ShaswatPatel.com » SEO Tips

Effective SEO: Keep it Simple, Keep It Real

Sam — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:32:26 +0000

The content of your website should be your top priority if you want to rank well with search engines. From the onset, give priority in putting top quality articles and information so that the groundwork is done and all you have to do is add on and improve your page further.

The first thing you need to note is that your content should be informative and relevant. Simply put, your content must make sense. All it takes for a visitor is a glance to see that your website does not have anything that can satisfy their need for information. Be concise and direct. The same policy applies to search engine bots. You have to be clear in your content so that the crawlers can properly index your site on the results.

Do your research and take note of the keywords that are best applicable to your site’s products and offerings. Use these keywords sufficiently but do not go overboard. Have your articles contain the keywords and make them flow organically with the article. Having good writers come up with content for your website is a good idea if you’re not able to do the job yourself.

Effective SEO

SEO is a legitimate method for improving search rankings and not just a gimmick. Take your content seriously as it is key in getting visitors to your site. If you fill your page with fluff, you may get initial traffic, but without substantial content you will never maintain a loyal user base. Search engines are also getting smarter and looking at relevant content instead of mere repetition of keywords.

Advertisers also prefer sites that have good content, as the website reflects on their company’s principles and policies. Companies will not pay for space on generic or shady sites, and you have to maintain your website’s integrity in order to get good advertisers.

In the end, SEO is about attracting your target market. The user is always judge of the end result. If you respect your audience enough to provide them with good and informative articles, the traffic to your site will grow naturally. You don’t have to resort to trickery to get traffic to your site. Put the effort on quality and quality will also come to you.

Keyword Research Tips for Beginners

Admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 13:50:25 +0000

Keyword research plays a major role when you begin with a new blog. It is the keyword research that would decide the future traffic to your website and would form all of your current stuff.

Now the choice is yours. That is whether you would prefer keyword research or pay hundreds of dollars to SEO website design services. If you wish to begin yourself, given below are some ways to help you begin with your blog.

Keyword Suggestion Tool- Google AdWords

Suppose you wish to create an immediate traffic at your blog, in such case you would have to pay for every advertisement. The keyword suggestion tool Google AdWords would guide you for the relevant keywords to be used for your blogs.

Once you enter the keyword, this suggestion tool would provide you with all the related and other suggested keywords. This tool also offers you “Global Monthly Search Volume” that helps you to know the frequency of a particular keyword being searched in a month. So, that is for sure that if the keyword which you have selected is not used so often then there is no sense in optimizing your blog content and website as it would result in very low traffic. The tool is non paid or is free to use.

Word Tracker

This is also free and very simple to use. The drawback of this tool is it mostly highlights the keyword searches done in USA. However, you could try this tool if you think your business market to be in America.

This is simple to use as just type your main keyword and click the submission button; it would open the list of all the related and main keywords being researches in the past few years.

Keyword Research Tips for Beginners

Word Stream

This keyword suggestion tool is also free and online but not so simple to use. The benefit in using this tool is once you search any keyword this tool offers you the entire list of the related keywords and mails it to you. This gets quite handy if you wish to create an Excel sheet for future analysis or you wish to continue your research in other program.

Word Stream does not provide result in raw numbers but in bar graphs according to the keyword popularity. So it is best to generate keyword ideas with this tool.

Google Wonder Wheel

This is the keyword suggestion tool that shows all the related keywords in an easy graphical format. Just type the keyword you are looking for in the Google search bar and click; you would see this tool on the side of the page.

You can see that the main keyword forms the centre of this wheel and the related keywords surrounding the main keyword. If you click any of the related keyword, it will form another wonder wheel branching from the original tree. In this way it helps to know the relevant keywords.

Both Google Wonder Wheel and Word Stream are mostly preferred to generate keyword ideas as they do not give you any idea regarding the number of monthly searches. The drawback is you cannot email the list but have to note it down using a paper and a pen.

Tips to Achieve a High Rank in The Search Engines

Admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:24:35 +0000

The only way to drive targeted traffic to your website is to achieve a high rank in the different search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process used to place a website at a high position in the search engine results. Different techniques are used for SEO — some of these are on page and the others are off page. The following tips would help you to achieve a high rank in the search engine results:–

The most important part of SEO is keyword research. There are different keyword research tools available such as, ‘WordTracker’ or ‘Keyword Discovery’. These tools have both free and paid versions which may be used to find out various keywords related to your niche. It is recommended to look for ‘Long Tail Keywords’ which have good volume of search but have less competition.

As the search engines are always looking for sites having good content, you must provide high quality content on your site. The content should be keyword optimized. It should be updated regularly. Always remember that the use of flashy graphics will not increase your search engine rank but a few lines of keyword optimized content can do the trick.

Achieve a High Rank in The Search Engines

The website should have a good layout and design. It should be easy to browse. Use keywords in the URLs and file names. Generate a XML site map for the website and submit that to the different search engines. If the site is large, you may generate a number of site maps. All the links in the website should be working, as broken links may damage your search engine rank.

As the search engines love blogs, you can start a blog either by using WordPress or blogger. Put a link to your website in the blog posts. Ping your blog after each post. Submit your blog posts to various social networking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Technocrati etc. All these will help to build important backlinks to your blog and help it to get indexed by the search engines. In addition to blogs, you may also use Squidoo or Hubpages to promote your site.

A website which has a high rank in the search engine results usually has a number of links pointing to it. These are called backlinks. Try to build high quality links to your site through forum posting, article marketing, classified advertising, blog commenting, social bookmarking etc.

You can also improve the search engine rank for your site through paid traffic, such as, ‘Pay Per Click’ advertising.

5 SEO Tips For The Images On Your Site

Admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:54:29 +0000

People who pay a lot of attention to Search Engine Optimization often neglect a branch of it called Image Search Optimization, which is composed of techniques to get the images on your site ranked high in Google, Yahoo, Bing and other engines’ Image Search.

That’s not a very good thing, as image search is constantly growing and as of 2009, it accounts for 10% of Google’s daily 200 million searches, which is quite an impressive number. And as there is much less competition, you can get your images and site ranking high pretty quickly.

When users perform an image search and click on a results page image, they see your site right under Google’s (for example) toolbar, and many times, if you have some good headlines or images there, they will stay (probably after viewing or copying the image they wanted).

SEO Tips of Images On Your Site

Amazon, for example, gets a few million visits per month from users searching for book covers or product screenshots. This is quite amazing considering they would’ve had those images there anyway.

So how can you get a piece of the 20 million daily image searches? Here are the best (and pretty much the only) tips and techniques to help you:

Set proper file names:

Don’t just name them randomly like “owkdej50bng.jpg”, so you can avoid duplicates. Name the file with the keywords you want it to rank for and/or with the name of the object that is displayed. For example, an image of a Nissan GTR sports car should be named “Nissan-GTR-sports-car”. You can use either hyphens, underscores or even spaces to separate words, as Google acknowledges them all as separators, although the latter would probably not stand well with Apache server (and Linux in general) and some older browsers. This is the most important thing to get your images ranked well, but some established sites get away with using just relevant keywords around the image on the page (Amazon is the best example of this).

Use all the image attributes:

This will not only help Search Engines rank your images correctly, but will also make them compliant with W3C requirements. You’ll have to use the “title” (title of the image), “alt” (alternative text to be displayed in case the image cannot be shown), “width” and “height” (to tell search engines and other bots the size of your image) attributes together to be fully compliant. This may be a little difficult to implement if you are not a programmer, but you can always search for a good plugin if you are using a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or OS Commerce. Search engines pay attention to W3C compliancy, so it will further increase you chance to rank higher for any keyword.

Surrounding text and alternative text:

The text in the immediate vicinity of the image and the content of the page in general influence an image’s ranking (again, the best example is Amazon with their random image names and missing attributes). That makes sense, as an image of a car on a health care blog would be really out of context, and therefore would not rank well. But if you have the same image on a car blog, it will show up much higher on the results page. The “alt” attribute is also considered as “surrounding text” by Google, and also plays an important role. Generally, you would have the same text in the “alt” attribute as you would in the image name. For example, the “alt” text for “Nissan-GTR-sports-car.jpg” would be something like “The Nissan GTR Sports Car”.

Image Resolution:

This doesn’t play a very important role for Search Engines (as long as your image is normal sized, not 20×20 pixels), but it does for humans. People who search for an image want to see it big and clear, not at a 150×150 pixels resolution. Most people navigate away as fast as they can click when they see such an image , as it does not present anything important and it just irritates them. How can you discern a car’s rims, for example, in such a small image? But, from a site owner’s perspective, if you insert a big image directly into your page, it will take a lot more time to load and will consume too much bandwidth. The best solution here is to have 2 images – one smaller sized that you would insert on the page, and a bigger one that will be linked from it. This way you’ll save bandwidth when people read your article and just take a quick look at the image and you’ll please people who want to take a closer look at it.

Link anchor text:

This is directly relevant to the above point, but can also be used in some other cases. If you link from the small image to the bigger one, you should use an anchor like “Large version of Nissan GTR sports car image” instead of just “Enlarge” or “Bigger version”. This will help both your images get a higher ranking due to relevancy. Another example – if you’re linking to an article related to the image, you should use “A review of the Nissan GTR sports car” instead of “Link” or “The article”. And unlike the image attributes, most CMS software allows you to insert an anchor text by default, without using any plugins.

That’s about all you can do to get your images and site ranking high on Image Search. There are a few other, less known and unverified methods, but these are the ones you’ll really need.

How to use Geo Tags for SEO

Admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:10:15 +0000

There are a lot of popular and well-known ways to increase your search engine rankings using Search Engine Optimization. Basic techniques include the use of user-friendly URL’s, the use of relevant keywords in the keywords, title and description meta tags, having a good article keywords density (2-3% is enough to get ranked higher and to avoid any search engine filters) and others.

But there are a few new, mostly unknown methods that can be used to gain higher rankings in specific circumstances. Those who know about them keep quiet, as they really can help improve a website’s rank and can make a great addition to one’s SEO tools arsenal. One of these techniques is using Geo meta tags on any website that has a local presence.

For example, if you have an online car parts store that has an office in Chicago, Illinois, you can benefit from using Geo tags when someone in that city (and even state) searches for car parts, as your online store will rank higher than others, because the search engine will consider it closer to the user and, therefore, more relevant. And all you have to do is add a few lines of code to your site’s pages (using a plugin or manually).

Right now only Bing and Yahoo (which is using Bing for search) have confirmed that Geo meta tage influence their rankings. Google hasn’t given a definite answer, but it’s safe to assume that they at least consider them when deciding on a website’s ranking. Also, geo tags have absolutely no negative impact on the rank, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use them.

Geo Tags for SEO

Implementing them is fairly easy, all you have to do is add three short meta tags to your site’s section (next to the other tags like description, keywords, etc.):

1. Geo.Region

The “geo.region” meta tag contains the ISO-3166 country and state code. For example, if your business and website are located in United States, Illinois, you would use “US-IL”. You can find the codes on the iso.org website or by searching “ISO 3166 country codes” on Google (or any other search engine).

2. Geo.Placename

The “geo.placename” tag consists of the names of your state and city/town. Let’s take “Chicago, Illinois” as an example.

3. Geo.Position

The “geo.position” tag includes the latitude and longitude of your city. A great tool that will help you find them out is itouchmap.com, which Google Maps (which itself doesn’t have the ability to show the latitude and longitude of a location). Go to itouchmap.com, click on “Latitude and Longitude”, type in your location (for example “Chicago, Illinois”; you can leave out the street name) and you’ll get the exact longitude and latitude of the city. You will use only the first number after the point and a semicolon (;) instead of a comma (,) for the Geo.Position meta tag, like this: “41.8; -87.6″.

For example, here’s what a small business website located in Chicago, Illinois, would have in the section:

As you can see, everything is simple. And there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t implement geo tags (aside from possible technical difficulties), so do it as soon as possible!

The most common SEO mistakes you need to avoid

Admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:08:24 +0000

Search Engine Optimization is a great way to get your business and yourself noticed by people, and therefore, by potential customers. There are a lot of companies and individuals that have gotten rich (like millions of dollars rich) using nothing but their extensive knowledge of SEO and how it works.

Even if you’re not interested in all of that and you just want to get a few readers to your new blog, you will still greatly benefit from SEO, as more than 80% of all websites’ traffic comes from search engines. It is only when the site picks up and becomes popular among online communities that you can hope to have most of your traffic consist of returning visitors from social networks and email subscriptions, without relying on search engines (as many webmasters are trying to do).

But in your quest for getting the most out of SEO, you must remember not to get too carried away, as it can cause serious problems for your blog. If you don’t follow the search engines rules and make a few wrong moves, your site can easily be penalized or even banned from appearing in search engine results, and most probably never be re-admitted. A lot of people had to change their domain name and IP address or hosting company to get their content back in the search engines. Most of the times, there is no other way.

SEO

So, in order to avoid having the same problem happen to you, here is a list of the most common SEO mistakes that a lot of people make and can get a website penalized or even banned in no time:

1. Keyword spamming.

You may already know that the more times a keyword is repeated in an article, the higher is the chance that the article will rank on the first page for that search term. That is absolutely true, but if you take it too far and insert the same keyword too often, your article will be penalized for keyword spamming and will never get to the front page, or even get dropped completely from the search engine. It has been proven that 2-3% is the maximum keyword density that will benefit SEO. Any more than that and you’ll not only lose any advantage, but risk getting penalized. A 2% keyword density means that your keyword (for example “skin care product”) is inserted into the article every 100 words. But you should take great care to make the article readable by humans, and make the keyword have sense in the phrase. This way, both the readers and the search engines will enjoy your article.

2. Building your site using Flash.

While it looks cool, Flash is probably the worst technology to use for building your site. Search Engines can not index any of the content made in Flash, so they will not rank your site for any term. This is the same as being banned, probably worse. If you need traffic, do not use Flash (preferably anywhere) – this is a good rule to adhere to.

3. Over-using meta tags.

The keywords, description and title meta tags are used by search engines to see if your article is relevant to a search or not. Nowadays, Google and Bing are not dependent on these tags anymore, but they still consider them when ranking a site. There are a lot of other, smaller search engines that index pages using only these meta tags, so you can potentially get a little traffic from them. But you have to follow a simple rule – do not cram as many keywords as possible in those fields! This will make the search engines (even Google and Bing) mark your site or article as “potential spam”, and it will definitely affect it in a negative way. Just use the keywords that the article is about and write a good title and description useful for human readers, not search engines.

4. Using bad content.

This is possibly the worst mistake you can make. If you just use stolen content from other sites or machine-rewritten content that is of absolutely no use to readers (as they can not understand it), your site will get out of rankings very fast. This is because search engines will regard it as a useless or spam site (especially if you have any ads), and will drop it from their index. It’s easy to fix this – just write good, useful content. That’s it!

5. Using direct affiliate links

. Some time ago, Google introduced a rule that makes sites with a lot of affiliate links, banners and ads rank lower than those without them. That is because, in their opinion, your site just wants a user to click on an ad and buy something. That is actually true, how else would webmasters make money, but Google shouldn’t forget that many of these sites also contain useful content, and the reader can not click on an affiliate link if he doesn’t want to. But saying this won’t help, so it is better that you cloak your affiliate links, which means not inserting the link that the affiliate network gave you, but redirect it through your site, so your affiliate links would look like internal links on your site. It’s quite easy to do, there are a lot of plugins or redirect page templates for this. It would be too long to insert them here, so just do a search for “affiliate links cloaker plugin”. Alternatively, you can use a third party service like bit.ly. It’s not as good as internal links, but it’s better than direct affiliate links.

That’s about it. By avoiding the above mistakes, you will ensure yourself a successful SEO campaign and high rankings for your website.

Link Building Tips: Easy Way To Bring Traffic To Your Link

Admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:53:50 +0000

There are countless ways of earning through internet. Most of them involves around blogs or websites. Any blog holder or web side owner has only 1 thing in his/her mind-How to get good traffic on web site. I have a solution. The best way to get traffic is making your link popular. Link Building is solution of this problem. For maintaining a good and effective website, link building is must. This is fundamental solution to make your link popular.

Link building has countless advantages. It improves search engine raking of your link which helps in bringing more traffic. It also helps in developing new contacts and business deals. If your link deals in affiliate marketing, it will help in bringing lots of clients which results in good sale of your business. SEO experts and some other link Building companies suggest that proper link building is must for every web site.

Link Building Tips

Try to exchange links with well established web sites as they already have good traffic. Don’t forget to exchange links with websites having same base as of yours. For example-if your website deals with health and fitness, try to link with most of health related web sites. Content is the soul of every web site. Always use unique and original content for your link. Content should be full of keywords. Also submit your web sites on various directories and search engines .Start writing articles and submit them to article directories .This will surely enhance your traffic. Join forums and communities related with your link .Type few keyword on Google like “submit url”,”submit web site”, “submit link “ etc and you will get lots of websites where you can submit your link. This step is must for making your link popular. Also try to leave comment on others link. This will definitely encourage others to view your link.

Link Building Services are also becoming more and more popular among web developers. They have their own methods and ways of making your link popular. They have unique data base having lots of other links through which they can connect your link. If you have good page rank, you will surely get various invitations for link exchange. If your choice of Link Building Service Company is good, you can see immense boost in your visitors count. Professionals can guide you more effectively. If you don’t have enough time for your website publicity, you should consult a good link building company and keep an eye on growth of your link. Some website owners hire free lancers which build some back links for their web site Professionals can decide easily which method is best for making your link popular. Hiring these professionals not only provide you lots of back links, but also gives lots of other tools also to make your link popular .These are few basic tips regarding Link Building.

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