy to create a press release or a piece of news, hire copywriters – they will help you find or create something newsworthy.

Look for resources that deal with similar topics to your own site. You may find many Internet projects that not in direct competition with you, but which share the same topic as your site. Try to approach the site owners. It is quite possible that they will be glad to publish information about your project.

One final tip for obtaining inbound links – try to create slight variations in the inbound link text. If all inbound links to your site have exactly the same link text and there are many of them, the search engines may flag it as a spam attempt and penalize your site.

4. Indexing a site

Before a site appears in search results, a search engine must index it. An indexed site will have been visited and analyzed by a search robot with relevant information saved in the search engine database. If a page is present in the search engine index, it can be displayed in search results otherwise, the search engine cannot know anything about it and it cannot display information from the page..

Most average sized sites (with dozens to hundreds of pages) are usually indexed correctly by search engines. However, you should remember the following points when constructing your site. There are two ways to allow a search engine to learn about a new site:

- Submit the address of the site manually using a form associated with the search engine, if available. In this case, you are the one who informs the search engine about the new site and its address goes into the queue for indexing. Only the main page of the site needs to be added, the search robot will find the rest of pages by following links.

- Let the search robot find the site on its own. If there is at least one inbound link to your resource from other indexed resources, the search robot will soon visit and index your site. In most cases, this method is recommended. Get some inbound links to your site and just wait until the robot visits it. This may actually be quicker than manually adding it to the submission queue. Indexing a site typically takes from a few days to two weeks depending on the search engine. The Google search engine is the quickest of the bunch.

Try to make your site friendly to search robots by following these rules:

- Try to make any page of your site reachable from the main page in not more than three mouse clicks. If the structure of the site does not allow you to do this, create a so-called site map that will allow this rule to be observed.

- Do not make common mistakes. Session identifiers make indexing more difficult. If you use script navigation, make sure you duplicate these links with regular ones because search engines cannot read scripts (see more details about these and other mistakes in section 2.3).

- Remember that search engines index no more than the first 100-200 KB of text on a page. Hence, the following rule – do not use pages with text larger than 100 KB if you want them to be indexed completely.

You can manage the behavior of search robots using the file robots.txt. This file allows you to explicitly permit or forbid them to index particular pages on your site.

The databases of search engines are constantly being updated; records in them may change, disappear and reappear. That is why the number of indexed pages on your site may sometimes vary. One of the most common reasons for a page to disappear from indexes is server unavailability. This means that the search robot could not access it at the time it was attempting to index the site. After the server is restarted, the site should eventually reappear in the index.

You should note that the more inbound links your site has, the more quickly it gets re-indexed. You can track the process of indexing your site by analyzing server log files where all visits of search robots are logged. We will give details of seo software that allows you to track such visits in a later section.

5. Choosing keywords

5.1 Initially choosing keywords

Choosing keywords should be your first step when constructing a site. You should have the keyword list available to incorporate into your site text before you start composing it. To define your site keywords, you should use seo services offered by search engines in the first instance. Sites such as www.wordtracker.com and inventory.overture.com are good starting places for English language sites. Note that the data they provide may sometimes differ significantly from what keywords are actually the best for your site. You should also note that the Google search engine does not give information about frequency of search queries.

After you have defined your approximate list of initial keywords, you can analyze your competitor’s sites and try to find out what keywords they are using. You may discover some further relevant keywords that are suitable for your own site.

5.2 Frequent and rare keywords

There are two distinct strategies – optimize for a small number of highly popular keywords or optimize for a large number of less popular words. In practice, both strategies are often combined.

The disadvantage of keywords that attract frequent queries is that the competition rate is high for them. It is often not possible for a new site to get anywhere near the top of search result listings for these queries.

For keywords associated with rare queries, it is often sufficient just to mention the necessary word combination on a web page or to perform minimum text optimization. Under certain circumstances, rare queries can supply quite a large amount of search traffic.

The aim of most commercial sites is to sell some product or service or to make money in some way from their visitors. This should be kept in mind during your seo (search engine optimization) work and keyword selection. If you are optimizing a commercial site then you should try to attract targeted visitors (those who are ready to pay for the offered product or service) to your site rather than concentrating on sheer numbers of visitors.

Example. The query “monitor” is much more popular and competitive than the query “monitor Samsung 710N” (the exact name of the model). However, the second query is much more valuable for a seller of monitors. It is also easier to get traffic from it because its competition rate is low; there are not many other sites owned by sellers of Samsung 710N monitors. This example highlights another possible difference between frequent and rare search queries that should be taken into account – rare search queries may provide you with less visitors overall, but more targeted visitors.

5.3 Evaluating the competition rates of search queries

When you have finalized your keywords list, you should identify the core keywords for which you will optimize your pages. A suggested technique for this follows.

Rare queries are discarded at once (for the time being). In the previous section, we described the usefulness of such rare queries but they do not require special optimization. They are likely to occur naturally in your website text.

As a rule, the competition rate is very high for the most popular phrases. This is why you need to get a realistic idea of the competitiveness of your site. To evaluate the competition rate you should estimate a number of parameters for the first 10 sites displayed in search results:
- The average PageRank of the pages in the search results.
- The average number of links to these sites. Check this using a variety of search engines.
Additional parameters:
- The number of pages on the Internet that contain the particular search term, the total number of search results for that search term.
- The number of pages on the Internet that contain exact matches to the keyword phrase. The search for the phrase is bracketed by quotation marks to obtain this number.

These additional parameters allow you to indirectly evaluate how difficult it will be to get your site near the top of the list for this particular phrase. As well as the parameters described, you can also check the number of sites present in your search results in the main directories, such as DMOZ and Yahoo.

The analysis of the parameters mentioned above and their comparison with those of your own site will allow you to predict with reasonable certainty the chances of getting your site to the top of the list for a particular phrase.

Having evaluated the competition rate for all of your keyword phrases, you can now select a number of moderately popular key phrases with an acceptable competition rate, which you can use to promote and optimize your site.

5.4 Refining your keyword phrases

As mentioned above, search engine services often give inaccurate keyword information. This means that it is unusual to obtain an optimum set of site keywords at your first attempt. After your site is up and running and you have carried out some initial promotion, you can obtain additional keyword statistics, which will facilitate some fine-tuning. For example, you will be able to obtain the search results rating of your site for particular phrases and you will also have the number of visits to your site for these phrases.

With this information, you can clearly define the good and bad keyword phrases. Often there is no need to wait until your site gets near the top of all search engines for the phrases you are evaluating – one or two search engines are enough.

Example. Suppose your site occupies first place in the Yahoo search engine for a particular phrase. At the same time, this site is not yet listed in MSN, or Google search results for this phrase. However, if you know the percentage of visits to your site from various search engines (for instance, Google – 70%, Yahoo – 20%, MSN search – 10%), you can predict the approximate amount of traffic for this phrase from these other searches engines and decide whether it is suitable.

As well as detecting bad phrases, you may find some new good ones. For example, you may see that a keyword phrase you did not optimize your site for brings useful traffic despite the fact that your site is on the second or third page in search results for this phrase.

Using these methods, you will arrive at a new refined set of keyword phrases. You should now start reconstructing your site: Change the text to include more of the good phrases, create new pages for new phrases, etc.

You can repeat this seo exercise several times and, after a while, you will have an optimum set of key phrases for your site and considerably increased search traffic.

Here are some more tips. According to statistics, the main page takes up to 30%-50% of all search traffic. It has the highest visibility in search engines and it has the largest number of inbound links. That is why you should optimize the main page of your site to match the most popular and competitive queries. Each site page should be optimized for one or two main word combinations and, possibly for a number of rare queries. This will increase the chances for the page get to the top of search engine lists for particular phrases.

6 Miscellaneous information on search engines

6.1 Google SandBox

At the beginning of 2004, a new and mysterious term appeared among seo specialists – Google SandBox. This is the name of a new Google spam filter that excludes new sites from search results. The work of the SandBox filter results in new sites being absent from search results for virtually any phrase. This even happens with sites that have high-quality unique content and which are promoted using legitimate techniques.

The SandBox is currently applied only to the English segment of the Internet; sites in other languages are not yet affected by this filter. However, this filter may expand its influence. It is assumed that the aim of the SandBox filter is to exclude spam sites – indeed, no search spammer will be able to wait for months until he gets the necessary results. However, many perfectly valid new sites suffer the consequences. So far, there is no precise information as to what the SandBox filter actually is. Here are some assumptions based on practical seo experience:

- SandBox is a filter that is applied to new sites. A new site is put in the sandbox and is kept there for some time until the search engine starts treating it as a normal site.

- SandBox is a filter applied to new inbound links to new sites. There is a fundamental difference between this and the previous assumption: the filter is not based on the age of the site, but on the age of inbound links to the site. In other words, Google treats the site normally but it refuses to acknowledge any inbound links to it unless they have existed for several months. Since such inbound links are one of the main ranking factors, ignoring inbound links is equivalent to the site being absent from search results. It is difficult to say which of these assumptions is true, it is quite possible that they are both true.

- The site may be kept in the sandbox from 3 months to a year or more. It has also been noticed that sites are released from the sandbox in batches. This means that the time sites are kept in the sandbox is not calculated individually for each site, but for groups of sites. All sites created within a certain time period are put into the same group and they are eventually all released at the same time. Thus, individual sites in a group can spend different times in the sandbox depending where they were in the group capture-release cycle.

Typical indications that your site is in the sandbox include:

- Your site is normally indexed by Google and the search robot regularly visits it.
- Your site has a PageRank; the search engine knows about and correctly displays inbound links to your site.
- A search by site address (www.site.com) displays correct results, with the correct title, snippet (resource description), etc.
- Your site is found by rare and unique word combinations present in the text of its pages.
- Your site is not displayed in the first thousand results for any other queries, even for those for which it was initially created. Sometimes, there are exceptions and the site appears among 500-600 positions for some queries. This does not change the sandbox situation, of course.

There no practical ways to bypass the Sandbox filter. There have been some suggestions about how it may be done, but they are no more than suggestions and are of little use to a regular webmaster. The best course of action is to continue seo work on the site content and structure and wait patiently until the sandbox is disabled after which you can expect a dramatic increase in ratings, up to 400-500 positions.

6.2 Google LocalRank

On February 25, 2003, the Google Company patented a new algorithm for ranking pages called LocalRank. It is based on the idea that pages should be ranked not by their global link citations, but by how they are cited among pages that deal with topics related to the particular query. The LocalRank algorithm is not used in practice (at least, not in the form it is described in the patent). However, the patent contains several interesting innovations we think any seo specialist should know about. Nearly all search engines already take into account the topics to which referring pages are devoted. It seems that rather different algorithms are used for the LocalRank algorithm and studying the patent will allow us to learn general ideas about how it may be implemented.

While reading this section, please bear in mind that it contains theoretical information rather than practical guidelines.

The following three items comprise the main idea of the LocalRank algorithm:

1. An algorithm is used to select a certain number of documents relevant to the search query (let it be N). These documents are initially sorted by some criteria (this may be PageRank, relevance or a group of other criteria). Let us call the numeric value of this criterion OldScore.

2. Each of the N N selected pages goes through a new ranking procedure and it gets a new rank. Let us call it LocalScore.

3. The OldScore and LocalScore values for each page are multiplied, to yield a new value – NewScore. The pages are finally ranked based on NewScore.

The key procedure in this algorithm is the new ranking procedure, which gives each page a new LocalScore rank. Let us examine this new procedure in more detail:

0. An initial ranking algorithm is used to select N pages relevant to the search query. Each of the N pages is allocated an OldScore value by this algorithm. The new ranking algorithm only needs to work on these N selected pages. .

1. While calculating LocalScore for each page, the system selects those pages from N that have inbound links to this page. Let this number be M. At the same time, any other pages from the same host (as determined by IP address) and pages that are mirrors of the given page will be excluded from M.

2. The set M is divided into subsets Li. These subsets contain pages grouped according to the following criteria:
- Belonging to one (or similar) hosts. Thus, pages whose first three octets in their IP addresses are the same will get into one group. This means that pages whose IP addresses belong to the range xxx.xxx.xxx.0 to xxx.xxx.xxx.255 will be considered as belonging to one group.
- Pages that have the same or similar content (mirrors)
- Pages on the same site (domain).

3. Each page in each Li subset has rank OldScore. One page with the largest OldScore rank is taken from each subset, the rest of pages are excluded from the analysis. Thus, we get some subset of pages K referring to this page.

4. Pages in the subset K are sorted by the OldScore parameter, then only the first k pages (k is some predefined number) are left in the subset K. The rest of the pages are excluded from the analysis.

5. LocalScore is calculated in this step. The OldScore parameters are combined together for the rest of k pages. This can be shown with the help of the following formula:

Here m is some predefined parameter that may vary from one to three. Unfortunately, the patent for the algorithm in question does not describe this parameter in detail.

After LocalScore is calculated for each page from the set N, NewScore values are calculated and pages are re-sorted according to the new criteria. The following formula is used to calculate NewScore:

NewScore(i)= (a+LocalScore(i)/MaxLS)*(b+OldScore(i)/MaxOS)

i is the page for which the new rank is calculated.

a and b – are numeric constants (there is no more detailed information in the patent about these parameters).

MaxLS – is the maximum LocalScore among those calculated.

MaxOS – is the maximum value among OldScore values.

Now let us put the math aside and explain these steps in plain words.

In step 0) pages relevant to the query are selected. Algorithms that do not take into account the link text are used for this. For example, relevance and overall link popularity are used. We now have a set of OldScore values. OldScore is the rating of each page based on relevance, overall link popularity and other factors.

In step 1) pages with inbound links to the page of interest are selected from the group obtained in step 0). The group is whittled down by removing mirror and other sites in steps 2), 3) and 4) so that we are left with a set of genuinely unique sites that all share a common theme with the page that is under analysis. By analyzing inbound links from pages in this group (ignoring all other pages on the Internet), we get the local (thematic) link popularity.

LocalScore values are then calculated in step 5). LocalScore is the rating of a page among the set of pages that are related by topic. Finally, pages are rated and ranked using a combination of LocalScore and OldScore.

6.3 Seo tips, assumptions, observations

This section provides information based on an analysis of various seo articles, communication between optimization specialists, practical experience and so on. It is a collection of interesting and useful tips ideas and suppositions. Do not regard this section as written in stone, but rather as a collection of information and suggestions for your consideration.

Outbound links.:- Publish links to authoritative resources in your subject field using the necessary keywords. Search engines place a high value on links to other resources based on the same topic.

Outbound links - Do not publish links to FFA sites and other sites excluded from the indexes of search engines. Doing so may lower the rating of your own site.

Outbound links - A page should not contain more than 50-100 outbound links. More links will not harm your site rating but links beyond that number will not be recognized by search engines.

- Inbound site-wide links- These are links published on every page of the site. It is believed that search engines do not approve of such links and do not consider them while ranking pages. Another opinion is that this is true only for large sites with thousands of pages.

- The ideal keyword density is a frequent seo discussion topic. The real answer is that there is no ideal keyword density. It is different for each query and search engines calculate it dynamically for each search query. Our advice is to analyze the first few sites in search results for a particular query. This will allow you to evaluate the approximate optimum density for specific queries.

- Domain Age:- Search engines prefer old sites because they are more stable.

- Site updates. Search engines prefer sites that are constantly developing. Developing sites are those in which new information and new pages periodically appear.

Search engines track the percent of visitors that immediately return to searching after they visit a site via a search result link. A large number of immediate returns means that the content is probably not related to the corresponding topic and the ranking of such a page gets lower.

- Search engines track how often a link is selected in search results. If some link is only occasionally selected, it means that the page is of little interest and the rating of such a page gets lower

- Use synonyms and derived word forms of keywords, search engines will appreciate that (keyword stemming).

; - Search engines consider a very rapid increase in inbound links as artificial promotion and this results in lowering of the rating. This is a controversial topic because this method could be used to lower the rating of one's competitors.

- Google does not take into account inbound links if they are on the same (or similar) hosts. This is detected using host IP addresses. Pages whose IP addresses are within the range of xxx.xxx.xxx.0 to xxx.xxx.xxx.255. are regarded as being on the same host. This opinion is most likely to be rooted in the fact that Google have expressed this idea in their patents. However, Google employees claim that no limitations of IP addresses are imposed on inbound links and there are no reasons not to believe them.

- Search engines check information about the owners of domains. Inbound links originating from a variety of sites all belonging to one owner are regarded as less important than normal links. This information is presented in a patent.

- Search engines prefer sites with longer term domain registrations.

6.4 Creating correct content

The content of a site plays an important role in site promotion for many reasons. We will describe some of them in this section. We will also give you some advice on how to populate your site with good content.

- Content uniqueness. Search engines value new information that has not been published before. That is why you should compose own site text and not plagiarize excessively. A site based on materials taken from other sites is much less likely to get to the top in search engines. As a rule, original source material is always higher in search results.

- While creating a site, remember that it is primarily created for human visitors, not search engines. Getting visitors to visit your site is only the first step and it is the easiest one. The truly difficult task is to make them stay on the site and convert them into purchasers. You can only do this by using good content that is interesting to real people.

- Try to update information on the site and add new pages on a regular basis. Search engines value sites that are constantly developing. Also, the more useful text your site contains, the more visitors it attracts. Write articles on the topic of your site, publish visitors' opinions, create a forum for discussing your project. A forum is only useful if the number of visitors is sufficient for it to be active. Interesting and attractive content guarantees that the site will attract interested visitors.

- A site created for people rather than search engines has a better chance of getting into important directories such as DMOZ and others.

- An interesting site on a particular topic has much better chances to get links, comments, reviews, etc. from other sites on this topic. Such reviews can give you a good flow of visitors while inbound links from such resources will be highly valued by search engines.

- As final tip…there is an old German proverb: "A shoemaker sticks to his last" which means, "Do what you can do best.” If you can write breathtaking and creative textual prose for your website then that is great. However, most of us have no special talent for writing attractive text and we should rely on professionals such as journalists and technical writers. Of course, this is an extra expense, but it is justified in the long term.\

6.5 Selecting a domain and hosting
Currently, anyone can create a page on the Internet without incurring any expense. Also, there are companies providing free hosting services that will publish your page in return for their entitlement to display advertising on it. Many Internet service providers will also allow you to publish your page on their servers if you are their client. However, all these variations have serious drawbacks that you should seriously consider if you are creating a commercial project.

First, and most importantly, you should obtain your own domain for the following reasons:

- A project that does not have its own domain is regarded as a transient project. Indeed, why should we trust a resource if its owners are not even prepared to invest in the tiny sum required to create some sort of minimum corporate image? It is possible to publish free materials using resources based on free or ISP-based hosting, but any attempt to create a commercial project without your own domain is doomed to failure.

- Your own domain allows you to choose your hosting provider. If necessary, you can move your site to another hosting provider at any time.

Here are some useful tips for choosing a domain name.

- Try to make it easy to remember and make sure there is only one way to pronounce and spell it.

- Domains with the extension .com are the best choice to promote international projects in English. Domains from the zones .net, .org, .biz, etc., are available but less preferable.

- If you want to promote a site with a national flavor, use a domain from the corresponding national zone. Use .de – for German sites, .it – for Italian sites, etc.

- In the case of sites containing two or more languages, you should assign a separate domain to each language. National search engines are more likely to appreciate such an approach than subsections for various languages located on one site.

A domain costs $10-20 a year, depending on the particular registration service and zone.

You should take the following factors into consideration when choosing a hosting provider:

- Access bandwidth.
- Server uptime.
- The cost of traffic per gigabyte and the amount of prepaid traffic.
- The site is best located in the same geographical region as most of your expected visitors.

The cost of hosting services for small projects is around $5-10 per month.

Avoid “free” offers while choosing a domain and a hosting provider. Hosting providers sometimes offer free domains to their clients. Such domains are often registered not to you, but to the hosting company. The hosting provider will be the owner of the domain. This means that you will not be able to change the hosting service of your project, or you could even be forced to buy out your own domain at a premium price. Also, you should not register your domains via your hosting company. This may make moving your site to another hosting company more difficult even though you are the owner of your domain.

6.6 Changing the site address
You may need to change the address of your project. Maybe the resource was started on a free hosting service and has developed into a more commercial project that should have its own domain. Or maybe the owner has simply found a better name for the project. In any case, moving to a new address can be problematic and it is a difficult and unpleasant task to move a project to a new address. For starters, you will have to start promoting the new address almost from scratch. However, if the move is inevitable, you may as well make the change as useful as possible.

Our advice is to create your new site at the new location with new and unique content. Place highly visible links to the new resource on the old site to allow visitors to easily navigate to your new site. Do not completely delete the old site and its contents.

This approach will allow you to get visitors from search engines to both the old site and the new one. At the same time, you get an opportunity to cover additional topics and keywords, which may be more difficult within one resource.

Instead of a conclusion: promoting your site step by step

2008-03-19T01:24:00.000-07:00

In this section, I will explain how I use seo in promoting my own sites. It is a kind of systematic summary where I briefly recap the previous sections. Naturally, I use Seo Administrator seo software extensively in my work and so I will show how I use it in this example.

To be able to start working with a site, you have to possess some basic seo knowledge. This can be acquired quite quickly. The information presented in this document is perfectly adequate and I must stress that you do not have to be an optimization guru to achieve results. Once you have this basic knowledge you can then start work, experimenting, getting sites to the top of the search listings and so on. That is where seo software tools are useful.

1. Firstly, we create an approximate list of keywords and check their competition rate. We then evaluate our chances against the competition and select words that are popular enough and have average competition rate. Keywords are selected using the keyword suggestion tool. This is also used to perform a rough check of their competition rate. We use the PageRank Analyzer module to perform a detailed analysis of search results for the most interesting queries and then make our final decision about what keywords to use.

2. Next, we start composing text for our site. I write part of it on my own, but I entrust the most important parts to specialists in technical writing. Actually, I think the quality and attractiveness of the text is the most important attribute of a page. If the textual content is good, it will be easier to get inbound links and visitors.

3. In this step, we start using the HTML Analyzer module to create the necessary keyword density. Each page is optimized for its own keyword phrase.

4. We submit the site to various directories. There are plenty of services to take care of that chore for us. In addition, Seo Administrator will soon have a feature to automate the task.

5. After these initial steps are completed, we wait and check search engine indexation to make sure that various search engines are processing the site.

6. In this step, we can begin to check the positions of the site for our keywords. These positions are not likely to be good at this early stage, but they will give us some useful information to begin fine-tuning seo work.

7. We use the Link Popularity Checker module to track and work on increasing the link popularity.

8. We use the Log Analyzer module to analyze the number of visitors and work on increasing it. We also periodically repeat steps 6) - 8).

SEO Job Interview Questions

2008-02-12T21:53:00.000-08:00

80+ SEO Job Interview Questions (posted on 11th Oct 2009)

Open-ended SEO questions

1. What is your favourite aspect of SEO?
2. What is the most difficult aspect of SEO for you?
3. What has been your biggest mistake in optimising a website for search engines?

4. What has been you biggest success in SEO?
5. Do you have your own website(s)? What are they? What is their purpose? How effective have they been?
6. What business sectors have you previously worked in as a SEO?
7. What is the most competitive sector you have worked in as a SEO specialist?
8. Do you like Matt Cutt’s?! ;)

Knowledge of the SEO Industry / engagement in learning about SEO and engagement with the SEO Community

9. What is your favourite SEO website/blog, and why?
10. Who do you most respect in the SEO industry, and why?
11. Who do you least respect in the SEO industry, and why?
12. Which website do you go to learn something new every time?

Analytics

13. What Analytics packages have you used?
14. Talk me through the process of setting conversion goals?
15. Explain the process of advanced segmentation and an example of why you might use this?
16. If you could develop a new feature for an analytics package that is not currently/easily available what would it be?

Algorithms

17. Please explain the PageRank algorithm…
18. What is the most important aspect to you of the PageRank algorithm for link-building?
19. What is page segmentation?
20. What is LSI / LSA and its relevance to SEO?
21. Explain to me how phrase-base algorithms work? Clustering?
22. Describe any perceived differences in the main search engines?
23. Have you noticed any algorithm changes lately that you believe to have affected your rankings? How do you work to protect your online visibility?

Keywords

24. What process do you typically go through when researching keywords?
25. How could this process be improved?
26. How do you carry out competitive analysis of keywords/SERPs as part of the keyword research process?
27. When targeting keywords on-page, discuss some considerations you might make?

Accessibility

28. What factors hinder search engines access to a website’s content?
29. What is the most responsible way of using Flash?
30. Tell me how you might use the Robots.txt file?
31. What is the difference between an xml sitemap and an html sitemap?

On-page Ranking Factors

32. If you were reviewing a landing page, what on-page ranking factors would you consider?
33. How would you analyse the strength of that page as part of the site?
34. Are you competent with HTML and CSS?

Onsite Ranking Factors

35. Talk me through factors you would consider in building an optimised website. (Possible answers might include the discussion around information architecture, site structure, title tags, link structures, keyword relevance, etc).
36. What are onsite ranking factors for building a successful landing page strategy?
37. Please provide examples of blackhat SEO techniques?
38. What are your thoughts on blackhat SEO techniques? What, if any, have you used, or tested?

Offsite Ranking Factors

39. What would the perfect inbound link look like?
40. What do you like and not like about link-building?
41. Explain to me your involvement in link-building in the past?
42. What approach to link-building have you had most success?

Linkbait Development and Marketing

43. Would you consider yourself as creative?
44. Have you ever successfully carried out a linkbait campaign for a client / in-house? What was the success?
45. Talk me through the process you might go through in developing a linkbait strategy?
Copywriting
46. Are you confident writing and publishing content online?
47. Please provide examples of the content that you have written. What was the purpose of this content and what keywords were you targeting?

SEO Tools

48. What keyword research tools do you use and why?
49. What is your favourite ‘SEO tool’? Why?
50. Do you think SEO tools are effective in competitive markets? Why?
Testing
51. Have you carried-out split-testing / multivariate testing of content?
52. What did you learn from this process?

Image Optimization

53. What factors can you do to encourage the chance of ranking for images?
54. What is hotlinking? How can this be successfully optimized?

Video Optimization

55. Have you ever carried out video Optimization ?
56. What are a few considerations of Optimizing video content?

Social Media Interview Questions
Open-ended Social Media Questions

57. Which social media sites do you most like? Why?
58. Which social media sites do you most dislike? Why?
59. What has been your biggest achievement in SMM?
60. Do you feel that you are well connected in Social media spheres? Does your social media account carry influence?
61. Do you prefer to use the same pseudonym across your social media profiles? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
62. When did you get into social media (and marketing)?
63. What is your oldest social media profile?
64. Would you ever sell or buy social media profiles?
65. What has been the most effective social media marketing campaign you have been involved in? How was it effective? Metrics / exposure / links?
66. How do you effectively use social media to support SEO campaigns, or vice versa?

PPC Interview questions

67. Although not strictly SEO, the understanding of the cross-over of visibility in paid-listings can be very important for effective SEO campaigns.
68. Have you worked on/with PPC accounts? How did it go?
69. How do you integrate PPC and SEO?
70. What considerations might you make when carrying out paid search competitive analysis?

Business Acumen and ROI

71. What are the key performance metrics you have previously reported to clients?
72. What are effective metrics for highlighting return on investment from SEO?
73. What would you like to change about the SEO reporting process?
74. What other areas of business present opportunities for organic search visibility?
75. If your SEO efforts aren’t getting the visibility you would hope, what would you do?
Pitching for Business
76. Have you prepared proposals for SEO clients?
77. Have you presented proposals to SEO clients? How did it go?
78. What was the biggest mistake you have made in a meeting with a client?
79. What is your greatest strength when presenting to prospective SEO clients?

Retaining Business

80. What do you think is the most important factor in retaining a client?
81. From the previous company that you worked for, what was one process that they could have improved in retaining and gaining clients?

Article Source:- justmeandmy.com

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Older Post:- February12 -2008

These Are Some SEO Interview Question.. May be you will face these questions in Interview...

1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

2) Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

5) Have you attended any search related conferences?

6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?

7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

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) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?

12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?

13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?

16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

18) Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)

20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

42) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

*** UPDATE ***

I got several excellent questions from a couple forum postings. These get into the more complicated end of SEO.

22) What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)

23) What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?

25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

26) In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

For in-depth answers to some of these questions :-

What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
Obviously a subjective answer, but domain trust, inbound links/anchor text, and properly formatted title tags are a good start.

10) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?
There are too many correct answers for this one, so let’s go with the wrong answer: “Reciprocal link requests”

42) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
Of course. If your candidate doesn’t know this please shoot him with the Point-of-view gun.

22) What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)
VIPS is a research paper from Microsoft that stands for Vision-based Page Segmentation which is just an offshoot of the general topic of page segmentation. It is an analysis of how a user understands web layout structures based on visual perception and is independent from the underlying code and technologies. Each section of the page is segmented into blocks and different degrees of relevance are put on each block. This explains one reason why links in content areas are more heavily weighed than sidebar and navigational links (another reason is through the use of shingling algorithms, which I’ll get into on another question). Since this is a visual topic,

23) What’s the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
Internally PageRank is constantly updated while toolbar PageRank is updated every 2-3 months. Toolbar PageRank is a single digit integer while the internally calculated PageRank is more like a floating-point number. And the final answer: Who cares?

24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?
The process of analyzing the relationships between terms in sets of documents. The engine looks not only at the query, but also looks for common terms in the document set. Documents that are semantically similar will carry more weight than those that are not. This is often a misunderstood concept. ( Get more information about LSI Indexing

25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
Phrase based indexing is used to classify good and bad phrases based on certain criteria inside the entire document. The number and proximity are taken into account. It also is capable of predicting the presence of other phrases on the page and will assign a higher or lower value depending on if those phrases or present or not.

26) In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’, ‘Florida’, and ‘Big Daddy’?
Hilltop: An old and often contested algorithm that calculates PageRank based on expert documents and topical relevancy. The theory behind it was to decrease the possibility of manipulation from buying high PR links from off topic pages. This was implemented during the Florida update, which is our next topic.

Florida: The highly controversial update implemented by Google in November of 2003, much to the chagrin of many seasonal retail properties. There were several theories as to what was included in this update; Over optimization filter, competitive term filter, and the Hilltop algorithm. This update had catastrophic results on many web merchants.

Big Daddy: A test data center used by Google to preview algorithm changes. This information was made public around November of 2005 by Matt Cutts and allowed marketers to preview upcoming SERP’s.

What is a shingling algorithm and how is it used?
A shingling algorithm is a page segmentation method similar to VIPS, but less resource intensive and more likely to be used in search engine algorithms. These shingling algorithms look for blocks of content that do not occur frequently across a web site and look for blocks with certain desired features. When the engine stores this information, the navigational, advertisements, and other non-content areas are omitted. This increases speed, saves on storage space, and theoretically makes the results more relevant because of the increase in unique content.

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