Thursday, July 24, 2008

Now, Yahoo Glue Pages In India

Glue Pages unite your Classic Search with visual information from the best sites anywhere on the web. Yahoo released a new type of search result for India called “Glue Page.” Instead of the usual text listing, some queries – like Computers – will now trigger a comprehensive and very visual result page. Glue pages are the combination of organic search results with visual images of your query from the best sites anywhere on the web.


The results contain images, videos, articles and more. Searching on Glue Pages Beta will help Users to receive more relevant, visually appealing search results from across the web. The new Glue Pages Beta feature for Yahoo! India Search supports the strategy to make Yahoo the starting point on the Internet and demonstrates commitment to provide a compelling online search experience.


For example a search 'Laptops' returns standard search results on the left, in the middle results with images from ebay and in the end some videos. See the link http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=laptops&rd=r1&fr=

Monday, July 14, 2008

How to get Your Website Crawled Early

The main motive of SEO is to get your website crawled early by Spiders. It is very important that your website should possess some things that tend the crawler to come to your to index it. Below are few tips which would help you to get your website crawled soon by spiders:

  • Update your website with more content as regular as you can. Whenever crawler comes to your website, it will show crawler that your website contains something new.
  • If search engines don’t see any potential links to your site then Search engines crawl yours site late. So your major concern should be to get good links to your site. More quality links are pointing to your site more search engines faster it crawls your site.
  • Host is also a very important point one should take care off. If your website is hosted on slow server the possible that your website will get crawled soon will reduce a lot. So switch your website to a host server which is fast and specific.
  • Sitemap on your site is one of the most important things. Create sitemap soon with all your website links located in it and pace that on the server. Sitemap should be at the top of the homepage, so that when your homepage gets crawled your sitemap too gets crawled with all internal page links.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Flash sites are not obstacle for SEO

Flash pages attract visitor easily, as visitors would not have to read anything and they are given everything what they want with flash movie. Another reason for why people are attracted by flash design is that flash pages are very interactive. Flash design push direct traffic to site which ultimately ends up with online sales, so shouldn’t we use flash? Today most of SEO professionals use best techniques for high page ranks in Search Engines, but what exactly client want is ‘SALES’ and Flash help you to get sales.


Most of SEO professionals ask this question: “How can I optimize my Flash website?” It may be surprising that your problem is not with Flash. Reason is that Search engines still lack the ability to extract content from within a Flash file (swf). Because Crawlers are designed to index HTML and still have difficulties reading content from within a Flash file. But there are some points, which must be taken care of:

  • Place your content within object tags
  • Use keyword descriptive meta tags
  • Place your content within no script tags
  • Use keyword descriptive title tags

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Local Search Engine Marketing

Search engine optimization marketing (SEM) is today’s trend. Everybody is looking to get high ranks on major search engines as it increases online business. Marketing your website by local search engine and directories submission is one of the most way to get found by local customers. Local search engines are called regional search engines, which target audience from particular region.

Local search engines are very successful if you are focusing some particular region for your online business. Its major benefit is very specific and targeted visits which is mostly likely to convert into sales.


Local search engine marketing basically includes:

  • Local Search Engine Submissions
  • Local Directory Submissions
  • Local Yellow Pages Submissions
  • Local Classifieds Listing

Thursday, July 3, 2008

On-page Optimization: Need to be major area of concern

For crawler or spider, Meta tags are very important. So, from SEO point of view, Meta tags should be in proper order and patterns. On-page optimization means dealing with elements that are in the code. Amongst parts of SEO, title tag is the major element of concern. Here are some points to be taken care of:

  • Make your title tag and attractive, and try to use keywords in title.
  • Do not make your title keyword-stuffed, as this will display in the search engine listing for your website.
  • If you are a well-recognized brand, such as Nokia, your name at the beginning of the page title is good for building trust in your brand.
  • If you are not very renowned brand, try to add your name near the end of the title, so that crawler's focus goes to the keywords in your title.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Google Search Box Now for Longer Queries

Have you ever noticed that it’s difficult to edit long queries in search box of Google because Google optimized the size of the box for short queries. But now, scenario has changed. You can search your topics with longer queries too. Now, Google will adjust the size of search box after you enter your query.


Google has expanded the query length limit to 32 words. The average number of words in a Google query was 4 at the end of 2007.

Friday, June 27, 2008

New features of Google

New features of Google : Google has now added a few new features which definitely enhances its multi speciality. Have a quick look at them:

Now Google Earth is also Google News:
Google has now added Google News to Google Earth.

Google News Comes To iPhone:
Google News launched a special interface for the iPhone. To access it, go to http://news.google.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

In addition to it, You can use some more features that make Google complete are:

Everyday Essentials: Some features that we use daily

Weather
Stock Quotes
Time

Choosing Keywords:

Synonym Search
Dictionary Definition
Spell Checker

Search by Number:

Package Tracking
Patent Numbers
Area Code

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Optimize Your Website Images

To optimize your website, you also need to take care of the images on the website as they are integral part of any website. They are after all, the media that attracts any visitor. If you are not optimizing images on your web site, you are probably missing large traffic that may come to your website. Here are following ways to optimize the images:


  • Use Keywords in the Images file names
  • Use Keywords in image ALT tags.
  • Optimize the WebPages nicely containing the images.
  • Keep the image near supporting keyword rich content
  • Limit the number of images per page.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Importance on Back Link on Internet

I see this discussion regarding link exchange usually on the Internet. Since back links play a huge role in how a site ranks in major search engines so people want to find a fast, easy and effective way to build back links.

Link Exchange is of many types: one-way link, reciprocal link, three-way and four way linking. People usually discuss online that out of all these linkage methods which one is more beneficial for business. Which of these methods will help you to get higher search engine rankings? There are various myths regarding Link exchange:

Link to every site: If you link back to every site you come across, your ranking will definitely suffer. So only theme relevant links should be exchanged.All people will add my site if I add theirs first: To receive a link, most people will add the site's link first. Unfortunately, not every potential partner will add your link even if you have already added theirs.

All people will add my site if I add theirs first: To receive a link, most people will add the site's link first. Unfortunately, not every potential partner will add your link even if you have already added theirs.

The name of website should be in the title of the link: Many search engines, especially Google, pay attention to the title of the link pointing towards your site. So, if you are looking for top placement for specific keywords, then they should be used in the title of the link instead of your website name.

Only link to sites with a high Google Page Rank: Instead of focusing on a page rank, many successful websites look instead at the quality of the Internet business. By linking to a well designed website, you can be ensured that the value of your link will increase as the website gains a high ranking

The following points about link exchange are worth considering:

  • All the link types (one-way, two-way or three-way) are equally important. Only thing that matters is a good inbound link from a trustworthy website.
  • The links to your site should be theme relevant. If a one-way link is on a low quality page then it won't count much.
  • Links from high quality websites will help to get higher search engine rankings. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get links from web pages that is related to your site topic.


Saturday, April 12, 2008

Role of DESCRIPTION Tag in Increasing Traffic

Though high ranking of site is important, but it is equally important that visitors/ surfers click on the link to your site. Description tag plays a major role in this. The Meta description tag describes your site's content, giving search engines' spiders an accurate summary filled with multiple keywords.

Meta tags are invisible to the reader. Some search engines are able to associate the content of Meta tags into their algorithms. Thus, it is recommended that you always include them.The Meta description tag is especially important because it's the only tag supported by some engines.

Now the question comes that how the search engines take the Description to show the results. Two major search engines i.e. Google and Yahoo follow the following strategy:

Google's Methodology

If you search for a page by its URL, Google uses the description from the Meta description tag. If that web page doesn't have a Meta description tag then Google also uses the description that is used in the DMOZ directory.

Yahoo’s Methodology

Yahoo uses only the first part of the Meta description. If the web page doesn't have a Meta description, then it uses the description of the web page from Yahoo's directory (if the page is listed there). If the web page has no Meta description and is not listed in the Yahoo directory, then Yahoo will display sentences from the found web page that contain the search query.


Saturday, April 5, 2008

Google Tools

Google, being the most popular search engine, plays a major role in SEO. However, Google offers many tools for SEO. These tools are used for SEO as well as for other applications. Major Google tools are as follows:


Web site promotion tools - A webmaster would use this section to search keyword and key phrase rankings.

Web site analysis tools - Webmasters can use these tools to analyze various sites for Meta tags of any given site, check out your friends’ sites or competitors’ sites.

Link popularity tools - This is a useful set of tools to see how a sites links compare relative to one another.

Miscellaneous tools - This set of tools is a webmasters mix bag of goodies. Get your domain name typos, and keyword / Phrase typos generated automatically.


Some of the popular tools in SEO are:


  • Google Notebook: An easy way to organize your notes; integrates with many other Google applications, such as Gmail.
  • Google Docs: You can use Google Docs as a free Web-based spreadsheet and word processor.
  • Google Scholar: A simple way to search for scholarly literature on any subject you can think of.
  • Google Calendar: Plug in your daily calendar with the multi-faceted Google Calendar
  • Google Desktop: Find what you're looking for on your computer more easily with Google Desktop.
  • Picasa: A free image editing and organization tool from Google.
  • Google Scholar: A simple way to search for scholarly literature on any subject you can think of.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Robot.txt File

Robots.txt This is the traffic-cop of search engine bots and instructs those bots which parts of a website they should and should not follow. This file is mainly used to give instructions to search engine crawlers to allow or disallow some part of website for crawling; this is also called as The Robots Exclusive Protocol. Whenever a search engine bot visits a website it checks for robots.txt file and find instruction given in this file. So if it finds instructions not to crawl website it goes on.

Sytanx for Robots.Txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /


Creating the file is simple- Simply open any text editor like Notepad and copy and paste the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow:


Then save the file as “robots.txt” and upload this file into the root directory of website.


The asterisk is a wildcard denoting all search engine robots and leaving the Disallow command blank allows them access to any parts of your site. If there are any areas of your website that for whatever reason you do not want the search engine spiders to visit simply place the file or folder name in the Disallow command like so:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /example folder/


Steps for Creating a robots.txt file

  1. Open any text editor (notepad)
  2. Write your robots instruction
  3. Save file as "robots.txt"
  4. upload robots.txt file to root of your website

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Navigation Structure: Helping in Better Ranking

As a ship captain traversing the open sea without a good navigation system will surely get lost. Same way, a site with poor navigation structure will cause problems in good search engine rankings. Good site design means a good navigation structure for your web site. This means the visitor can find the information with ease. Thus the navigation structure of a website should be easy.


Some points should be considered to make the structure of a website “Search Engine Friendly” which are as follows:


1. Dynamic Site Navigation – If you are designing a dynamic website (php, asp etc), try make your URLs with less or NO query string. Some URL rewriting techniques should be used to make URLs search engine friendly.


2. Don’t Use Image Links - Try to avoid images for navigational links as we all know search engine spiders don't read text in images. Always use text links for navigation and use CSS.


3. Logo - Most of websites have Logo is on top left. It is good practice to link your logo to home page from every page.


4. Site Map - A few sites are now creating "Site Maps" which is a page which links to all other pages in the site. This is better option if you want to provide visitors with an 'index', and is also appreciated by the major search engines.


5. JavaScript Menus or Links - Do not use JavaScript for your internal linking because search engine spiders do not read text written in JavaScript and will not follow link defined in JavaScript

6. Avoid Links in Flash - Search engine crawlers are not able to index/follow links defined in flash. Graphics add a lot to a Web site, but text leaves a lot more room for links. When you write about a specific topic, product or service on a page, include a link within the text.


7. Frames - Don't use frames. Very few people use them. They not only create a variety of user problems but search engines also have trouble in indexing framed pages.


8. Avoid Image Maps - Do not use image maps for navigation.


User and Search Engine Friendly Content

The content of a website is most powerful tool for selling products or services. Though things like graphics, animations etc are important to increase your website visibility but good content is way to attract your visitors to stay on website and search about products and services you are selling. While writing content for a website, one should follow some tips:

Active Content - Always use active words in content to making visitor feel like a participant rather than a passive reader. Always inspire them to take an action.

Consistency - Your objective should be consistency through out website. Make content consistent from page to page.


Call of Action - Your call of action text should be clearly visible to visitor when your visitor is on your website.


No Error Content
- Content on a website should be free from any grammatical or spelling mistakes.

Selling Idea
- Most of websites have content describing features of their product or services, do not write about what your product/service have but write about how can it is beneficial for customers.

Content for Search Engines
- A search engine friendly content does not mean content stuffed with lot of keywords. Try to use proper density of keywords in content. Never try to spam by hiding your content. Try to link you keywords to relevant internal page of website that will really help to boost performance of linked page.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Simplest Way to increase Traffic

There are many ways to increase traffic to your website. But the simplest and effective ways is posting blogs. Blog is basically an online journal related to a particular topic. Blogs consist of text, images and links to another blogs and websites too related to our website. The results in a blog appear sequentially. BLOG itself is a website which facilitates users to post their thoughts and suggestions through comments.

Benefits of blogging

  • Crawler mainly admires rich content sites and blogs are mainly rich in content as various readers can post their thoughts and also can update those posts. Blogs contains categorized content
  • Traffic rate on blogs is more than that of normal websites. As blog is related to particular topic, so it is beneficial for web surfers because they will get the required information.
  • Blogs contains the fresh content because blogs content is regularly updated. Both, the readers and search spiders reward fresh content.
  • Blogs supports text, images and video, more detailed information and opinions about a particular topic. Blogs can easily link to each other than the websites. So it attracts more incoming links and traffic.

So it is clear that blogs are very important for both the business point of view and seo point of view. Blogs are the cost effective and simple way to increase traffic and incoming links to our website.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Top Ways to Generate Website Traffic

What is link Popularity? Link popularity is a general representation of the total number of web pages which link to a website. Most of the major search engines support the "link:" operator. Link popularity plays an important role in SEO Parts. It helps to get the online visibility of a web site among the top of the search results. There are many ways to generate Quality links to your website.


Submit to Major Search engines and Directories: DMOZ.org, Google.com, and Yahoo.com are the example with good popularity among other Search engines/directories. Because DMOZ employs volunteers who manually judge and approves the links on Dmoz


Keep updating your site regularly: Unfortunately, may Internet marketers fail to do this and the website ends up static. Just like housekeeping, you have to keep you website as fresh as possible. Not only will your visitors come often to check out new content, the search engines will crawl through your site more often.


Article submissions: Write articles and submit them to websites who will publish them. Make sure you provide your name and URL, which will be published, with your article. This is a great way to get links to your website.


Make A Newsletter:
Another way to generate a great amount of traffic is to make a newsletter on your website each week or each month simply send out a newsletter to all of the people in your often list.


Exchange Links:
The best type of traffic is a free organic traffic that comes from search engines like Google.com or Yahoo.com. The way to get your website listed for great keywords that will bring traffic back to your website in the search engines is by building high-quality one-way links back to your site.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

SEO Techniques

Search engine optimization methods can be mainly divided into two categories:

1. Techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design
2. Techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing.


White Hat SEO: White hat SEO is technique in which webmaster follow all the rules of search engines means doesn't try to make fool search engines. White hat SEO means follow all the ethics rules and algorithms. Web pages that are created with white-hat SEO methods are advantageous to web surfers, search engines and webmasters and beneficial by search engines. An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note.

Black hat SEO: Black hat SEO is technique that the webmaster used to improve rankings of their web pages in ways that are disapproved by the search engines. These methods include cloaking, paid links, doorway pages, hidden text, etc.Google and all other search engines have made it very clear to webmaster and site owner’s that they penalize websites that use black hat SEO methods once they detect them

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Meta Tags in SEO

Though Meta keywords tag and Meta description tags are not the main factors considered by search engines when ranking sites but they should not be overlooked. A Meta description tag is said to be a brief summary of page's content. A. They were proposed in order to make using the web easier. Meta tags mainly consist of:

Title Tag: The title tag has been one of the most important factors in getting high search engine rankings. Search engines use title tags to collect information about the website. Keywords in title tags are displayed in the hyperlink on the search engine result page.

Meta Description Tag: The Meta description tag describes site's content summary filled. In search engine result pages, after reading title of website a visitor reads the description of that web site and decide whether he will visit website or not.

Meta Keyword Tag: The Meta Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page.

Meta Robots Tag: The Robots Meta Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the robot.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Keywords - Major Actor in SEO

One of the major aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of keywords both in the Meta tags of a site and throughout the website content. In particular, the density, the placement and the actual keywords are the major concern. Keywords play the major role in making your site rank well in many search engines. Although the value of a keyword can be estimated in advance using various resources. One of the major aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of keywords both in the Meta tags of a site and throughout the website content.

Keyword analysis is a process of selecting the most favorable and relevant keywords or Keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. For any online marketing product or services to accomplish it is vital to know your audience there likings and the most viable means to reach them. Various Online tools are available for analyzing keywords.So, What Is The 'Correct' Keyword Density Then?

This leads to the question of how to determine spam and what is considered an acceptable level of keywords within your text. The general belief was that including a keyword within your text with a range of 5% to 10% was best practice. It certainly wouldn't get you penalized and it made it blatantly obvious that your site was relevant to that topic. However, some believed the figure could legitimately be taken as high as 20% without any negative search engine effects.

Below is the list of few good tools available online which can be used for keyword analysis:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Friday, February 29, 2008

Make Your Website Easily Accessible

Web accessibility is about making your website accessible to all Internet users, regardless of what browsing technology they're using. A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don't realize is that by optimizing their site for the search engines, they can also optimize it for their site visitors. Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation.
There is need to keep just few things in mind like working status of site coding , functionality of pages, uptime of the site's server, validity of HTML elements etc. If these features are overlooked, both search engines and user will leave your website in a second.
These features include:

Forms need to be accessible to all web users:If any submissions form, select boxes, other input-required elements block content is not accessible then search engines may never find them. Keep data that you want accessible to search engines on those pages that can be directly accessed via a link.

The end user should have control over your web pages: All web users have unique requirements for how they use the Internet, depending on the kind of browser they're using or any kind of handicap or disability they may have. By handing control back to your users you'll enhance your website's accessibility and you site visitors will be able to use your website in the way that best suits them.

Proper linking of WebPages: If an HTML link is broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be found. In addition, some conclude that search engines take that as negatively rankings for the sites & pages with many broken links.

Applicable HTML & CSS: Although arguments exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful display in order to be cached properly by the search engines.

Meta Data, URLs & Title Tags: URL’s and Meta Data components describe your site and page to visitors and search engines. Keep them relevant, compelling and accurate to ranking well on Search engines. You can also use these areas as launching points for your keywords, and indeed, successful rankings require their use. Also make the online visible text "search-friendly".

Thursday, February 28, 2008

How to Get More Traffic from Internet

The way of enhancing the popularity of your website so that it appears more frequently in search engines results is a technique called Search Engine Optimization. It increases free traffic to the site. When a particular search term is entered, the database of the search engine is searched relevant to the search query. Every search engine has its own search algorithms to determine which web page is more relevant for a given search. There are a number of steps that can be followed to help a web page receive higher ranking in search results:

Heading Tags: These are similar to H1, H2, and H3. Start your page content with H1 tag. Put the most effective Keywords in H1 tag.

Link Strategy: Every page of website should be linked properly to Home page and other pages. URL of the pages should contain keywords.


Site Map Page: Site map is page from where you can excess all the pages of your site. No doubt Site map page is the last page, but plays a major role for website. It is basically a route map which has link to each and every page of your web site.


Meta Tags: Meta tags contain Title Tag, Meta Description Tag , Meta Keyword Tag and other more tags like robot tags etc. Title is the most important tag of all these, Keywords should be used in title tag but in an organized manner. Don’t add more than 3 keywords in title tag.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the most popular way to increase your online business because it increases your online visibility. Online business can be done for a every website from a small informative website to large scale shopping portal. Popularity of a website is directly proportional to number of unique and returning visitors. There is no use of having a huge website with lots of attractive graphics and animations if you are not getting relevant traffic. We all know 70-80% of website traffic depends on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, because people use these search engines to find their useful products or information. If you want to achieve relevant targeted visitors and high ranking in these major search engines, your website must follow their ranking algorithms. You need to optimize your website to get higher rank instead of waiting for to be found by visitors personally. There are many factors that can affect your search engine that we need to keep in mind.

Following are brief list of such factors:

  • Selecting appropriate domain name
  • Fast and reliable hosting provider
  • User and Search Engine Friendly Design
  • Easy Navigation Structure
  • Good amount of content
  • Appropriate meta tags with proper keywords… and many more.