Archive for the ‘SEO Tips’ Category

Leverage LinkedIn for Search Engine Visibility

Posted by Jubran Moe on September 7th, 2011
LinkedInSEO

By: Terri Wells

Seemingly hundreds of articles cover the use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to market your website and raise its visibility in the search engines. Relatively few articles talk about using LinkedIn for the same purpose. Keep reading; you’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish with this professional networking site.
George Aspland, writing for Search Engine Land, noticed the power of LinkedIn when building some links for a client. He discovered his client’s rival boasted some incoming links ranked as “strong” in the review tool he was using. They came from the rival’s LinkedIn profile and led to the rival’s website. But Aspland’s client also had a LinkedIn profile pointing to his own company’s website, and that link had not earned a “strong” ranking on the review tool. What was going on?

It turns out there’s a lot more to setting up a strong LinkedIn presence than just creating a profile. None of it is particularly difficult, but it is a bit time-consuming. After the initial set-up, you’ll need to mind it regularly, like a garden, for the maximum benefit. And if you have employees, it’ll help to get them involved as well.

The first thing you’ll need to do is set up a LinkedIn Company Page. This is basically a LinkedIn profile for your company. You can set up your company’s LinkedIn Company Page yourself, or you can delegate it – as long as the person setting up your firm’s LinkedIn Company Page is a current employee of your firm, with his or her own LinkedIn profile listing your company and their position within it. Whoever is setting up your company’s LinkedIn Company page needs a company email address, such as twells@firmname.com, which will be used as one of the confirmed addresses on the new LinkedIn account.

LinkedIn provides a ton of detail on company pages and what goes into them. Before you create yours, I recommend you read the article at the link to give you a better idea of their full potential. You may also want to check out this FAQ page on company pages; it answers the questions most likely to come up as you’re building your company’s LinkedIn presence. When you’re finally ready to build your LinkedIn Company Page, you’ll want to start here.

You’re only about one-third done at this point. Next, you need to get your employees to associate their LinkedIn profiles with your LinkedIn Company Page. That’s not difficult. LinkedIn’s FAQ page suggests sending the following directions to employees for editing their LinkedIn profiles:

Click Profile at the top of your home page.
Click Edit next to your current position.
Click Change Company and type the full company name.
Click the correct company name in the dropdown list.
Click Update.
Linking to your company profile on LinkedIn isn’t enough. If you want to increase your company’s visibility, your employees need to be more visible as well. Once they’ve associated their profiles with your LinkedIn Company Page, they can optimize their public profiles. It shouldn’t take much time, especially if they’re already using LinkedIn for professional networking.

To optimize your own LinkedIn profile for more visibility, log in to LinkedIn, and then hover over your profile name; it’s in the upper right hand corner of the profile screen. Choose “Settings.” You’ll get a number of choices on the next screen; click on “Edit your public profile.” On the next screen, click the radio button for “Make my public profile visible to everyone.”

On this “Customize Your Public Profile” page you’ll also see a list of options that you can make public. Click as many of these as you are comfortable with. Aspland notes that “The Headline, Summaries with specialties, Additional Information / Websites are helpful for search results.” Once you’ve walked through it for your own LinkedIn profile, you’ll be able to tell your employees how to do it.

You’ve effectively set a connected social network in place. Now it’s time to use it. When you have an important update, encourage your employees to share it with a link to the content via LinkedIn. Don’t spam this network with lots of automatic updates from other sites like Twitter; in large quantities, they’ll get ignored. But judicious use of this function will put your company’s name in front of your employee’s contacts – along with the helpful information from the update, of course. This can become pretty powerful. As Aspland observes, “if you have 50 employees with LinkedIn profiles each with an average of 100 connections and most of them posted an update about a great article your company published on its website, thousands of connections on LinkedIn, many of who are familiar with your company and (hopefully) favorably predisposed, may see that announcement.”

As you get the word out about your company and use this network within a network, the search engines will start to take notice. Your content will become more visible, not just within LinkedIn but outside of it as well, as others who discover it via their LinkedIn connections link to your content in turn. Just make sure you’re using it for something worth spreading. Good luck!

Posted in SEO Tips Tags: , No Comments »

How To Increase Google Trust

Posted by Jubran Moe on March 28th, 2011
Google Logo - Keyword Tool

By: Codex-M

If you are a webmaster looking to increase rankings and organic traffic from Google, then this tutorial will definitely prove helpful. You may have heard of Google’s Panda / Farmer update affecting low quality websites – this tutorial will answer the questions of what does Google view as low quality – and more importantly – how do I make my website a high quality site?
Tip #1: Add Original, Useful and Substantial Content on a Frequent Basis

In this page: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html , Google stresses the importance of having original content on your website. Below are some good content guidelines you can implement:

a.) At least 500 words. Most readers need details – especially if your content is a tutorial or how-to guide. If your content does not explain the details, then your content is not good enough, which also reflects the overall quality of your website.

Having a thin amount of content, your site can be labeled as a “content farm” by Google. Make a habit of writing content with details instead of generalizing everything in one or two paragraphs.

b.) Content should be original and not copied. As suggested by Google here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html , some great ideas about writing original content are based on research, in-depth reports, and thoughtful analysis.

c.) Articles should be well written, clear, concise, and direct to the point. The readability of your content is also important.

d.) Content should contain images or videos. Content with images or videos reinforces learning and helps the reading process. Make sure you have rights to these images and videos. Make sure to ask permission first if you do not own them.

e.) If absolutely necessary, cites references to external sources as proof. Sometimes when you are writing something in your blog or website, you need evidence that can substantiate your point. In this case, you need to link to a quality external resource. This linking process should be given with editorial merit.

f.) Link to other content within your website. For example if your content is talking about “building widgets” then in some of your paragraphs you start talking about “configuring widgets”. If you already wrote a separate and detailed tutorial about “configuring widgets”, then have your “building widgets” page link to the “configuring widgets” content. This method is really helpful for visitors who are in need of detailed resources about a certain topic (example “widgets”). You might notice that if you are reading a Wikipedia article, it links to a lot of related pages within Wikipedia, and of course helps improve the user experience and increases the retention time of your visitors.

g.) Allow user-generated comments. When you publish content make sure you allow comments to it. User comments are helpful to validate the accuracy and trust of the content. If certain content receives a lot of interaction and approval, then any future readers do not need to spend more time searching for quality content on the Internet because they already found one. They will stick to your website longer.

h.) Allow users to share your content on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites. One aspect of a quality website is that its content is highly shared, liked and added to a users list of favorite websites. You should take this opportunity, as search engines like Google are definitely using this data (source: http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389 ).

i.) Write as often as possible- this makes your website grow bigger with quality content. The end results are higher organic traffic due to long tail effect and higher link baiting opportunity because of your content. Google also loves to rank big websites (source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Choosing-Keywords-Help/Keyword-Difficulty-vs-Size-of-Domain/ ).

Posted in SEO Tips Tags: 1 Comment »

New SEO Virus Symptoms May Be Difficult To Treat

Posted by Jubran Moe on March 15th, 2011
SEO Virus

New SEO Virus

Website owners, particularly those who are new to the world of website ownership may be susceptible to a debilitating and contagious disease. Known by its common name, SEOitis, this virus once encountered, can result in enhanced immunity, but those exhibiting extreme neediness and gullibility may be subject to repeat occurences. If diagnosed in the early stages, the virus can be effectively treated but may result in permanent financial and emotional damage if allowed to advance.

Risk factors for this rapidly spreading infection include a belief in “get rich quick” web schemes and a trusting nature coupled with lack of internet savvy. Sufferers may also exhibit Google paranoia manifesting itself in a belief that the popular search engine can actually control the business success of individuals.

Pathogens known as SEOguri are the cause of SEOitis as they rapidly multiply in unchecked online trash heaps like Twitter and websites promising wealth enhancement on the web. While these germs may only be categorized as a nuisance to more experienced website owners, newbies can become increasingly affected as they wait for the fees they’ve paid for their online presence to multiply into mega riches.

Symptomatic behaviors include incoherent forum postings, unchecked purchases of multiple domain names and confusing content which may change on a daily or even hourly basis. As the disease progresses victims may suffer sleep loss resulting in deep neuroses, such as obssession over link creation and meta tags. Posting of repetitive content and listening to and believing in webinars, in addition to accelerated consumption of eBooks usually signals that SEOitis has set in. Financial failure and decline of online reputation is the final phase of the disease process.

Psychological counseling and website realignment may be required to bring the unfortunate victims of SEOitis back to reality. Panic attacks and withdrawl symptoms may be alleviated by website reconstruction and relinquishment of infected website marketing procedures.

Posted in News, SEO Tips Tags: 5 Comments »

Improve Google Ranking with Blogger

Posted by Jubran Moe on February 22nd, 2011
blogger

By: Codex-M

There are around 321,000,000 results for site:blogspot.com in the Google search engine. This means there are 321,000,000 indexed pages for blogs that are hosted in Google Blogger. Yet with this large number of pages, you’ve probably noticed that only a few of these blogs manage to get a decent Google ranking for most common blogging topics. Why? And can you duplicate their success? Keep reading.
A quick list of the most common blogging topics is published here: http://promediablog.com/blogging-tips-10-most-popular-blog-topics-to-make-money-online/. For certain key terms, a few sites stand out. For example, for “film reviews blog,” two results deserve further study: commonguyfilmreviews.blogspot.com and telugu-film-reviews.blogspot.com. For “pet blogs,” internet-pets.blogspot.com is worth a look. For “fashion and jewelry blog,” we’ll look at three results: dcelestine.blogspot.com, in-vogue-jewelry.blogspot.com and profashionjewelry.blogspot.com.

This article will examine the SEO characteristics of these blogs and what makes them rank in Google for their targeted terms. The information gathered by this observation can be used by aspiring bloggers to optimize their blogs for the best results in Google.

Content is Still King: Consistency and Quality

One of the common characteristics of most these blogs is that they emphasize writing quality content on a consistent basis.

Another thing worth observing is the large minimum number of indexed pages on these blogs. Based on the sample provided, you can observe that most of them have indexed pages greater than 50; in short, all of the blog owners have written at least 50 posts for their blog.

A high number of blogs in Google’s top 10 even have hundreds to thousands of indexed pages. Regarding the quality of the content, these blogs feature original content, and most of their blog posts are more than 400 words long.

These blog authors write useful and convincing content with the sole purpose of meeting the demands of their readers. The blogs’ readers, especially those that are coming from Google, expect quality information, and these blogs deliver. You might observe that their content is not spammy in nature, and that the authors write naturally for their readers.

Another thing worth observing is that these blogs do not contain too many ads on their pages. Well, you might have seen that most of Google’s “blogspot” users set up blogs just for Google AdSense. As a result, their blogs contain a lot of ads, but little content, which is a mistake.

But the top ranking blogs do not contain distracting or obtrusive ads. Instead, most of them even have no ads, or if they include an advertisement, it is clearly separated from the content, and limited.

This implies that these blog authors are not blogging just for the purpose of making ad income; they are blogging to write great content which is helpful for their readers.

Finally, they are not only writing quality content on a single occasion; most of these blogs are consistently updating and adding content.

Posted in SEO Tips, Tutorials Tags: , 1 Comment »

Random SEO Tags

Posted by Jubran Moe on February 20th, 2011

Best Random SEO Tags – plugins

Random One Cat Widget

This Widget shows up to five random posts from a given categories.

Random Tags Cloud Widget

This Random SEO tags plugin allow you to display random tags on your website / blog

Benefits of Random SEO Tags

Using the random SEO tags will help your visitors to view the common articles. also it will help to increase your pages exposures on search engines.

Posted in SEO Tips, Tutorials Tags: , No Comments »

The Skills & Experience Needed to Excel in SEO

Posted by Jubran Moe on February 17th, 2011

When referring to SEO, marketers often consider it to be the “technical” part of their online marketing strategy, as all SEO techniques require some technical knowledge, or at least a familiarity with basic HTML. In addition to technical knowledge, a good SEO strategist will need to be handy with words and text, so it helps to have experience in copywriting. Search engines are becoming so intelligent that they can differentiate between a well-written relevant piece of text and a block of text that has been written hastily in an attempt to quickly add content to a website. This is why good copywriting experience, typically associated with blogging, is fast becoming a highly sought after skill for any SEO strategist.

Optimising a website so it achieves high ranking organic results is really only a small part of what a good SEO strategist should be doing for a business. Having a high ranking means nothing to the business if customers are being turned away from the website as soon as they arrive as a result of poor web design. While it can be argued that it’s the Web Designer’s responsibility to ensure the website functions properly and looks great, it’s also up the SEO strategist to advise the Web Designer on ways that the two can work together to achieve a better overall web design.

For example, if the SEO strategist determines that the website needs a larger space for text on the home page, the Web Designer will need to redesign the website to accommodate, instead of simply trying to squeeze the text in. A good SEO strategist will therefore always have a basic understanding of what constitutes good web design.

Posted in SEO Tips, Tutorials Tags: , , 2 Comments »

Keyword Research

Posted by Jubran Moe on February 17th, 2011

SEO Keyword research

Keyword research can be defined as the process of uncovering and selecting the appropriate keywords for a particular website. Keyword research is one of the most fundamental SEO techniques as it provides the basis for any SEO campaign. Some of the world’s leading SEO experts often credit their success to how much time they spent doing keyword research before launching a SEO campaign. Keyword research is so critical to the entire SEO process that it’s always the first item on any SEO strategist’s to-do list.

When conducting keyword research SEO strategists typically work from a top-down approach. This means trying to understand the website’s target audience, and from this derive a list of keywords that the audience would use to find the website using a search engine. This can be achieved by either brainstorming or surveying both past and potential customers.

A brainstorming session will yield more than just a list of keywords, but also a list of alternate spellings, wordings and synonyms. When brainstorming for a target audience, SEO strategists must also consider how language and cultural factors change the way people search. For example, if the website is located in Australia the SEO strategist cannot use keywords that are spelled out using the American version of the English language, but instead must use keywords from the British version of the English language.

Surveying customers is the most ideal way to extrapolate the perfect list of keywords, however it’s also the most difficult and time consuming. There are numerous ways to perform surveys including emailing existing customers, conducting in-house focus groups or even adding optional pop-up surveys that appear when new users arrive at the website.

Once an initial set of keywords has been established it’s a good idea to write the list up on a whiteboard or somewhere that is accessible to all members of the team, as the keyword list will constantly change throughout the entire SEO campaign. For example, if the Marketing Manager conducts a focus group, he/she may need to alter the keyword list as a result of customer feedback.

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Search Algorithms

Posted by Jubran Moe on February 16th, 2011

A search algorithm is an algorithm that finds a file with specified properties within a database of files that are stored on a computer system. In its most basic form a search algorithm is a procedure or set of steps for solving a particular problem by using the problem as input and returning a solution. In relation to search engines, search algorithms are used to rank information on the Web.

In the past, search algorithms were based on complex mathematical formulas. By using search algorithms, a search engine could determine how many links a website had, how long users typically spend on the website, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a website and the density of those keywords or phrases. The search engine then uses the output of search algorithms to give the website a ranking.

The problem with search algorithms that are solely based on mathematical formulas is that once the formulas are revealed to the public, people can abuse the system by tricking the search engine into thinking their website is relevant. To counter this, search engines began using search algorithms that employ a combination of mathematical formulas and human input to determine the website’s ranking. These types of search algorithms are the focus of SEO Today.

These days, search algorithms are able to derive a ranking by looking at everything, from how long the website has been on the Web to how many errors are encountered. New search algorithms are even able to derive relationships between keywords, for example, the algorithm knows that the keywords “Ferrari”, “sports car” and “automobile” are all related, and ranks the website accordingly.

It’s important to understand that each search engine uses different search algorithms and that these algorithms are usually kept secret, due to the competitive nature of the industry. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts are constantly trying to discover exactly how a search engine determines a website’s page ranking, which leads to a lot of speculation, assumption and guesswork.

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Search Engine

Posted by Jubran Moe on February 16th, 2011

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a software program that is used to find answers to queries by using algorithms to search through a database of information that is stored on a computer system. In its most basic form a search engine can be described as an electronic information retrieval system. The software that runs on a computer terminal at the local library, to help people find the books they wish to borrow, is an example of a search engine. The most common form of search engine, and the focus of SEO Today, is a Web search engine, which refers to an online tool that is used to search for information on the World Wide Web (Web), or a small portion of the Web.

Web search engines use propriety algorithms to create and store indexes of the millions of websites available online into a database. These algorithms ensure that only meaningful results are displayed when users make queries. Because all Web search engines use different algorithms, a user may get varying answers to their queries, depending on which Web search engine they choose.

Web search engines typically consist of three parts:
1. Retrieval Program – A program that searches the Web and gathers information, commonly
referred to as a spider, crawler or robot (bot).
2. Database – A collection of the indexes and associated information that has been created by
using the retrieval program.
3. Search Tool – An interface that allows the user to search through the database by using
queries.

Posted in SEO Tips, Tutorials Tags: No Comments »

Update Your SEO Vocabulary

Posted by Jubran Moe on February 15th, 2011
SEO Tips

by Terri Wells

The SEO field changes constantly in response to the search engines. These days, though, visitors find your site via Facebook, Twitter, and other resources in addition to Google. That means your approach to SEO needs to expand – and so does your vocabulary.
SEO now embraces a range of fields. A well-rounded SEO understands some of the technical aspects of websites, the wider field of Internet marketing, conversion metrics, how to test ads, and much more. If you want to keep up with the field and understand where it is going, you need to get acquainted with the concepts I’ll be explaining in this article. Give yourself a pat on the back if you’ve already heard of these, but don’t be surprised if you see a few you’ve never encountered before.

Let me give credit where it’s due. Tad Chef, writing for SEOptimise, covered these terms and more. If you want to see them explained in greater detail, he links out to an article for every single one of them.

We’ll start with a number: 503. You know about 404 not found codes, 301 redirects, and probably even 200 (which means the URL is accessible). What is a 503 code? It tells search engine crawlers, and anyone else who visits your site, that it is temporarily down for maintenance. Google notes in a Webmaster Central blog post that using a 503 HTTP result code is a way “to deal with planned website downtime…that will generally not negatively affect your site’s visibility in the search results.” You can even specify the length of time your site will be down in an optional Retry-After header, to let the Googlebot know when it can come back for something to crawl.

The next term I’d like to discuss is “A/B testing.” Also known as split testing, this is not a new technique. You’ve probably known about it for years. Google even offers ways for you to do A/B testing of your ads with them. In its simplest form, split testing involves comparing two versions of a page to find out which one gets more visitors to do what you want them to do: make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, request more information, and so forth. Doing it right is both an art and a science, as small changes can sometimes lead to big differences in a page’s conversion rate.

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