Ravikumar Tiwari : SEO, SMO & PPC

Website's Internal Linking Structure

2011-07-26T19:50:00.001+05:30

Set up Your Website's Internal Linking Structure Properly
When you are planning your website or blog, make sure you have at least one text link on every page that links to your main URL. The text link should contain your best keyword or keyword phrase. As your site grows in size, so will the number of web pages that point to your main page, increasing the popularity for that page based on your best keywords. Also, when adding blog posts at your blog, be sure to hyperlink to other posts on your blog when appropriate. (Each time you do this, be sure to use the keywords you're working at getting ranked!)

Check the Keyword Density in Your Website Text

2011-07-26T19:49:00.003+05:30

The number of times your keywords appear in the text on your web page or blog helps search engines match the content to the appropriate search terms. This is known as keyword density. How often keywords should be used is often debated among SEO experts. Some believe that stuffing a page with keywords is beneficial to search engine rankings, while others think that 'keyword stuffing' is viewed as a form of spam by the search engines. As a general rule, for a web page that has about 400-600 words of bódy content, use the main keyword once in the first paragraph, once in second paragraph, once in the last paragraph, and once somewhere in between.

Use Your Keywords in the HTML Heading Tags

2011-07-26T19:49:00.001+05:30

Heading tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.) give the search engines more info about how relevant the web page is to certain search terms. Make sure to use heading tags containing your keywords at each page of your site. As a bare minimum, every web page should have one H1 tag that includes the same keywords that are in your title tag.

Use Your Keywords in Your Domain Name

2011-07-26T19:48:00.001+05:30

Websites with exact match domains get top ranking easier than non-keyword domain sites. In other words, once you know your best keyword phrase for your niche, see if you can get the domain name that matches that phrase exactly. Go for .com then .net, then .org. If none of them are available, use a hyphen (-) between your best keywords.

Use Your Keywords in the Title Tags of Your Web Pages

2011-07-26T19:47:00.001+05:30

A web page's title tag is one of the most important factors for how that page will rank in the search engines. Each page at your site should use a title tag that matches the search term you're trying to get the page ranked for. This is especially important at your main page. The title tag should also describe the content of the page in a concise and accurate manner. This helps the search engines decide how relevant the page is to a particular search term. The more relevant a page is, the higher it will rank in the results for that search term.

How to Choose Your Keywords

2011-07-26T19:45:00.000+05:30

When you are planning your website's content, you should do some research about which keywords to use. Keywords are the search terms that people use to find websites in search engines. Think carefully about your target audience and consider what they might type into a search engine when they are looking for websites like yours.

You can use tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to help you with your research. When you are starting out, aim to have a list of five keyword phrases that you will optimize your website for. Once you are ranking well for these five, you can add more keywords to the list.

When using the Google Keyword tool, use the "exact match" option so you know how many people are searching for the exact terms you're researching. The best keyword phrases to optimize for are keyword phrases with 1500 - 5000 monthly searches. Those keywords usually have just enough searches to be profitable, but not so many that the competition is too stiff to outrank.

Strategy for Social media marketing (SMM)

2011-07-18T19:39:00.000+05:30

Social media marketing (SMM)

A few key platforms: Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn. And a few key strategies: developing a style and how to convert your social traffic.

Claim your brand

Set up your twitter account

Have something to say – define your style

Build a following on Twitter

Time your tweets

Create a conversion oriented facebook fan page

Connect your blog to facebook

Seed some facebook fans

Start networking on linkedln

Stay in the conversation: Leave twitter tabs open for “live” social interaction

Create a social media contest page with viral features

How to SET UP YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT

2011-07-18T19:34:00.001+05:30

SET UP YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT

Design a branded twitter background: The new twitter is considerably wider than it used to be (you’ll notice a lot of branded backgrounds are covered up which looks a little silly), so the primary left side branding area of your background needs to be very slim. For screen resolution of 1280px (fairly common place these days)- you are limited to roughly only 108px for the core part of your branded background design and massaging.

Paid search marketing (pay per click or PPC)

2011-07-18T19:32:00.000+05:30

Paid search marketing (pay-per-click or PPC)

PPC is the fastest way to get instant traffic to your site.

Create a Google Ad Words account

Send traffic to landing pages – not your home page!

One landing page per ad group

Improve message match for a high quality score

Get some help from a PPC expert

Basics of Organic search marketing

2011-07-18T19:28:00.000+05:30

Organic search marketing

Set up Google Webmaster tools

Research and define your cure organic search keyword

Architect your blog for search-choose targeted categories

Use SEO campaigns to track your progress

Link building

How to track Lead Generation

2011-07-18T19:05:00.001+05:30

Lead Generation

Set up a feed burner account to capture & track RSS readers

Gather emails for a product launch

Answer question on LinkedIn

Give something away in exchange for customer data

How to do Email marketing

2011-07-18T18:58:00.001+05:30

Email can be tough and unforgiving compared to other online medium (once you hit send, your massage is committed to the other, never to be undone – except through the use of the apologetic.

Choose an online email provider

Create a branded email template

Set up a drip campaign for acquisition, education & retention

Segment and create lists

Test your emails

Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

2011-07-18T18:54:00.000+05:30

Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

A single purpose and CTA for every page

Rate your pages with the conversion scorecard

Test your landing pages

Try a 5 second test

learn from your users using feedback widget & live chat

Segment inbound traffic sources

how to do Content marketing

2011-07-18T18:51:00.000+05:30

Content marketing

Content isn’t king anymore – it’s more like the emperor. Content is the start, middle and end of your online marketing story and is critical to virtually you do. By the end of this course you’ll be writing on your corporate blog, guest blogging, writing eBooks, getting your publishing schedule organized with an editorial calendar and even attempting the mighty info graphic.

Start a corporate blog & give your knowledge away for free

Submit your content to social hubs

Bookmark your content on delicious

Set up an editorial calendar

Enable social sharing mechanisms

Write an eBook

Write guest posts for other blogs

Write about others to build relationships

Create info graphic

How to claim your brand

2011-07-18T18:48:00.000+05:30

To avoid having your brand name taken by someone else, you should set up branded accounts on the important social networks as soon as possible. Visit the following sites to claim yours, and do it today.

Twitter.com/youryourbrandname

Youtube.com/yourbrandname

Flickr.com/yourbrandname(for storing your photo, graphics and info graphics- for organic image search value)

linkedIn/yourbrandname(as a business hub that’s bigger than just you)

Facebook.com/yourbrandname

Best Business card practices

2011-07-18T18:45:00.000+05:30

A good business card starts a conversation. Make your card feel different.

Make sure your card can be scanned. This is probably the most important rule, if you want geeks to get a hold of you sometime in the future.

Don’t make non–standard size or shapes. Why? They can’t fit into binders.

Make sure the basic are on there. You know, your name, title, company, address, phone and fax number, email, URL of both your company’s Web site and your blog logo.

Include a line about what you do. So many cards don’t have any information about what either the company or you, personally, do,

Analytics contain so much hidden awesomeness

2011-07-18T18:35:00.000+05:30

Set up Google analytics account

Establish conversion goals and funnels

Annotate important events in Google analytics dashboard

Discover under-performing areas of your site

Understanding the Average Position metric in Google Adwords

2011-04-08T14:42:00.000+05:30

Understanding the Average Position metric

Many advertisers are concerned about the average position of their ads. Though this metric can be useful, it's easy to misinterpret. This blog post is intended to help advertisers better understand the average position metric, its uses, and its limitations.

To begin with, it's important to understand that there are two interpretations of the phrase “ad position.” The “page position” refers to the location on the page, such as “top ad 2” or “right-hand side ad 1.” The “auction position” is the rank of the ad in the auction that determines the order of the ads on the page. The critical point is that the reported average position metric is based on auction position, not page position.

An ad with a larger average position may perform better than an ad with a smaller average position

Increasing a bid may improve page position but not auction position

A bid increase may move your average position lower on the page

An average is not always the best way to summarize a distribution of positions

Examining bids, clicks, and costs

How to Optimize AdSense maximize CPC | Earning

2011-04-08T14:16:00.001+05:30

Do's and Dont's to increase cost per click for Google Adsense

DOs:

Enable all of your ad units to show both text and image/rich media ads. By increasing the number of advertisers competing for your ad units, the ad auction will make sure that the highest paying ad will be shown.

Keep your filter list small so you don’t lower your revenue potential by blocking the highest-paying ads.

Increase the number of ads competing for your site by setting up your custom channels for placement targeting.

The top-paying ads will be shown in the ad unit that appears first in your HTML code. To take advantage of this, you will need to understand which of your ad units has the highest clickthrough rate (CTR) by using custom channels. Then, you can easily change the code of your website to make sure that your top performing unit is the one with the highest-bidding ads.

DON’Ts:

Some publishers believe that by writing about high paying keywords they will be able to improve the earnings on their site. This is not a practice that we encourage. In fact, we always recommend to write about subjects that you know well and that you are passionate about so you can continue to create the compelling, original content that attracts visitors to your site.

Don't use scraped content. It’s a violation of our policies.

Don’t create multiple accounts. Publishers are not permitted to maintain multiple AdSense accounts under the same payee name, and having the ad code of different accounts on the same website will not affect your CPC in any way.

Finally, don’t try to manipulate the standard behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads in any way that is not explicitly permitted by Google. In case you have any doubt, read the AdSense program policies.

Best Social Network Monitoring Tools

2010-11-10T17:58:00.000+05:30

Best Social Network Monitoring Tools

HootSuite: Available in both paid and free versions, HootSuite allows you to try its premium version for 30 days before you decide on which one suits your purposes best. The paid version allows teams to work in tandem and monitor conversations and campaigns across the web.

ScoutLabs: Scout Labs offers a 14 day trial period in which you can test its efficacy before you decide to sign up. With customizable work spaces for teams and clients, it allows you to monitor your campaigns and that of the competition with considerable ease.

Radian6: Although a little on the expensive side, Radian6 is still one of the best social monitoring tools available today. It offers an analytic dashboard and engagement console, and also has a collection of social media case studies, e-books and white papers that you can peruse for more insight.

Trackur: This is another social media monitoring tool that is available in both paid and free versions; Trackur is also one of the cheapest paid-for tools on the market today with plans as low as $18 a month. It allows you to pay only for features you use, and it’s easier to learn and use because of its simple design.

BrandsEye: Brands Eye offers plans starting at $1 a month for bloggers and moves on to other packages for businesses and enterprises. It allows you to monitor and manage your reputation online and provides scores that tells you if people are praising or maligning your brand and your products.

Top Social Network Monitoring Tools for Free

2010-11-10T17:55:00.001+05:30

Top Social Network Monitoring Tools for Free

Socialmention: This site specializes in real-time search and analysis for social media. You can set up alerts with keywords or your company name and receive daily emails on how many people are looking you up or tracking you online. There’s also a widget you can download to receive alerts in real time. The advantage of email alerts is that you have a history of your tracking records to perform comparative analysis from week to week or month to month.

Twazzup: This site is simple to use and you don’t have to download anything to your computer. All you need to do is type in keywords of interest and watch what people are saying about you online (websites and blogs) and on Twitter.

Addict-o-matic: One of the best free social network monitoring tools, this site generates results from Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Tweetmeme, Yahoo Web Search, Bing, Google Blog Search, Wordpress, Wikio, YouTube, Ask.Com News, Truveo Video Search and Blinkx Mainstream Vid News. The layout is neat and you can easily see which site generates the most mentions.

HowSociable: With HowSociable, you can gather metrics from Facebook, YouTube, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Digg, Ning, Xing, Vimeo Videos, Reddit, Bebo, FriendFeed and many other social networks. It provides a visibility score that you can use to grade performance and also allows you to keep track of your metrics through email alerts.

Google Alerts: Google Alert allows you to set search terms, how often you want to receive notifications, what kind of results you want to see (best match or random mentions), and what kind of sites you want to monitor.

Interesting facts about Twitter

2010-11-10T17:51:00.001+05:30

Interesting facts about Twitter

Over 106 Million twitter accounts
55 Million tweets per day
640 Tweets/ Second
300,000 People join Twitter every day

Interesting facts about Youtube

2010-11-10T17:48:00.001+05:30

Interesting facts about Youtube

Over 2 Billion video are viewed on youtube each day
24 hours of video is uploaded every minute
Every week, the equivalent of 60,000 full length film is uploaded to youtube

Interesting facts about Facebook and its user size

2010-11-10T17:42:00.000+05:30

Interesting facts about Facebook and its user size

500 Million Active users
The avg. user has 130 friends
150 Million users are accessing facebook via mobile devices. and these users are twice as active than non-mobile users
If facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world, after China and India.

China - 1.3 billion
India - 1.18 billion
Facebook - 500 million
USA - 310 million

Size of the internet and internet users

2010-11-10T17:34:00.000+05:30

Size of the internet and internet users

1.9 Billion people use the Internet
42% of these live in Asia
Over 5 million terabytes of data on the Internet
Google's index only includes 200TB (or 0.004%)
193 Million domain registrations
46% of domain registrations are .com

Tips to engaging facebook communities & pages

2010-11-10T17:04:00.000+05:30

Tips to engaging facebook communities & pages

Today, there are around 1 million pages on facebook.

As a matter of fact, facebook pages are a wonderful medium to create an engaging experience with your audience, but the problem is that, setting up a page alone does not take you any closer to this goal. Setting up the page is probably the first of the Many steps involved in creating the platform on facebook.

Process of creating facebook pages and learn how we can make engaging comunities via facebook.

1. First off, create a strategy in place

One of the biggest mistakes we all make is to not have a strategy in place while creating your social media profiles. You would know what theme to follow, what to communicate and what not. So having a proper strategy in place, even before you set up your profiles is always recommended.

2. Find out what your ultimate goals are

One simple question to ask yourself before creating a facebook fan page is – what is the purpose of having a community ? Is it brand recognition or user engagement ?

3. Figure out a content strategy

Creating a content strategy s very vital for social media. A content strategy not only means what your communication content is, but also what you need to avoid from it. A content strategy should also take care of designing your content and what the medium is – images, videos, text, podcasts ?

4. Figure out how you can bring your brand in-context with the content

When you think about content strategy its easy to get carried away. Funny videos are a very popular item with people, but that doesn’t mean your brand gains anything out of sharing them on your facebook pages.

5. Figure out how you can motivate your audience

How you can help them get it through you. There has to be a purpose why one must like your brand or join your community. Give them a good reason to like you.

6. Find out how you can measure your brands performance

Probably the most important step in the whole exercise is to find out ways to measure the campaigns effectiveness. Based on what your goals are find out how you can measure the key metrics ruling out the noise. There are several ways to do this, but every campaign requires a customized approach that will decide the effectiveness of the campaign.

7. Figure out what your audience need from you

Imagine yourself in the audience’s shoes and deliver those things that might interest them even if they don’t make sense to you in business perspective.

8. Figure out how you can deal with negative comments

If negative comments are something you’d not want to hear in your campaigns, then I’d say that you’re not ready to do this thing. I encourage negative comments (well, to a controlled limit). The reason ? One negative comment is worth hundreds of praises. The mileage you can get from a negative comment is immense if you deal with it properly. But ignore one, and you’re spoiling the whole show. However, I do not agree that all comments are attention-worthy. Some are ignorable, but you have to figure out which is which – this is the important part.

How is optimizing large websites?

2010-11-10T16:45:00.000+05:30

How is optimizing large websites different from smaller ones ?

Volume of pages

The most obvious difference is that you’ll be dealing with more number of pages, and things can get complicated as each page needs careful attention. In smaller websites, the number of pages are so low (let’s say below 100) that it is easy to find out what’s important and what’s not, but when it comes to thousands, things can get tricky. How to solve it ?

Weight-age and importance of pages

When dealing with large websites, it is mandatory that you define different categories and subsets of pages. And one primary metric to take into consideration while creating categories is to find out how the search engines might consider them important. Based on their page rank, links, and content availability, create different batches of pages, so that you know how to go about dealing with each of them.

A strategy I follow while dealing with a large number of pages is to divide the entire content into different sets based on their importance. I normally select two factors while creating categories. a) Content and b) Importance The pages with the most content, like the landing pages goes to the bottom of the pyramid. They generally form the most part of the website as they tend to be large in number. And the most important pages align above these narrowing down on their volume.

The best approach to optimizing large websites:

first mapping out the entire list of pages on the website, then categorizing them into important, less important batches.
Doing the SEO optimization processes based on the content on the pages.
The key features are that the large number of pages with the most of content will be dealt with immediately and targeted for long tail keywords which will be as comparable to the number of pages in hand.
The second category of pages which are more important, and has better authority but lesser number of pages and content in place.
Target more specific keywords that are close to the primary or competitive keywords reserved for the top level pages. here a lot of onsite optimization has to be done, along with little of internal linking changes and more of offsite optimization.
Pick up the reserved competitive keywords, and match it up with the most relevant pages and do the onsite optimization part. But the highlight of this phase is going to be the offsite optimization that you do and the authority you can harness over the time. Mostly, these pages would be the top level, close to domain name pages, which already has a good amount of authority and link juice accrued, so you might also want to consider doing a proper link analysis here and spreading all those link juice evenly and with priority to importance onto other pages below the top level.
While all this action is going on on the top level pages, the earlier optimized bottom and mid level pages would be working well, and giving you results. Based on the study done on their analytics, it might also be worth to tweak certain optimization criteria for certain pages. The idea is to find the relevant information from your goals and analytics.

SEO Interview Questions with Answers

2010-08-20T19:17:00.000+05:30

Can you write HTML code by hand?

A. Yes I can. I do use some WYSIWYG editors and then modify the code by hand as needed.

Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?

A. In simple terms, Google uses the gross number of inbound links to a page to determine how important the page is. This "pagerank" has little to do with actual search results but can make a difference on user behavior.

Have you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?

A. No, I do make use of many tools already available on the internet as well as SEO programs that I have purchased.

What do you think of PageRank?

A. In relation to SEO projects, it is relatively unimportant but can give an indication of how much work needs to be done in gaining inbound links.

What do you think of using XML sitemaps?

A. I use them. They are an additional tool to help the search engines when they crawl a site. There is no requirement for any sitemap and your pages will get indexed without them if you pay close attention to navigation within your site.

What SEO tools do you regularly use?

A. Keyword analysis tools, keyword density tools, index checking, backlink checking, wordprocessor to check spelling and grammar, HTML validation and others.

Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?

A. Usually I would use the robots.txt to keep a search engine from indexing an entire directory on a site. This would often be directories dealing with admin functions or directories that only contain script or image libraries.

What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

A. Text on page! Search engines utilize text and only text in providing search results. That text is found in many place including the URL and title of your pages as well as the visible text you place on your pages.

Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?

A. My experience in "copywriting" is limited to my site at www.afreshpath.com. It is a blog about outdoor recreation in Nevada and so far is placing well in search results.

Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Or be Stumbled?

A. Not yet! I am not particularly worried about it but I do try to write in such a way that others would be inticed to submit my articles.

Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.

A. The most important META tag for SEO is your page description. Search engines do make use of this tag but it does not outweigh the title or visible text. The META keywords tag is not much of a factor in the major search engines but should not be overlooked.

Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?

A. 1. Interview website owner or webmaster to get a good grasp of the site's purpose and goals.

2. Perform a keyword analysis to find best performing keywords that should be used for that site and for individual pages of the site

3. Analyze site content to determine usage of relavant keywords and phrases. This includes visible text as well at titles, META tags, and "alt" attributes.

4. Examine site navigation

5. Determine the existence of robots.txt and sitemap and examine those for effectivenes.

6. Make recommendations for changes needed for the site and each individual page.

If the company whose site you've been workind for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?

A. I would update the old site with permanent redirects to to new page for every page. Then I would attempt to remove old content from the major search engines to avoid duplicate content issues.

Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements

A. #1 issue is visible text being relevant to expected search terms.

# 2 would then be page titles

# 3 is navigation and "alt" attributes for navigation items and link text.

# 4 would be "alt" attributes for images and other media presented on pages.

What do you think about link buying?

A. I discourage the practice for the most part. There are more effective means of paid marketing. One exception would be purchasing listings in highly reputable directories such as Yahoo directory.

What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?

A. LSI indexing ries to overcome the limitations of "literal" search term matching . For example, if someone is searching for "hiking in Norhter Nevada" a literal search would only match the words used without taking into account words such as "hike", "hiked". LSI can give more relevant results because it does take word usage and context into account determining what a page is "about" rather than a strict reliance on literal wording.

What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

A. In regards to search results, it is a method that search engines such as google use to determine relevance of a page based on phrases acutally used in a document. For example, if you have a page instructing people on wildlife photography, the search engine would reasonably expect to see terms and phrases such as "selecting a camera", "appraoching wildlife", and "low light photo conditions". Related phrases will add to the relevance of a page where unrelated phrases will reduce the relevance of a page. This is one technique that Google is using to weed out "spam" sites.

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

A. Seo is search engine optimization and is the process you use in getting your pages to place well on search results. SEM is search engine marketing and involves purchasing advertising space on search result pages. Sponsored listings are SEM. Both are related though! When using Google Adwords, the better you optimize your pages for search, the less you will be paying for your selected keywords in the PPC campaign and the better placment your ads will get.

What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?

A. I check the competitors backlinks to find hightly relevant sites and request a link from them. If reciprocal linking is required, I may be able to place a lik back to them in a relevant portion of a page on the site but if not, I will state so and may not gain that link. Another method I use is to submit press releases to relevant media.

What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?

A. Social media such as social networking sites and news sites can provide for viral marketing. Viral marketing has proven to be powerful if the content of a site is appealing.

What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?

A. I would avoid any site with the appearance of a link farm. I would also avoid any "spam" practice such as unsolicited email campaigns, certain affiliate advertising sites, sites that re-direct visitors to your site, and anything resembling the practices of Zango.

Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

A. Many sites have shoping carts and member login or logout links. This type of link is simply an administrative function and does nothig to contribute to site content. The search engine does not need to index those pages.

Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

A. Yes I am and the tool I use most frequently is Google's webmaster tools. I also use the available Yahoo hosting tools for my own sites. Knowing what search terms your visitors are actually using to find your site as well as where those visitors are coming from will help refine SEO efforts. The amount of time each visitor spends on your site will help in determining if content changes are needed.

From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?

A A user coming into your site from an organic search usually has never visited your site before or is performing a general search for a specific product or topic. These visitors are trying to find the site that most suits thier needs. A "type-in" user is specifally interested in your website. They may have found your URL in print advertising or from a friend. Often, these users are familiar with what you are offering and are coming back to your site as a repeat visitor.

How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?

A. The main indicator is to perform a search on all major search engines using the keywords/ keyphrases I am optimizing for. An analysis of those results will help to determine if optimization has gained in the results or lost ground. This analysis should be done over time as each search engine will update and index on a varying schedule. Another aspect is to use website statistics to determine where traffic is originating.

What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?

A. Competitive analysis means taking a close look at websites that rank highly in search results and comparing those sites to the one you are optimizing. They have employed methods that are working and are a valuable source for ideas.

If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?

A. I might approach the problem as if it were an entirely new project. Again taking a look at the keywords and phrases that I am attempting to optimize for and again taking a close inspection of top ranking competition. If the site is indexed and does show up in the irst 10 pages of a search but on in the top three, I would look into modification of major areas such as page titles, on page text, and page descriptions. If the site is not yet indexed or has been dropped from an index, there are major problems and the site may require a total re-work and re-submission.

How many target keywords should a site have?

A. I advise not more than three or four well related keyword phrases. This allows for more effective optimization.

You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?

A. It doesn't unless the rumor proves to be fact. Yes, I check on the rumor but as with all rumors, it can have detrimental effects if you "jump on the band wagon" and it proves to be just a rumor with no basis in fact.

Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

A. Wikipedia is an established authority! As such, it is referenced by huge numbers of other documents with relevant text associated with links back to Wikipedia.

If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?

A. Myself and only myself if those conditions existed.

SEO Interview Top Most Asked Questions

2010-08-20T19:08:00.000+05:30

SESEO Interview Questions

Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
Can you write HTML code by hand?
Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
What do you think of PageRank?
What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
What SEO tools do you regularly use?
Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs Meta robots tag?
What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Or be Stumbled?
Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
What do you think about link buying?
What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
What role do social media play in an SEO strategy?
What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

Analysis

A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites. (Yes/NO)
Are you familiar with web analytics?
From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
How many target keywords should a site have?
How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?
Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Industry Involvement

Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.
If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
Have you attended any search related conferences?
Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
Who are the two key people - who started Google?
Who is Matt Cutts?
If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?

Open-Ended

These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.
Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

Social Media Interview Questions

Which social media sites do you most like? Why?
Which social media sites do you most dislike? Why?
What has been your biggest achievement in SMM?
Do you feel that you are well connected in Social media spheres? Does your social media account carry influence?
Do you prefer to use the same pseudonym across your social media profiles? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
When did you get into social media (and marketing)?
What is your oldest social media profile?
Would you ever sell or buy social media profiles?
What has been the most effective social media marketing campaign you have been involved in? How was it effective? Metrics / exposure / links?
How do you effectively use social media to support SEO campaigns, or vice versa?

My Career Journey

2010-03-30T13:13:00.009+05:30

I have started my career as a SEO Tranee after completing my T.Y BSc in Chemistry from Mumbai university. I got my first job with the reference of Rishiraj Singh who is in the field of Internet Marketing. I happened to learn basics of SEO from him.

I have learned designing and developing new concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

After BSc. I started my job hunt in the chemical field but I did not meet the expected salary and so after losing interest in it , I decided to go with SEO, Mr. Rishiraj had referred me to a Search Engine Marketing firm Opengeers Technologies Pvt Ltd . I cleared the interview there and joined as a Search Engine Optimizer in April 2007. After three months, I decided to move on and search new job and I got a job in Webeestar Technologies where I got the opportunity to learn SEO, Designing and developing techniques.

After eight months I moved into a company called Riteverses Solutions Pvt Ltd. as a Online SEO Specialist on 27th April 2009. As a result of my performance, I got a salary raise within three months, I also got certified with Google Analytic.

I have a dream to become an entrepreneur which I definitely will make real soon.

How to do link building | submission

2009-05-12T14:19:00.000+05:30

The term 'search engine submissions' is as the name suggests about submitting to the search engines, in order to get your site indexed by the search engines and web directories, so that people can find your site. Submitting your web site via free submission forms in search engines and web directories doesn't guarantee inclusion into an index. You may have to resubmit again and again get all of your Web pages indexed.

There are 3 ways to submit your web site to the top search engines; submit manually, use submission software, or use an online submission service.

Manual search engine submission

The process of 'manual search engine submission' means personally visiting each search engine and registering your Web pages.

Some of the Important links are given below.

www.google.com/addurl/

submit.search.yahoo.com/

dmoz.org/add.html

www.altavista.com/addurl/default

www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Search engine submission software

The alternative to the manual search engine submission process is to use search engine submission software or online services that simulate manual submissions. There is a very important distinction between the two, as most search engines have banned automated search engine submissions.

Search engine submission services

Online search engine submission services are similar to their software counterpart except they are hosted online rather than on your computer. Just like search engine submission software, online search engine submission services should also simulate manual submissions.

www.submitexpress.com/

www.highrankings.com/

www.1-hit.com/

Things to do in SEO

2009-05-12T14:17:00.000+05:30

Things to do

Our webmaster guidelines provide general design, technical, and quality guidelines. Below are more detailed tips for creating a Google-friendly site.

good coding,

We all know good coding is always a boost in search engine rankings, If we have a clean HTML coding every search engine will love to index our site, JavaScript, Frames, .INC files, .LBI files are always a small barrier to search engines,

I can see today's search engines particularly google can understand any sort of Crap coding but still they don’t give the best PR to pages which it finds difficult to crawl, We all know how important Page Rank is to a site so it is important we give the best coding to the search engines.

Very important thing when designing a site is to make sure we make the site navigation as friendly as possible, we have to make the site with the best navigation for the crawlers to dip deep into the site, If your Web pages are not accessible to a spider, no amount of content optimisation, Website popularity or submitting to search engines will improve their performance -- they simply won’t be added to the index.

Some the stuff search engines find difficult to crawl is flash, DHTML, Javascript etc, Make sure you use all these things to the minimum level on the site,

Give visitors the information they're looking for

Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

Make sure that other sites link to yours

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our measure of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives to determine its PageRank, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Please note that ranking of sites in our search results is completely automated, and we don't manually assign keywords to sites.

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

Make your site easily accessible

Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.

Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you create static copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates.

What is search engine and how does it work

2009-05-12T14:15:00.000+05:30

Search Engines Basics

Search Engine :

The internet is huge source of information having billions of webpages containing information about different fields and topics. From these huge sources getting information of your use is very hard by trial and error method. So it leads to the problem of locating the correct information over internet. This problem is solved by the invention of search engines.

A search engines itself do not contain any information, it only points user to the location of the required information. A search engine can provide links to relevant information based on your requirement or query. There are lots of search engines but only few of them are popular. Few of the search engines are Google, Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. In order to understand the terminology and techniques to position your website pages for higher ranking in search engines, the knowledge of the basic functioning of a search engine is very important.

Working of Search Engines :

A search engine is basically a software which follows certain algorithm which is updated on regular basis to be familiar with the latest technologies in order to provide best relevant search results. Each search engine does the same functions of collecting data from webpages and storing them to there database with particular notation. So whenever user query with particular keywords, search engines provides the relevant results in its own unique ways.

Crawling the Web :

Crawler is also known as robot or bot or spider. Every search engines have its crawlers for indexing different webpages. Crawling or spidering is the method of following links from different webpages and collecting the contents of these webpagees for storage in the search engines databases. A Crawler sees every page as its individual not as a website. Crawling of the bots on the internet start from any popular webpage or from existing older indexed websites. The crawling to webpages continues until it finds a logical stop, such as a dead end with no external links or reaching the set number of levels inside the website's link structure. So in order to get a website index it should be linked from any webpage which is indexed by If a website is not linked from other websites on the internet, the crawler will be unable to locate it. Therefore, if the website is new, and has no links from other sites, that website has to be submitted to each of the search engines for crawling.

The efficiency of the crawler makes it crawl multiple websites at the same time, so as to collect billions of website contents as frequently as it can. Website for news, blogs, media and others which are updated on regular basis are crawled more frequently every hour or so by superior search engines like Google provide updated search results. The crawler also does not flood a single website with a high volume of requests at the same time, but spreads the crawling over a period of time so that the web site does not crash. Usually search engines crawl only a few levels deep from root of a website. It is believed that pages in the deep of a website have less page ranking. The success of Google's search is PigeonRank™ , http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html technology founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

How to write Quality Content

2009-05-12T14:14:00.000+05:30

Quality content

Have you heard of the phrase “Content is King”? It’s written on most of the SEO blogs and strongly by SEO gurus. But still people tend to ignore the truth of this common-sense phrase. People use search engine to find information on internet so it is quiet obvious that search engine give more importance to the content rather than anything else.

There is not much difference between SEO content and optimized content. If your web page is search-engine-optimized, it means the search engines are going to love it and are going to give it a higher ranking compared to non-optimized pages. If your website covers a more popular topic you will need to try harder. For example, HiddenTricks.com provides content in the area of mobile, computer, internet, SEO etc. This is a much more competitive field, with many thousands of websites competing for the same keywords. At this level it is much harder to get good SERP placement through content alone, although it is still possible.

Quantity of content:

It's not only the quality of content which matters - quantity is also very important. People search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text you have, the more chance that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase someone is searching for. Some search engines also place importance on quantity - they assume that a large website has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality.

Try to get your keywords at the beginning of page and at the end of content and few in between. All search engines including Google, use complex algorithms to determine exactly where your pages will show up in the result pages. While the exact details of Google’s algorithms are not known, several factors have been calculated as being among the more important. One of these is the amount of information a site presents to visitors. It’s a simple principle that the more pages of content your site has the more value it provides to your visitors. Interlinking between pages within the content of each page is also believed to have a positive effect. Make your web site content visitor friendly and easy to read and understand. Your content should be written in a way that grabs the user’s attention, while utilizing your targeted keywords and keyword phrases.

Statistical analysis:

Number of times a keyword is repeated on a page (keyword count) and the ratio of how often that keyword is used in relation to other text (keyword density) are minor search engine ranking factors.

Pages with their target keyword repeated 11-20 times or 81- 90 times rank best on the leading search engine! If there is a "cutoff" point where too many repetitions of a keyword result in much lower ranking, we didn't find it. Pages with up to 100 repetitions of the keyword continue to rank higher than pages with 1-10 repetitions of the keyword.

What is Page Rank | PR

2009-05-12T14:13:00.000+05:30

PageRank Explained

PageRank is one of the methods that Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one. We can’t know the exact details of the scale because, as we’ll see later, the maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its re-indexing.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.

Check out how it is calculated:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#Some_algorithm_details

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

What you should not do in SEO

2009-05-12T14:12:00.000+05:30

What you should not do. . . (spamming the search engines)

There are several things, considered "spamming", that you can do to try to get your page listed higher on a search engine results page. Basically, you should never try to trick a search engine in any way, or you risk being blacklisted by them. Since the majority of your traffic will come from search engines the risk far outweighs the benefits in the long run. Below is a list of the more common things we recommend that you never do when trying to achieve better listings.

Do not:

Using invisible text

A lot of web masters try to put invisible text on their web pages by making the text color same as the background color. Almost all search engines can easily detect this and the next time you submit a web page for your website, it will straight away go to the dumpster without ever being crawled or looked at by a human (You get the idea).

Repeating keywords

Lots of webmasters repeat certain keywords all over the page especially concentrating at the bottom of the page in very small fonts. Again try this only if you want to get banned from the search engines.

Using unrelated keywords

If you site is about selling shoes, then over flooding your web page with references to Britney Spear will not help you. Lets say it gets you #1 rank on Google for keyword "Britney Spears". If someone is looking for information about Britney Spears, and they land up on your website, do you think they will buy shoes? The answer is probably no. I have no idea why someone would do this! Doing this not only increases your chances of getting banned by search engines, but if you ever do get listed using irrelevant keywords, you are not targeting your customer base.

Linking using link farms

This means interconnecting all your pages to give the effect of a lot of information being available on the web site. When a search engine crawls through your website, it creates a history of your site better than you could imagine. It knows exactly how many pages you actually have. How many link are there just to fool the search engine crawler, and a lot of other such information.

Over submitting web pages

Conclusion

What some web masters fail to understand is that compared to the 30 minutes to an hour they spend trying to fool the search engines, the search engines are spending countless hours and hundreds of dollars to stay ahead of the game.

Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site.

Don't feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.

Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT tags if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.

Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders using a robots.txt file. For information about using a robots.txt file, please visit our information on blocking Googlebot.

Do anything to trick the search engines into listing your site better. If what you are doing is not listed as one of our search engine tips the search engines will likely view it as spam and penalize you.

List keywords anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. By "list" we mean something like - keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4, etc. There are very few legitimate reasons that a list of keywords would actually appear on a web page or within the page's HTML code and the search engines know this. While you may have a legitimate reason for doing this we would recommend avoiding it so that you do not risk being penalized by the search engines.

Use the same color text on your page as the page's background color. This has often been used to keyword stuff a web page. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Submit identical pages. For example, do not duplicate a page of your site, give the copies different file names, and submit each one. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Submit the same page to any engine more than once within 24hrs.

Use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do not directly relate to the content of your page.

hoe to create seo frendly navigation strcture | menu

2009-05-12T14:10:00.000+05:30

Always keep in mind that search engine bot index source of your web page. So it doesn’t matter whether you have turned off visibility of your anchor link using CSS or JavaScript, it will be indexed by search engine bot.

While designing your navigation menu please remember following points.

If possible avoid menu driven by flash or JavaScript.

Try to use text in the menu instead of image. If you are using image in navigation menu then don’t forget to use “alt”

Design your menu in such a way that visitor can navigate all pages of your site from menu they don’t have to search.

Linking all pages of site from Menu is also important from SEO point of view also because search engine spiders have lot of links to follow so all pages of your website can be indexed by search engines easily.

Use targeted keywords within your anchor text to increase relevancy and improve positioning.

Web users are quite familiar with horizontal navigation bars at the top, and vertical navigation lists at the left hand side of web pages. So follow this pattern unless you have some strong reason to change.

Don’t forget to include site-map in your navigation menu because regular surfers like to refer to site map instead of searching.

How to create META Keywords Tag

2009-05-12T14:09:00.000+05:30

META Keywords Tag (Metadata)

Many people still think Meta keywords as a quick fix for SEO, actually it's not. Most of the top search engines don’t give any importance to the Meta keywords tag. Yahoo is perhaps the only search engine that still gives little importance to the Meta keywords tag. Although it’s recommended from most of SEO gurus “Do not use the meta keywords tag”. Because by using Meta keywords tag on a web page, it’s easy for your competitor to know your keywords but if you are not doing great then there is no harm using it.

Meta keyword tag is information inserted into the "head" area of web pages other than the title tag. This information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, Meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with.

For those search engines that are META enabled, the META keywords tag used to be one of the most important areas after the page title and page description. It has been abused by both marketers and consumers alike that there is very little weight given to the META keywords tag.

Meta keywords tag Tips:

The contents of a Meta keyword tag is used to help define the important keywords of a page. It sounds good in theory. However, in practice, the Meta keywords tag is often misused, including the addition of excessive or irrelevant keywords. So much so, that most, but not all, search engines totally ignore the contents of the Meta keywords tag.

Utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your title element, META description tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Try to limit it to 15 to 20 words if possible.

Make sure your META Keywords Tag is relevant to the content on your page.

If you do decide to use the Meta keywords tag, I suggest that you only include the most important keyword phrase in the content of the tag. The Meta keywords tag should be placed just after the Meta description tag.

Separating keywords with comma:

Some search engine optimizers recommend leaving out the commas, so that it creates more keyword combinations for the search engines to index. It’s am issue of controversy amongst SEO gurus. But I have noticed all high ranking website separate keywords in meta keywords tag by commas so it can be taken for granted to separate meta keywords tag with commas.

How to use meta description

2009-05-12T14:06:00.000+05:30

META Description Tag (Metadata)

The META description tag usually consists of 25 to 30 words or less using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces). The META description also shows up in many search engine results as a summary of your site. Directories like Yahoo! and the ODP (Open Directory Project - dmoz.com) show the page title and description that you entered (and the editors modified) on their manual submission form. The contents of Meta description tags are indexed by some search engines as the page description in its search engine results.

However, Meta description tags are often misused, with misleading or even false descriptions about a page. As a result, the relevancy of search results is often compromised, so search engines have begun to de-emphasize the importance and even totally ignore the contents of the tag.

In general, search engines will index the first 135-249 characters of the Meta description tag contents. Write a description that sells the page.

Meta tags are hidden in a document's source, invisible to the reader. Some search engines, however, are able to incorporate the content of meta tags into their algorithms. No engines penalize sites that use meta tags properly, so it's recommended that you always include them. The Meta description tag is especially important because it's the only tag supported by some engines.

Meta description tips:

Make sure you accurately describe the content of your page while trying to entice visitors to click on your listing.

Include the most important keywords at the beginning of the tag. But, don't just fill the description tag with keywords.

Include 3-4 of your most important keyword phrases specially those which are used in your title tag and page copy.

Make sure your META Description Tag is relevant to the content on the page.

Why to do Keyword research | how to do keyword research

2009-05-12T14:05:00.000+05:30

Title: Keyword research, selection and optimization with keyword research tools

Meta Description: Detail explanation about selecting keyword wisely for better search engine ranking. List of keyword research tools useful for keyword selection and optimization are given below.

Keywords are the words used to find matching web pages from any search engine. The first step for effective search engine optimization (seo) is doing keyword research. Many popular websites having higher PageRank but ranking lower than other websites only because of poor keyword selection. Since the keywords that you decide to target will be used throughout the optimization process so choosing the right keywords is essential. If you choose the wrong keywords you will not be found in the search engines.

Search Words Entered by Searchers:

For effective keyword selection for your site think of the words that visitors will search for i.e. the words that best describes your website content. If you are starting with new website then its highly recommended don’t use the popular keywords because it won’t place you higher in search engine. Select three-four separate keywords for individual pages before designing.

SEO Keyword research for Adsense websites and blogs:

If your aim is to design a website that can attract high eCPM ads then use Google AdWords Keyword research tool. It will give you idea about keyword search volume, trends and advertiser’s competition. You can also tailor your results for languages and countries.

Select phrase instead of single keyword:

Choosing keyword phrases are much better option than selecting single keyword. From various reports and surveys it is concluded that most peoples prefer to search with phrases rather than single keyword. Try to select two – three keywords for each of your webpage. Always remember that a large portion of searches are three words or more. As most people search for answers, very often they phrase their search terms as questions. Searchers won't search for words that describe the solution. For better optimization of your pages, always think like a searcher.

Order of keywords in your web page:

The order in which the keywords occur in your web page matters in the search rankings. For example: sharewareconnection.com rank 1st for “seo tool download” but it is not on first page for keyword “download seo tool”

Forms of keyword do make difference:

Keywords can be written as planned for the search engines. Plural and singular forms of the words should also be utilized as many searchers will choose either one form or the other. Plural and singular forms of a keyword will often result in vastly different search results in Google, making it important that both forms of a keyword be part of the copy if well written content is the result. Additional ways of writing keywords include adding –es, -ed, -ing, or other related suffixes to reflect different searches. If different word variations become too difficult, and if the keyword is highly competitive, it’s preferable to create an entirely new page for each alternative form of the word, to concentrate the keyword power of the page.

Stay away from keyword stuffing:

Keyword stuffing is the repetitive placement of keywords within a Web page’s copy. It is likely to trigger a Google filter, the potential loss of visitor traffic due to hard to read content is a much larger problem. The page reads like a string of keywords and little else. Most common form of keyword stuffing is to repeat different form of the word into the page title and heading tags. The search engines can penalize the page in the search rankings. The constant and complete usage of the same link anchor text for all inbound links can be considered a form of keyword stuffing as well.

The percentage of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words by crawlers within a webpage should be in the range of 2-8%.

Best places to use Keywords are:

Title

Heading tag

Domain name

File-directory name

Start and end of the page

Meta keyword and description

Tip : Place two keywords as close as possible to each other.

Here is the list of Keyword research tools that can be helpful in keyword selection.

Google Adwords Tool

Actually this tool is offered by Google Adwords for Advertiser to select keyword for advertising but it can be very useful for webmasters who don’t have any idea about keyword selection. You can find keyword search volume of previous month, search volume trends and advertiser’s competition for particular keyword. You can also do keyword research for similar keywords.

2. Keyword Suggestion Tool

This tool can give lot of details related to your keyword like related keyword suggestion, Yahoo suggest, Google suggest and link to various tools and website related to keyword research.

Sites That Use Image Maps for Navigation

2009-05-12T14:03:00.000+05:30

Due to the code that makes up an image map search engines often get trapped in them and can't spider your site.

If you use image maps for your main site navigation you should consider switching to standard HTML hyperlinks or your site will most likely not get spidered. If you want to keep the image maps you can, but you should add another navigation scheme to your site that uses only standard HTML hyperlinks so that your site will get spidered. An easy way to do this is to create a site map page uses standard HTML links to link to every page on your site. Then add a standard HTML link on each page of your site that links to the site map.

Images are an essential part of any Web page and from a designer point of view they are not an extra but a most mandatory item for every site. However, here designers and search engines are on two poles because for search engines every piece of information that is buried in an image is lost. When working with designers, sometimes it takes a while to explain to them that having textual links (with proper anchor text) instead of shining images is not a whim and that clear text navigation is really mandatory. Yes, it can be hard to find the right balance between artistic performance and SEO-friendliness but since even the finest site is lost in cyberspace if it cannot be found by search engines, a compromise to its visual appearance cannot be avoided.

With all that said, the idea is not to skip images at all. Sure, nowadays this is impossible because the result would be a most ugly site. Rather the idea is that images should be used for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse – for displaying text (in a fancy font, for example). And the most important – in the <alt> attribute of the <img> tag, always provide a meaningful textual description of the image. The HTML specification does not require this but search engines do. Also, it does not hurt to give meaningful names to the image files themselves rather than name them image1.jpg, image2.jpg, imageN.jpg. For instance, in the next example the image file has an informative name and the alt provides enough additional information: <img src=“one_month_Jim.jpg” alt=“A picture of Jim when he was a one-month puppy”>. Well, don't go to extremes like writing 20-word <alt> tags for 1 pixel images because this also looks suspicious and starts to smell like keyword-stuffing.

Graphic images - navigation buttons

Graphic images add uniqueness, color, and personality to a web site. Most web sites we see use web graphics (buttons) as a navigation scheme.

Advantages:

Graphic images have visual appeal. Peoples' eyes are naturally drawn to a splash of color and a change in dimension. The biggest advantage to using navigation buttons is that they give your visitors a visual representation of how to navigate your site right away, especially if the navigation buttons are visible on the top part of a computer screen.

Another advantage of using graphic images/navigation buttons is that as long as the navigation buttons have alternative text in the HTML code, your web site can still be navigated even if your visitors turn off the graphic images. If navigation buttons are used in conjunction with text links, you have multiple places to put keywords: both within the text link and the alternative text of the navigation buttons. Many search engine optimization specialists recommend this combination for good search engine indexing.

Disadvantages:

Download time is a big consideration in determining whether or not you should use navigation buttons. In general, you should keep the navigation buttons' file size to between 1K-5K in file size and dimensions between 60-165 pixels in width and 25-60 pixels in height. You don't want the main message of your site to be the navigation buttons, and you don't want people clicking off of your site waiting for all of your navigation buttons to download.

Many sites are getting away from using a beveled effect on navigation buttons to show variety in web site design. The disadvantage of this idea is that many visitors might not understand that the graphic image is a hyperlink. One of the main reasons beveled buttons are so popular is that people believe that a "buttony" image is "clickable." The following shows two sets of navigation buttons - the beveled buttons appear to be more "clickable."

Ensuring visitors and search engines know what your content is about

Images on a site are great -- but search engines can't read them, and not all visitors can. Make sure your site is accessible and can be understood by visitors viewing your site with images turned off in their browsers, on mobile devices, and with screen readers. If you do that, search engines won't have any trouble. Some things that you can do to ensure this:

Don't put the bulk of your text in images. It may sound simple, but the best thing you can do is to put your text into well, text. Reserve images for graphical elements. If all of the text on your page is in an image, it becomes inaccessible.

Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Make sure the alt text is descriptive and unique. For instance, alt text such as "picture1" or "logo" doesn't provide much information about the image. "Charting the path of stock x" and "Company Y" give more details.

Don't overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don't stuff it with extra keywords.

It's important to use alt text for any image on your pages, but if your company name, navigation, or other major elements of your pages are in images, alt text becomes especially important. Consider moving vital details to text to ensure all visitors can view them.

Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?

(1) Don't put the bulk of your visible text in images, use real text

(2) Use alt tags to describe the images

(3) Do not keyword stuff the alt tags

(4) Alt tags are more important when your navigation is all images

(5) A webmaster should be watchful of the "image-to-text ratio on your page"

(6) Vanessa then pitched Google Sitemaps, with "Taking advantage of Image search"

what is use of hyperlinked text in SEO

2009-05-12T14:01:00.000+05:30

Hyperlinked Text

The text that used to anchor a link is called as Hyperlink Text. The part of the text that is hyperlinked is most important and needs to be your primary keyword. Any people use text like “Click Here” or “Read more” but its not a good SEO practice. Always try to use keyword related to the linking page as hypertext. Search Engines relate this Hyperlink text to content of your linked page.

Take an example of this link: <b><a href=http://www.yourdomian.com/seo>Free SEO tips</a></b>

When search engine crawler index this page it will consider “http://www.yourdomain.com/seo” is related to “Free SEO tips”. By getting many links with “Free SEO tips” as hyperlink text search engine, the particular page get more importance for this keyword.

This area is overlooked by many when promoting a web site to the search engines. Many web sites utilize graphic representations of links. These are visually appealing, but the text in the image cannot be indexed by the spiders.

I always recommend an additional text navigation bar (SSI - Server Side Includes or Front Page Includes) somewhere on the page, usually at the top, right, bottom or left hand side. Link text should be concise, use keywords and phrases, and follow the same structure as the graphic navigation.

Graphical navigation icons and buttons are as popular as hypertext navigation. The graphical icon or button is a graphic, generally a GIF or JPEG formatted image, that links to either an absolute URL or relative URL.

The basic reason behind using the graphical navigation icons or buttons as primary text links is use of high-impact fonts and colors that are not supported through regular HTML. Improving the look of the links on your site can help attract more visitors to your site.

But the problem arises due to the fact that search engines can not relate the graphics to any keyword. So in all cases where graphics are used as navigation, it is wise to use alternative text tag within the source code of the image.

The search engines basically figure that if you are linking to something from your page whatever it is you are linking to is likely to be closely related to the content of your page. For that reason some of the engines actually look for keywords in the hyperlinks and any text immediately surrounding the hyperlinks. What this means to you is that if you can you should include your most important keyword phrases in the link itself and possibly the surrounding text.

Tag tips:

Try to include your most important keywords within the hyperlink itself.

Try to include your most important keywords in the text that immediately preceeds or follows the the hyperlink.

Make sure your links and surrounding text are still readable and make sense after you include a keyword phrase or two.

why to use Heading tags

2009-05-12T13:59:00.000+05:30

Heading Tag

Most of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN place a lot of relevance on keywords in header tags (H1, H2 and H3). It’s highly recommended from us to spread your important keywords in the heading tag of your WebPages.

Example of header tag:

<H1>Header Tag</H1>

<H2>Second topic in header tag </H2>

At least one heading tag <h1> should appear at the top of your page and be well written using prime keywords and keyword phrases. Second heading tag contains the subtopic heading. Its not necessary to use the third but if required you can use.

You must have noticed that using heading tag make fonts look very huge. So in order to reduce the size of fonts use CSS to control looks and appearance of heading tag.

Optimizing Heading Tags

Although they are not used very frequently any longer HTML heading tags can help improve your listings in the search engines too. Since they are "headings" the search engines figure that they are very closely related to the content of the page that they appear on. So, just like with all of your other optimization efforts you should include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can.

HTML heading tags have 4 different sizes and are formatted as you see below.

<h1>Heading Size 1</h1>

<h2>Heading Size 2</h2>

<h3>Heading Size 3 </h3>

<h4>Heading Size 4</h4>

Tag Tips:

Try to include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can. Consider rethinking your page content. It is often very easy to take an existing page full of copy and find ways to break it up into separate sections with headings. Make sure your Heading Tags are relevant to the content on the page.

Optimizing Frame sites

2009-05-12T13:58:00.000+05:30

Optimizing Frames

If your site uses frames, you've got problems - as far as the search engines are concerned anyway!

The problem is that search engines do not index framed sites very well. In fact, the search engines do such a poor job of indexing frames that we recommend redesigning your site without them if you want to get good listings in the search engines.

Now, if your site must use frames there are some tips we recommend you implement to make sure that you get the best listings you can even with frames.

The problem:

A frame is exactly what the name conveys - they are an HTML page that "frames" other HTML pages. Now, the problem arises when you go to submit. In most cases a framed site will only have one page you can submit, the home page. Since your site uses frames the home page actually has nothing that the search engine can use (i.e. page copy) to determine how to list your site. Why? Because your home page is actually a frameset which does not have any real content. Here's an example that should help you see what we mean. Keep in mind this code is what the search engines see:

Example Code of a Site Using Frames

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Example Framed Site</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<FRAMESET cols="150,*">

<FRAME name="contents" target="main">

<FRAME name="main">

</FRAMESET>

</HTML>

We can't explain everything about frames here, but you should easily be able to see in the above example that their is no real content for the search engine to use to determine how to list your site. All that is there is HTML code. The result is a framed site will often not get listed at all, and if it does it will usually be listed very poorly.

The solution:

Not really a "solution" (the solution would be to get rid of the frames!), but the best thing you can do to improve your results is to use the <noframes> tag within your frameset. This tag was originally used for displaying content to people using older web browsers that did not support viewing frames. While just about all web browsers now support frames the <noframes> tag can still be used for content that will help your framed site get listed. In addition, you should also implement the best title tag, and meta tags that you can.

Where it belongs:

The <noframes> tag belongs just before the </frameset> tag for your frameset, as you can see below in red.

Example Code of a Site Using Frames with <NOFRAMES> Tag

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Example Framed Site</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<FRAMESET cols="150,*">

<FRAME name="contents" target="main">

<FRAME name="main">

<NOFRAMES>

Optimized page content goes here for best results.

</NOFRAMES>

</FRAMESET>

</HTML>

Tag tips:

Place optimized content within the <body> tags that you see above within the <noframes> tag. An easy way to do this is to create a new regular (not framed) home page for your site that describes your site, products & services. Often the content can be taken directly from one of your existing framed pages. Once you have the page created view the HTML of the page and copy everything from within the <body> and </body> tags. Then paste the new content within the <body> and </body> tags found within the <noframes> tags of your frameset. A complete page (including all the HTML) can be placed within the body tags.

Search engines like simple HTML pages, so since it is very unlikely anyone will ever see this <noframes> content we recommend keeping it very simple and text based for best results.

Make sure all your <noframes> content is optimized following all our tips. If it is not optimized, it is not going to help you very much.

Include links in the <noframes> content to all of the other important pages on your site so that the search engine will crawl and index them too.

Implement the best title tag, and meta tags that you can on the frameset page.

How to Optimize Sites That Use Flash

2009-05-12T13:55:00.000+05:30

Sites That Use Flash

Flash itself is not the problem. The problem is how it is used. The 2 largest problems with how Flash is used are:

Flash is often used on home pages as a "splash" page. The problem with these splash pages is that many times they are made entirely from Flash, which the search engines can't index. That means your splash page will not get listed. Your best bet search engine wise is to avoid submitting any page that is made mostly of Flash. If you must submit a page that is mostly Flash you can improve your chances of getting listed by to adding as much page copy to the page that you can. You should also make sure you have good meta tags and title tag.

Hyperlinks made with Flash can't be spidered by the search engines. Normally, when you submit a page to a search engine you can expect the search engine to follow the links on the page you submitted and spider the rest of your site, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, unless you have (or add) standard HTML hyperlinks to the other pages of your site none of your other pages will be able to get spidered by the search engines, which is a bad thing. An easy way fix this problem is to create a site map page uses standard HTML links to link to every page on your site. Then add a standard HTML link on each page of your site that links to the site map.

If there is a really hot potato that divides SEO experts and Web designers, this is Flash. Undoubtedly a great technology to include sounds and picture on a Web site, Flash movies are a real nightmare for SEO experts. The reason is pretty prosaic – search engines cannot index (or at least not easily) the contents inside a Flash file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of course, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were plain text, these workarounds are just a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, although certainly they are better than nothing.

Why Search Engines Dislike Flash Sites?

Search engines dislike Flash Web sites not because of their artistic qualities (or the lack of these) but because Flash movies are too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly, as they do with a plain page of text. Spiders index filenames (and you can find tons of these on the Web), but not the contents inside.

Flash movies come in a proprietary binary format (.swf) and spiders cannot read the insides of a Flash file, at least not without assistance. And even with assistance, do not count that spiders will crawl and index all your Flash content. And this is true for all search engines. There might be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time beings, search engines are really united – they hate it but they index portions of it.

What (Not) to Use Flash For?

Despite the fact that Flash movies are not spider favorites, there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. But as a general rule, keep Flash movies at a minimum. In this case less is definitely better and search engines are not the only reason. First, Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them. Second, Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection or better is still not the standard one.

Basically, designers should keep to the statement that Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it – i.e. you have some text with the main points of the story (and the keywords that you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie to add further detail or just a visual representation of the story. In that connection, the greatest SEO sin is to have the whole site made in Flash! This is is simply unforgivable and do not even dream of high rankings!

Another “No” is to use Flash for navigation. This applies not only to the starting page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie but external links as well. Although it is a more common mistake to use images and/or javascript for navigation, Flash banners and movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.

Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites

Although a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be optimized. There are several approaches to this:

Input metadata

This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.

Provide alternative pages

For a good site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages.

Flash Search Engine SDK

This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. As it name implies, this tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious job to do it manually.

However, you still need to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if necessary. For example, the order in which the text and links is arranged might need a little restructuring in order to put the keyword-rich content in the title and headings or in the beginning of the page.

Also, you need to check if there is no duplicate content among the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color of the extracted text is also another issue. If the font color of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will run into hidden text territory.

SE-Flash.com

Here is a tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is visible to search engines and what is not. This tool is very useful, even if you already have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed because it provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Besides, it is not certain that Google and the other search engines use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so this tool might give completely different results from those that the SDK will produce.

These approaches are just some of the most important examples of how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well. However, not all of them are brilliant and clear, or they can be classified on the boundary of ethical SEO – e.g. creating invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the Flash movie itself. Although this technique is not wrong – i.e. there is no duplicate or fake content, it is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages and it is better to avoid it.

How to choose Domain Name

2009-05-12T13:53:00.000+05:30

Domain Names

Domain name is the most important feature for the search engines. Anyone can change file name, sub-domain, title, heading even all the content of website but the domain name is unique identity that can’t be changed. That’s why all the search engines give it enough importance. Its highly recommended to have one of your primary keyword in your domain name. Search engine relates keywords to domain name. So it is good to include your best keyword in your domain name.

Brand or Keyword:

Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.

There is an indirect benefit to having a keyword-rich domain name. Many search engines like Google that consider link popularity into their ranking algorithms often also look at the anchor text of incoming links. That is the text used in a text link that points to your site should as far as possible, should contain your primary keyword. If your site is related to insurance then people should link to you as for car insurance or medical insurance as the link text.

Using Dashes (-) in Domain Names

It is very hard to get domain name of your choice. Hence the alternative is to use dashes in domain name. So by using dashes you can get domain name of your choice separated by dashes. Most of the benefits of dashes in the domain name have eroded in the last year or two. Domain names themselves have been greatly devalued in search engine algorithms, and most links use the site name vice the domain name as the anchor text.

Still I m in the favour to choose a keyword rich domain name without needing dashes. It requires creativity and a bit of time, but it is possible. If you are aiming to sell products vice become a consultant you may be able to do well making a living from search engine traffic and not need as strong of a branded name behind your domain name.

Here are the guidelines for selecting a good domain name.

Short in length

Easy to say and spell,

Descriptive

Memorable.

1. Short in length

A good domain name should be short, the shorter the better. There are basically two reasons for choosing short domain name.

a) Short domain name are more popular because people find it easy to refer and type.

b) It is easy to spell and memorize.

2. Easy to say and spell

Its very obvious that a good domain name should be easy to say and hard to misspell. Many times people refer a website to there friends on phone but misspell it and the person log on some different website. Mistakes can be in typing or in writing also so a good domain name should be easy to correct and should be logical.

3. Descriptive

A domain name should be just like one word description of your website content. A good domain name should be easy to guess by normal peoples. The very best domain name should be one you can guess Always try to choose some words which exist in dictionaries and have some logical relation to your website content. Just like name of our website its Uniquetricks, so people visiting out website always have idea that this website is some thing to deal with tricks.

4. Memorable

There are a huge number of peoples who don’t like to add bookmarks for any website for surfing. They like to memorize the domain name so they prefer websites which are easy to memorize. Suppose you met a friend in party or anywhere out and you want to tell them about any cools website but you don’t remember the domain name, obviously you don’t want it to be happen with your domain name. So always choose a domain name which is easy to remember and people can relate to you and your product.

But not all short URLs are memorable. I spoke to a company recently who decided to get some domain name like bscs.com, the initials for Boyle's Sierra Carpeting Sales. Sure, bscs.com is short, but it is only memorable to a handful of company insiders. Now if you're IBM, then using initials for your domain name makes sense; that's how your customers know you. But most of the time, using initials for your domain name is a most unmemorable and customer-unfriendly approach to business.

If the domain name makes no sense in and of itself it is not memorable, and your customers won't be able to remember what in the world it is. Much better would be a domain name like hiddentricks.com, for it is both memorable and meaningful.

What is a document type

2009-05-12T13:52:00.000+05:30

A document type defines which version of (X)HTML your document is actually using, and this is a critical piece of information needed by browsers or other tools processing the document.

All of us want good looking websites that work well for our visitors.

Satisfied visitors => Happy site owners.

But few times due to poor coding it breaks the design in some browsers.

Every HTML document should have a Document Type Definition known as DTD before the <html> tag. The DTD tells the User Agent which rendering mode to use when displaying the page.

Here are the list of DTD DOCTYPEs widely used:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Document Type Definitions and XML Schemas carry information for human consumption, describing what different elements should contain, how they should be used, and what interactions may take place between parts of a document. Although they use very different syntax to achieve this task, they both create documentation.

Necessity of Document type declaration:

To use a HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) Validator to check the page coding.

To implement the style sheet according to your plan in all the leading browsers.

To improve your ranking by allowing search engine to identify the language type for your page.

Beginners Guide

After reading all this even if you don’t understand anything, Its highly recommended to use the HTML 4.01 Transitional declaration. It is much more forgiving for the beginner when performing HTML validation. This works even on oldest version of all browser.

Here is the document declaration:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Although it’s the older one but still allows elements and presentation attributes that should be in the stylesheet.

Why Directory and file Naming

2009-05-12T13:50:00.000+05:30

Many search engines relate directory and file name with the keywords for a web page, so it is a good place to have one of your primary keyword. I have seen on many search engine result pages they do focus keywords in file names, so its very obvious that search engine give importance to the keywords in directory and file name.

Directory and file Naming :

It’s a good practice for an SEO to name all the files, images and scripts related to primary keywords of the site. By predicting nature and behavior of many leading search engines, it led me to the conclusion that using keywords in file name will play a role in your overall search engine marketing strategy.

Instead of naming your file home.php, you should name it home-keyword.php or keyword-home.asp. Always use hyphens (-) or underscore (_) to separate the words in your file names. Prefer to name your files in lowercase because all the searches performed in lowercase only. Although it doesn’t matter for leading search engines but don’t take chances.

This is not an area to stuff keywords. Files should be named appropriately as part of the overall theme and should be relevant to the on page content. Be descriptive with naming directories. Don't get carried away, but make sure at least one keyword or keyword phrase appears in the directory name. Don't forget to use hyphens (-) to separate the words.

This is not an area to stuff keywords. You can get penalize by search engines. So be little careful and don’t repeat the same keyword in directory and file name. Instead of that you can make a group of common keywords for different pages and name directory to that keyword and file to second keyword. Hence you can easily cover three keywords, first in domain name, second in directory name and third in file name in one url without using hyphen and going deep in directory. Directories should be named appropriately as part of the overall theme and should be relevant to the directory content.

Just look url of this page, its covering five of our keywords for this page.

http://www.domainname.com/seo/directory-file-naming.html

Visitors to your site will appreciate the clean URI paths which are easy to remember and bookmark. Always try to provide the visitor with the shortest url path.

Avoid using Dynamic url’s. Most search engines cannot or will not list any dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are most commonly used on database driven sites, or sites that are running scripts.

A dynamic URL would look something like: http://www.domainname.com/seo.php?formid=253&id=8&tricks=&seo=&guidelines=directory.

Most Web sites with a large number of pages are developed using dynamic server-side Web technologies such as ) Java Server Pages (.jsp), Hypertext PreProcessor (.php), Active Server Pages (.asp). Using these techniques provide better control and handling to the designer but generates dynamic url. The first thing you notice in the above address is the .php extension, and you might think that the .php extension is causing the issue. That is not the case. Next you will notice are question marks, equal signs, ampersands, numbers within the URL. These are called as stop characters. They are named stop characters because they signal to search engines to stop crawling past a certain point, limiting the number of pages crawled on your site. So search engines don’t get enough information from dynamic url so try avoiding this.

What is Cloaking

2009-05-12T13:48:00.000+05:30

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

The only legitimate uses for cloaking used to be for delivering content to users that search engines couldn't parse, like Adobe Flash. As of 2006, better methods of accessibility, including progressive enhancement are available, so cloaking is not necessary. Cloaking is often used as a spamdexing technique, to try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking; it can also be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site based on the search engine description which site turns out to have substantially different, or even pornographic content. For this reason, major search engines consider cloaking for deception to be a violation of their guidelines, and therefore, they delist sites when deceptive cloaking is reported.[1][2][3][4][5]

Cloaking is a form of the doorway page technique.

A similar technique is also used on the Open Directory Project web directory. It differs in several ways from search engine cloaking:

It is intended to fool human editors, rather than computer search engine spiders.

The decision to cloak or not is based upon the HTTP referrer, the user agent or the visitor's IP. The referrer tells the URL of the page on which a user clicked a link to get to the page. Some cloakers will give the fake page to anyone who comes from a web directory website, since directory editors will usually examine sites by clicking on links that appear on a directory web page. Other cloakers give the fake page to everyone except those coming from a major search engine; this makes it harder to detect cloaking, while not costing them many visitors, since most people find websites by using a search engine.

What is Alt Attribute

2009-05-12T13:46:00.000+05:30

Alt Attribute

Alt text is the line of text you see pop up in Internet Explorer when you place your cursor over an image. It also displays a text representation of the image when the user has images turned off in their browser. It is highly recommended that you utilize this area as it is required under accessibility laws and is indexed by all the leading search engines.

Always include ALT text to describe the contents of an image. Use keyword rich descriptions in the ALT text, as some search engines index the keywords.

You will also provide a text description to visitors with slow download connections or have their images turned off. But to ensure that the text is visible, you must set the image's width and height dimensions.

The use of ALT text also enable visually disabled visitors using screen readers, or reviewers, to interpret the image on the screen. Images can be translated, only if there is alternative text describing the image.

Internet Explorer displays alt text when you hover your cursor over an element that utilizes the alt attribute. This is incorrect behavior as the alt text is designed to be displayed when the user has their images turned off while browsing. Other browsers such as Opera, Netscape and Mozilla will not display the alt text on hover.

The alt attribute should not to be stuffed with keywords or phrases. The alt text should mirror the content of the image. If it is a graphic header then your alt attribute should mirror the text in the graphic header.

Alternative text values should not exceed 70 characters in length. If you want to use more than 60-70 characters then use the longdesc attribute as an alternative to alt text.

Make sure your Alt Attribute is relevant to the content for that image.

Alt Tag tips:

Be sure to use the keyword phrases that you also used in the page content, title tag, meta description and other tags.

Its recommended to use no more than 2-3 keywords per image.

The "alt" attribute is also a good place for misspellings and plural keyword phrases that you may not have used elsewhere.

Why Content is King in SEO

2009-05-12T13:40:00.000+05:30

Once upon a time, if you wanted to use SEO to increase your rankings, you simply crammed your website as full of keywords as possible. Some less scrupulous web designers crammed their sites full of popular, but irrelevant, keywords. Of course, that only worked for websites who only wanted to display ads and were not concerned with getting visitors to come back.

Today, SEO isn't just for con men anymore. Respectable businesses are learning how to optimize their websites so they can be found by people who are searching for the products and services they want to sell. This means, of course, that they don't just want visitors to drop by once. They hope to keep them coming back. This is why content is so important.

Webmasters and SEO experts have a saying: “Content is King.” It's very true. A website's content, even more so than its products, is what attracts visitors. If you can't write good content yourself, Riteverses can help you SEO-optimized Content for your industry.

Content should be well written and be free from those embarrassing typos that make visitors wonder if your website really knows what it's talking about. For our purposes, however, it also means that content should be rich in keywords, informative and interesting, so that the visitor feels they've learned something. Such is the power of Quality content. Content truly is king on the Internet. Use it properly, and first-time visitors will become repeat visitors.

Every day we get businesses coming to us looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want to talk about an SEO campaign but one quick look at their site and we see that SEO may not be the right approach for them. Usually in these cases the site needs a complete usability makeover. These businesses, however don't want to discuss website architecture, visitor usability, or even making their site search engine friendly. They want rankings and want them now.

I understand their standpoint. SEO and SEM without good usability is like inviting people out to eat at a rat and roach infested restaurant. You may bring people in, but you won't make them happy.

SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.

What’s more important in SEO Links or Content?

Good Content at times will received links from other sources. Content is everything.

Engage the Reader

Traditional marketers and copywriters frequently criticize search engine optimization companies for focusing so intently upon the keyword research and placement within the text that they sacrifice the art of truly engaging content. Granted, it can be delicate balance at times, but our ultimate goal with every written page is to entertain, inform, and entice the reader.

Increase Search Engine Rankings and Traffic

Though there are plenty of phrases people still don’t search for, your chances of receiving organic search traffic increase exponentially, based upon the quality of your copy. For the interactive marketing company, it can feel like pulling teeth to convince some companies to seriously consider copy changes or additions to their site. Perhaps we, as an industry, need to do a better job of communicating the necessity, because quality content is absolutely critical to achieving top rankings for competitive phrases. Pictures and graphics don’t equate into words, unless you’ve added the appropriate HTML tags to them. Even then, tags are no substitute for actual text in the body of your site. Think of this way: each search engine is programmed and designed to crawl each site in a manner similar to a human. Information is stored and viewed as more or less important based upon what a human is most likely to consider important. You can have the best META tags in the world, but search engines reward Web pages where the tags match up with the page’s copy. Quality content affects both the quality and amount of inbound links. With the rise of social media sites including Digg, Reddit, and De.licio.us, your site content is more important than ever. Your readers have the power to submit excerpts of your copy to these sites with links back to your page for all to see. This is especially powerful for companies with the foresight to regularly produce articles, blogs, and press releases. This fresh content not only contributes to the optimization of your site, it also provides opportunities for exposure to (potentially) millions of readers on various social media sites. Some companies plan entire campaigns around the bursts of traffic received from social media links.

How to get the good Search Result when we search

2009-02-02T15:36:00.000+05:30

If you use Google many times a day. Following Google search tips I actually find useful. .

Weather search:

To see the weather for many any city, type “weather” followed by the city and state, zip code, or city and country.
Time search:

To see the time in many cities around the world, type in “time” and the name of the city.
Dictionary Definition

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word “define” then a space, then the word(s) you want defined. To see a list of different definitions from various online sources, you can type “define:” followed by a word or phrase. Note that the results will define the entire phrase.
Explicit Phrase:

if you are looking for content about internet marketing. Instead of just typing internet marketing into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase. To do this, simply enclose the search phrase within double quotes.

Example: "internet marketing"

Exclude Words:

if you want to search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising. To do this, simply use the "-" sign in front of the word you want to exclude.

Example Search: internet marketing -advertising

Site Specific Search:

if you want to search a specific website for content that matches a certain phrase. Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the "site: uniquetricks.com" modifier.

Example: "internet marketing" site:www.uniquetricks.com

Similar Words and Synonyms:

Let’s say you are want to include a word in your search, but want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms. To do this, use the "~" in front of the word.

Example: "internet marketing" ~professional

Sports Scores :

To see scores and schedules for sports teams type the team name or league name into the search box. This is enabled for the English Premier League, National Football League, National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball.
Book search :

If you’re looking for results from Google Book Search, you can enter the name of the author or book title into the search box and Google will return any book content it has as part of your normal web results. You can click through on the record to view more detailed info about that author or title.
Specific Document Types:

If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier "filetype:". For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to internet marketing.

Example: "internet marketing" filetype:ppt

This OR That:

By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search. If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator. (Note: The OR has to be capitalized).

Example: internet marketing OR advertising

Phone Listing:

Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know how it is. If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature.

Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note: the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).

Currency Conversion :

To use our built-in currency converter, simply enter the conversion you’d like done into the Google search box and Google will provide your answer directly on the results page.
Airline Travel Info :

To see flight status for arriving and departing U.S. flights, type in the name of the airline and the flight number into the search box. You can also see delays at a specific airport by typing in the name of the city or three-letter airport code followed by the word “airport”.
Maps:

Looking for a map? Type in the name or U.S. zip code of a location and the word “map” and Google will return a map of that location. Clicking on the map will take you to a larger version on Google Maps.
Fill in the blank :

Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to ‘fill in the blank’ by adding an asterisk (*) at the part of the sentence or question that you want finished into the Google search box.
Area Code Lookup:

If all you need to do is to look-up the area code for a phone number, just enter the 3-digit area code and Google will tell you where it’s from.

Example: 617

Numeric Ranges:

This is a rarely used, but highly useful tip. Let’s say you want to find results that contain any of a range of numbers. You can do this by using the X..Y modifier (in case this is hard to read, what’s between the X and Y are two periods. This type of search is useful for years (as shown below), prices or anywhere where you want to provide a series of numbers.

Example: president 1940..1950

Stock (Ticker Symbol):

Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock.

Example: GOOG

Calculator:

The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google.

Example: 48512 * 1.02

Word Definitions:

If you need to quickly look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply use the "define:" command.

Example: define:plethora

Hope this list of Google search tips useful in your Google searches.

How to drive traffic to your blog free

2009-01-03T14:28:00.000+05:30

driving traffic to the blog or website is now on peak...
everyone wants his/ her blog /website should come on top...
here i am giving you some free tips for driving traffic to blog/website in no cost...

How to get more clicks on ads and earn more from adsense ?

2008-12-02T15:13:00.000+05:30

In this video you will get about :

How to Analise your web page ?
How to Create custom channels ?
How to Determine best ad design and placement ?
How to Maximize ad units on a page ?
How to track and measure your results ?

Some of the Effective Link Building secret Tips and Tricks

2008-11-19T20:27:00.000+05:30

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become the buzz word of today. In order to rank high in search engines a website should be optimized as per the guidelines of the search engine.

SEO can be divided in to two different categories the first one being on page optimization and other one being the off page optimization. On page optimization involves in effective inclusion of keywords and phrases in domain name, website name, the content of the website, urls of internal pages, Meta tags, Meta descriptions, and alt image ids.

Off page optimization is anything done outside the web pages and this includes backlines, directory submission, article submission, and the like. This article is an attempt to elucidate the techniques in link building for a website.

One of the criteria for the search engines in ranking a website is the number of relevant back links. This process of acquiring relevant back links is known as link building. There different strategies for link building of which some are reciprocal links, one way links, paid links, text links, links through banners, links form blog sites, and more.

The following are the important point to remember when you start link building.

What you should Do.

Your links should originate form web pages that contain relevant content to your website.
See that the web page from where you get the link has minimum outbound links.
Verify the crawl frequency to know if the webpage is crawled by major search engines.
See to that your links are visible to the visitors.
Confirm the page rank, traffic, duration of links, quality of links and the total number of outbound links before you get the link from a website.

What you should not to Do.

Do not get links from unrelated websites.
Avoid websites with low page rankings/porn/adult sites.
Never go for penalized sites involved in Black Hat SEO.
Do not get links from websites that exaggerate their page ranks.

What is Long Tail Low Competition Keywords?

2008-11-19T20:25:00.000+05:30

For search relevancy algorithms where there are fewer matches and fewer external signals of quality available, Google must put more weight on the content of individual pages. Where there is no community to rely upon Google must trust publishers. And while each long tail ranking might have little value the nickels and quarters add up.

What is Competitive Keywords?

2008-11-19T20:23:00.000+05:30

When there are many matching search results for a given search query,

Google places a lot of weight on core domain age & authority and on external signals of quality like link quality,

link diversity, link anchor text

How Google makes search ranking algorithms?

2008-11-19T20:21:00.000+05:30

For competitive keywords:

Link Anchor text: 20%

In community links: 20%

Domain Authority: 25%

Link diversity: 15%

Site age: 15%

On page optimization: 5%

Long tail keywords:

On page optimization: 50%

Domain authority: 15%

Site age: 15%

Link anchor text: 15%

Link diversity: 5%

If you are starting a new site and have built little to no offsite signals of quality you can expect to rank for long tail phrases first. As your site builds authority you can compete for some of the head keywords.

In SEO how to use navigation ?

2008-11-19T20:18:00.000+05:30

Maile’s slides on “Where We’re Coming From”

How to using not found errors ?

2008-11-19T20:17:00.000+05:30

Jonathan’s slides on “Using the Not Found errors report in Webmaster Tools”

SEO myths with google webmaster

2008-11-19T20:14:00.000+05:30

John’s slides on “Frightening Web mastering Myths”

Social

2008-09-13T00:30:00.010+05:30

About Ravikumar L. Tiwari

Birthday :- August 11, 1985
Official Birthday :- April 5, 1986
Age :- 25

I am a SEO with Google Analytic certified, Web Developer n Designer

http://www.orkut.co.in/Profile.aspx?uid=15502648057697774292

http://www.orkut.co.in/Profile.aspx?uid=2372064005183202563

webpage: www.uniquetricks.com
www.ravi-tiwari.blogspot.com

passions: computers, mobiles, search engine optimization (SEO), electronic gadgets, doing silly things, roaming with friends, pulling legs and flirting.

activities: technical article writing, technical events, outing with friends, like to debate

Tv shows: Mahabharat, Ramayan

Movies: All big B's movie, Anil kapoor, Akshya kumar, Rajesh khanna, Hritik and Govinda...

cuisines: hot and spicy, Indian and Chinese,

Gtalk : ravi11081985@gmail.com , devendra5486@gmail.com

Yahoo : ravi11081985@yahoo.com

Skype : ravikumartiwari

city: mumbai / Mariyahu
state: Maharashtra / U.P.
zip/postal code: 400078/222161
country: India

That’s all folk.

Professional

2008-09-13T00:14:00.009+05:30

education : Master's Degree

high school :I.D.U.B.S

college/university : Mumbai | Madurai

major :chemistry

degree : Master Of Science (Chemistry)

year : 2008

occupation : Web Analyst

industry : Education, Higher Education

job description : SEO, Web Analyst

work email : ravi11081985@gmail.com,

career skills : SEO, SMO & Internet Marketing Professional

career interests : Internet Marketing Professional

Personal

2008-09-13T00:06:00.011+05:30

I MAY NOT BE THE BEST BUT I AM NOT LIKE THE REST

height : 175 centimeters

eye color : brown

hair color : black

build : slim

looks : Average

best feature : arms

turn ons : dancing, flirting, intelligence, long hair, power, thrills, wealth

turn offs : Nothing

from my past relationships i learned :Pyar Ishq aur Mohabbat...

five things I cant live without :Family, Friend, Air, Water, Food...

in my bedroom you will find : My Laptop