Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Social Networking for Business Guide




It seems like there's an over-abundance of social sites nowadays. For a newbie, it can be quite intimidating when first joining a network or two and building a community. A handful of questions may run through your head:

    • Which networks to join?
    • How to participate?
    • What's enough, or too much?
    • How will it help my business?

So, to answer some of these, I'd like to present my "Social Media For Dummies" overview. First, a quick recap of my favorite networks and what they're about.



Facebook - The ultimate platform for keeping up with (stalking) friends. I joined Facebook way back in 2005, you know, when it was just for college students and before you could even share photos (gasp!). I've witnessed the evolution of this mega-network over the years, and it has become, not only the 4th largest website in the world, but the best place to find people, keep up with them, and inform them. It is the son of Classmates.com on every possible steroid ever ingested by humans. The ability to share and communicate with friends and colleagues is seamless. Overall, Facebook is a great place to start your social networking endeavors.

LinkedIn - A must-have in every business person's arsenal of tools. If you are (or hoping to be) in business of any sort, LinkedIn is a great place to set up shop. Very similar to Facebook, minus the annoying applications, plus job postings and resumes. This is where you network with those in your industry, join groups, research companies, and prospect clients. Build your credentials by asking colleagues for recommendations or head to the "Q&A" section to provide advice.

Twitter - Share, Learn, Meet. I wouldn't be surprised if Webster adds a new definition for "tweet" this year. Within the first half of 2009, Twitter has gone from nearly 5 million users to over 23 million. It is the social media platform of choice at Fortune 100 companies. Easily share links, pictures, videos, articles... Oh, and personal updates... with followers. Twitter is kind of like the cocktail party of social networks. Here, you can easily reach out to strangers by tuning in to their tweets or quickly replying to them. A limited amount of customization keeps annoying advertisements and outlandish profiles at bay, unlike the outdated MySpace.

Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, reddit, etc. - Social Bookmarking to share and store your favorite links. You just read an article over at NYT.com that you loved. Use one or more of these bookmarking sites to share it with the world. Looking for information or articles on a certain subject? Head to one of these sites and search your topic, you'll be able to peruse a list of articles or sites that others have found useful or interesting. Not only are these great for sharing, but storing sites for later use as well. Say you have a home desktop, a netbook for travel, and a work computer... customize your bookmarks and easily access them on each computer without updating each machine.

FriendFeed - All of your networks in one place. FriendFeed lets you put all of your networks in one big stream. Users can see your Facebook status, latest Tweet, pictures posted on Flickr, blog post, bookmarked article and much more when they follow your feed. Much like Twitter, but a whole lot more.


Monday, October 19, 2009

7 Tricks to Get a Google of Links

SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you're running first it's sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you're not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.


Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.


So let's go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition's link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.
[Track Your Keyword Rank History on Google, Yahoo and Bing!]


Let's Talk Competitive Link Research


Finding out where your competitors' links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.


Yahoo's much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there's a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here're some tips to break through to the other side.


Note: If you're lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I'll share a tool that does it all much quicker.


Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site


Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for


link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or
link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html


and so on.


Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links


You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let's exclude the internal ones.


You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in:


link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com


and you'll get a list of external backlinks only.


There's a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.


Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains


The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add -site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.
Top Positions in the Web's Largest Article Directory


You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:


link:http://www.cnn.com -site:cnn.com -site:en.wikipedia.org


Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs


This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in


link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.gov or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov


and you'll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.


Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer


Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs


This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com's so add a -site.com modifier and you'll get lots of new link data.
[Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!]


Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks


Try link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
Or link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org


Give it a thought and I'm sure you'll come up with lots of ideas. Feel free to share your findings in the comments.


Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines


Don't limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn't give you link data, so forget about it) but then there're Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, get rid of the the duplicates and you'll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor's links to study.


Note: Some search engines have a different set of operators so you'll need to type domain: instead of link:.


Getting It All Done Fast


This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT's a lot of work.


I'm too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That's why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don't even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.


SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:


    • Google PR of the domain and linking page
    • The URL and title of the linking page
    • The anchor text and description
    • Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will
       think it's there till they reindex the page).
    • Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
    • How many other links are on the page
    • How much link value the link passes
    • And some other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.


If you want to do competitive link research seriously, I'd strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.


Source:-www.Site-Reference.com


SEO Expert in India

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Latent Semantic Indexing in google?

Latent semantic indexing was introduced in an attempt to improve the service offered by Google and other search engines to those using their services.


Keyword density has been the main part of search engine optimization for many years, easily understood by beginners in website design and article writing. The two major factors influencing search engine placement were the use of keywords and in-links (back links).


When Google introduced Adsense, however, it soon became apparent to entrepreneurs that there was a lot of money to be made by generating web-pages specifically designed to display Adsense ads. Thousands of dollars could be made daily by generating thousands of pages, using template-based page generation software specifically designed for the purpose. Content duplication was rife and the websites themselves were of little or no use to the visitor who was presented with nothing more than Adsense adverts.


One of the reasons, perhaps the main one, for the introduction of latent semantic indexing was to overcome this problem, and to ensure that websites were providing a useful service to those using Google’s search engine, though Google is not the only search engine using the algorithm.


Since the introduction of latent semantic indexing, many sites have been de-listed by Google as being of little use to the visitor, and for using duplicate content. A change of keyword was frequently the only difference between pages. Many internet marketers found their income slashed to almost zero overnight, and this change can often be traced back to the time that latent semantic indexing was introduced.


Latent semantic indexing was initially used in Adsense to enable adverts targeted to the theme of a webpage to appear on the page. The algorithm checks the wording on the page and determines the theme of the page. It was only later that Google applied the algorithms to search engine placement, and it is used by search engines other than Google. It involves analysis of words used in natural language, the synonyms and closely related words used when discussing the general theme of a page. It complements, rather than replaces, keyword analysis.


Since it is based on a mathematical set of rules, or algorithm, it is not perfect and can lead to results which are justifiable mathematically, but have no meaning in natural language. Google purchased a company, Applied Semantics, to develop it early in 2003.


So what is latent semantic indexing? How does it work in layman’s terms?


Let’s look at the three words separately:


LATENT.


The word ‘latent’ means something which is present, but not obviously visible. For example, the latent heat of vaporization, or the heat required to vaporize water, is present in clouds, and is only released when it rains. This is why it seems to get warmer during thunderstorms. In terms of latent semantic indexing, it means that a word such as ‘lock’, can be present in a text, and its meaning is hidden until some other factor reveals it. ‘Lock’ can mean, among other things, a piece of hair, a security device or a means of conveying a barge between different heights in a canal. It is only the rest of the text which makes its meaning clear.


SEMANTIC


The word ‘semantic’ refers to the meaning of language or words, as opposed to what is actually said or written. In the use of the word ‘lock’ in ‘a lock of hair’, semantics is the use given to the word ‘lock’, which is made obvious by the expression ‘lock of hair’.


INDEXING


With reference to use of the word in latent semantic indexing, ’indexing’ is the identification of the meaning of a document from its subject content, and its listing into a form suitable for use by a search system.


Let’s make it clearer by giving an example. Software-generated pages used for Adsense tend to be very general and are able to be used as templates for any keyword or phrase. Here is how a typical piece of such text could read, using ‘the history of locks’ as key-phrase.


“If you are seeking information on the history of locks, there is no better place than the internet. The information superhighway is full of sites specializing in the history of locks, and the history of locks is a very popular subject. We recommend that you check out the other pages on this site for information on other topics associated with the history of locks.”


This is very common with Adsense sites. You can replace the key-phrase ‘the history of locks’ with any keyword whatsoever, and the same text can be used countless times, being replaced automatically by the software from a given list of keywords. It does not give the reader any information whatsoever. In fact, it does not even give information as to what type of lock is being referred to. It could apply equally to a security lock and a canal lock. This is why latent semantic indexing was introduced to search engine ranking analysis.


Now here is the same text including some qualifying wording:


“If you are seeking information on the history of locks, there is no better place than the internet. The information superhighway is full of sites specializing in the history of locks of all types, from the massive Roman door locks to sophisticated encrypted password security systems. From long-keyed safe locks to the history of combination locks that have given safecrackers so much trouble over the ages. The history of locks is a very popular subject and we recommend that you check out the other pages on this website dealing with topics such as general security, the history of cylinder and lever locks, and padlocks of various kinds.”


The ‘latency’ referred to in the term ’latent semantic indexing’ is the hidden meaning of the word ‘lock’, which remains hidden in the first version until the semantics of the second reveal its meaning. Thus, by use of the algorithm, website content with similar keywords, but different meanings for the keywords, can be differentiated and, more importantly for the webmaster, the relevance of the site can be properly determined and indexed.


No longer will sites with ambiguous keywords, as in version one above, be acceptable to search engines. The semantics of the page must make the meaning and topic of the page clear.


So what does that mean to you? It means that not only must you maintain a reasonable density of the specific keyword being targeted, since that is still the term being used by the searcher, but you must also use related words and terms to define the overall theme of the page. Prior to latent semantic indexing, a search for the term ‘the history of locks and canals’ would have been directed to both of the above texts. Since its introduction, such a search will be directed to neither. It will be directed to a page where it is obvious that the theme of the site is canal locks.


This can only be good for the visitor to Google. 

SEO Service in india



Source:http://www.aj2000.com/articles/latent-semantic-indexing.htm

10 Steps to Creating Your Internet Marketing Plan


If you're the owner of a small service business, having a solid Internet marketing plan in place can both increase your name and brand recognition locally in your geographic area, as well as expose you to a whole new set of potential clients throughout the world.

If you have a business plan or vision that is written, you only need to integrate this Internet marketing piece into that existing plan. However, if you are like many of my clients, you carry your business and marketing plans in your head without bothering to commit anything to paper.
Here are ten considerations you need to make as you complete your Internet marketing plan:
1. Objective of Internet Marketing Plan:
What do you want to accomplish by using Internet marketing? To find new clients? Provide services and info to existing clients? Sell services or products? Educate your target market or your staff about your product or service? Create an online community for your target market? How much money to have to spend each month on this Internet marketing plan? Having a goal and budget in mind will make your marketing more effective.
2. Marketing Funnel:
The most successful online business owners have a marketing funnel (think of it as an upside down triangle) through which they "funnel" clients. The process begins from the wide top of the funnel, representing low-cost products or free give-aways, and moving clients down through the funnel to the narrower portions which represent gradually increasing investments from the clients from your higher-priced products and services. What products and services do you currently offer? Are they at varied price points that would create a funnel effect? What plans do you have to increase your product or service line? Will those new offerings plug gaps in your marketing funnel?
3. Your Competition:
Knowing and understanding where you stand among your competitors can you help you strengthen your marketing message. Do a keyword search for the terms someone might use to find your business online. Write down the URL's of your top 5 competitors. How popular and relevant are their sites? You can check their traffic ranking with Alexa, http://www.alexa.com/#traffic, as well as see what other sites link to them. Does your competition offer something unique? Where are the gaps in the service or product offerings?
4. Target Market:
Instead of trying to marketing to everyone (the shotgun marketing approach), find a clearly definable target market that you can easily describe and locate. Are they male or female? What age group? What industry? What socio-economic group? Where do they hang out on- and off-line? What do they read? To what groups and associations (real and virtual, personal and professional) do they belong? How much money do they make? Can they easily afford your product or service? What keywords are they using to search for businesses like yours online? (Note--you can do keyword research with free downloadable software, http://www.GoodKeywords.com).
5. Solution to a Problem:
The reason that someone will buy your product or hire to you to provide a service is to solve a particular problem that they have. What problems and issues plague your target market? How does your product or service solve that problem? How does your solution differ from that of your competitors? What makes you uniquely qualified to provide the solution to their problem?
6. Branding Your Business:
Your domain name can either help you be memorable or cast you into a sea of "brandless" solutions. At a minimum, you'll want to buy both your personal name as well as the name of your business in the .com version, if it's available. Then buy the .com versions of your product names and program names. If you use a full-featured domain registrar, you'll be able to point and mask these domains to internal pages of your web site, or use them as stand-alone sales letter pages.
You may also think of problems faced by your target market or solutions that you provide and buy domain names in the .com version of those as well. Internet marketer Dean Jackson brands his ebook on how to stop a divorce by owning the domain name, StopYourDivorce.com, This is a compelling solution to his target market -- men who have been ignoring their wives' complaints of marital dissatisfaction and come home one day to an empty house and a note telling him that she's filing for divorce.
7. Assess your website.
Your web site should be visually appealing, with one primary font for the text and a simple primary color scheme, along with an easy-to-navigate layout, and readily identifiable buttons to link to other pages in the site. Your content should focus on and address the problems of your visitors and how your product or service can help solve their problems. Rather than listing the features of your product or service, detail the benefits they'll gain from purchasing your product or service. People rarely buy features -- they buy benefits. Don't depend on your web site designer to write your content -- that is best done by you, as you know your business and your target market better than anyone.
Present a clear call to action that is clearly shown on every page of your site. In an online business, your primary call to action should be getting the visitor's name and primary email address by asking him subscribe to your ezine or by giving him access to a free ecourse, special report, audio recording, or ebook. Lastly, provide an abundace of readily available information to demonstrate your expertise (articles, blog posts, free downloads, giveaways, contests). Your visitor is always asking WIIFM (What's In It For Me) -- make your web site about your visitor, not about you.
8. Online Business Management Technology:
Do you have access to the appropriate services and technology that will help you sell your product or service online? At a minimum you'll need a merchant account (permits you to take credit card payments) that includes a virtual gateway (enables you to process transactions online) and a full-featured shopping cart that will permit you to sell both physical and electronic products and create a series of autoresponders to follow up with buyers and non-buyers alike. Depending on your marketing plan, you may also want to investigate email newsletter distribution services, online appointment setting services, stand-alone autoresponders, blogging software, article submission sites, online press release distribution services, website content management services, and links exchange management services and software.
9. Internet Marketing Strategies:
How will you create traffic to your website? There are countless ways to do this, including: pay-per-click purchases (in which you buy a keyword at a search engine and pay for placement on that search engine for that keyword and pay for each visitor who clicks on that link and is sent to your site); organic search engine listing ranking (in which your site comes up at the top of the non-sponsored listings on a search engine by having keyword rich descriptions in the page title and page desciption meta tags and then optimizing each page for no more than 3 keywords in the first 250 words on a page); well-written email newsletter that is published on a regular basis; submission of articles on topics related to your target market to article submission directories; regularly post entries to a blog aimed at your target market, full of content discussing issues related to that target market; series of podcasts containing interview with experts of interest to your target market; ongoing series of teleconferences containing value-added content for your target market; submission of online press releases with new tips information for your target market; exchange relevant links with others in different industries with the same target market;
10. Building a Team:
You'll never be able to do this all alone. The most successful business owners don't even try. You need to add experts to your team who are great at what they do so that you've got the time and energy to go out and do what you do best -- selling your products and services to your target market. Some great experts to add to your team include a virtual assistant or online business manager, an online business coach, a web site designer, a graphic designer, a writing expert (editor, ghost writer, proof reader or copy writer), a bookkeeper, and intellectual property attorney, to name a few.
To conduct a successful Internet marketing campaign, you need to integrate your plan into the overall marketing plan/business vision that you have for your service business. Some businesses will thrive off Internet marketing alone; however, for most, Internet marketing simply complements and enhances your offline marketing strategies.

Source: http://www.aj2000.com/articles/10-step-internet-marketing-plan.htm

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Google SideWiki Encourages Public Graffiti on Any Site




Google has launched a controversial new tool that allows the public to comment on any web site in a side bar displayed in their browser.

Called 
Google Sidewiki, the tool is integrated in the latest version of Google Toolbar and works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer but ironically, not yet Google Chrome. To use Sidewiki, download the latest version of the Google Toolbar and set it to enhanced.

When activated, Sidewiki slides across from the left and becomes a browser sidebar, where you can write entries in a vertical column and read the entries of others. To activate Sidewiki, you simply click on the Sidewiki button in your Toolbar menu or the little talk bubble on the left hand side of your screen.

See: 
http://www.sitepronews.com/images2/sidewiki.jpg

If you've got a Google profile, your image will appear next to your Sidewiki entry. You can either highlight a certain part of a web page, click the Sidewiki button and comment about it, or you can make a general comment about the entire web page. If you've got Sidewiki installed, you can see comments made on the same web site by other members of the public and you can forward your Sidewiki comments to colleagues, friends and family via direct link, email, Twitter or Facebook.


It appears that persons can read the Sidewiki comments sent via link whether they have Sidewiki installed or not. When you're logged into Sidewiki, you'll always see your comments at the top and any others below.

Not only does your Sidewiki entry appear on the original page, but if you have highlighted text, your entry also appears on any webpages that contain the same snippet of text that your comment is about. From the 
official blog post:

"
Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to."

Rather than viewing them in the order in which they were written, Sidewiki entries are ranked via an algorithm determined by Google:

"
So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed."

The technology used to determine ranking involves 
large-scale graph computing but other factors are at play, as revealed by Danny Sullivan in his post about Sidewiki. These include use of sophisticated language, complex sentences and ideas, user reputation and user history as revealed by your Google profile and comment contributions. Your comments and others can be thumbed up or down using the "useful - yes or no?" tool, or reported as abuse, further contributing to your user reputation and "Profile Rank" as Danny calls it.

Google have also launched an API that allows developers to work freely with the content created in Sidewiki. Where no comments have been made on a web page, Google may show blog results relating to that page.

The potential applications of Sidewiki are interesting and frightening at the same time. For example, I can see how it could be a useful bookmarking tool, allowing you to make notes about a web site you've found which you could refer to later. You can even embed YouTube videos in Sidewiki (take a look at the Google home page to see this in action).

It also has fantastic potential as an online collaboration tool, letting you annotate the pages on a site in conjunction with team members in a similar way to tracking changes in a MS Word document and sharing document versions via Google Docs.





BUT, (and it's a big but), I can see Sidewiki being open to abuse in a similar way to Searchwiki, Google's comment tool for search engine result pages. Searchwiki has been widely panned in the search industry because it's Notes feature has been exploited by spammers, overactive PR companies and people with a chip on their shoulder about certain web brands. Unfortunately, I see Sidewiki heading in the same direction. And fast.

Any user controlled element of a search engine is open to some level of abuse. But I don't see a huge amount of comment filtering going on yet and have already seen evidence of spamming (view the Microsoft home page with Sidewiki installed and you'll see anti-MS entries like 
this one).

Yes Google have a usefulness rating system in place, a Report Abuse link and are flagging some comments with the disclaímer "These entries may be less useful" but I doubt their filters will be able to keep up as Sidewiki takes off. There's also going to be the troll factor which will undoubtedly lead to the system becoming worthless if it's not carefully controlled. I've viewed Sidewiki entries on some major sites this past week and it's already starting to feel like Toilet Wall Graffiti 2.0.

Sidewiki has 
program policies but spammers don't care about those and trolls don't read them. Besides, one man's graffiti is another man's gospel.

Google's catch phrase for Sidewiki is: "
Contribute helpful information to any web page". To that, I say: Define helpful.

About The Author

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S



Benefits of SEO

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." 
Benefits of Search Engine Optimization can be achieved only by forming some of the SEO campaign. It is very essential for your company's marketing strategy over the web. Search Engine Optimization is the only most beneficial and fruitful way of reaching the high profit margins by marketing on the web. To make your business more successful online, you need to start a search engine optimization campaign. 


Here we have few facts which should leave you in no doubt that search engine marketing should form an integral part of every web promotion strategy. 


85% of Internet users find websites through search engines. 


90% of Internet users do not go past the top 30 search engine results. They simply type something else in if they can't find a relevant site. 


75% of Internet users have the intention of purchasing a product or service when using search engines. 


Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. 


If we say why SEO is important: 90% of traffic comes from major search engines. Hence it is very important to be on top position on major search engines to get valuable traffic. If you are not on the top position your competitor will take away the traffic. 
Search Engine Optimization is very time-consuming process. After continues research and analysis you should modify the website you want to optimize. Once you have optimized the website you have to wait for search engine to get crawled and then monitor the results. 
If you think to optimizing website by your own you need to know about the basic rules about search engines. You should be careful to select the keyword and you site navigation. You even need to update you knowledge about search engines ever changing strategies and make according changes in you website. But beware of false optimization, don't use any trick to fool search engine by increasing keyword density or doorway pages, as it will penalize your site permanently. 
Search Engine Optimization

Top Five SEO Tips to Increase Website Traffic

1. Extensive Keyword Research 


SEO starts with a solid keyword research and sorting. Most of the SEO professionals are impatient and always in a hurry to implement their ideas. 
Well, that keeps them revising their SEO Services efforts and eventual loss of time and traffic. Keyword research for effective SEO results needs a lot of patience and intelligent calculations. Above all you should be using the best possible tools to perform keyword research for a strong search engine optimization. 
For example Google Keyword Tool, Google Insight and Google Suggestions. You will get the exact number of monthly searches on Google Keyword Tool. Here is what you should do then; 
a) Download them in an excel sheet. 
b) Find out your kind of keywords (that match your website content and products). 
c) Sort them by daily searches. 
d) Collect the best ones for the Home and do similar calculations for the other important internal pages. 


2. Original and Optimized Content 


SEO based content writing is the best element on a live web page. Both, search engine crawlers and human beings love to read original and effective content filled with useful information. However; there has to be an efficient use of SEO content writing techniques as well. A smart and optimized content contains the right balance of the keywords used throughout the content. Usually it should be 5% to 6%. 
a) Use two to three keywords in the whole content. 
b) Start the content with the most important keyword and end it with the same keyword. 


3. Web Page Optimization 


Search Engine Crawler reads only the HTML of the web-page and so it must be properly optimizes to guide the crawlers to the right areas and content of the website. Put the keywords in Title, Description and Add more keywords in the keywords area. Do not forget to put H1 to H6 using the keywords. Alt Tags must be placed on the images wherever possible. 


4. Article Syndication 


Write articles and Press releases about your website, it`s products and services. Submit the articles into as many article submission and press releases into major press releases websites. Do not forget to leave anchor texts so that readers can come to your website as well. 
This practice is easy and very effective. It helps the website gets crawled by the search engines within two days which reinforces the natural ranking of the website.If you leave anchor texts for the internal pages as well then you can expect to get your website`s internal pages caches (known to search engines). This boosts the website`s presence even more. 


5. Social Bookmarking 


It is very important to be a highly actively involved into social bookmarking activities. Join all the major Social Bookmarking websites like dig, delicious etc. Bookmark your own articles and press releases over there, make friends and share your bookmarks. 
Social bookmarking websites are very well optimized and are cached by search engines everyday. If your website`s content, link etc is bookmarked over there then you can expect your website to get cached by Google within twenty four hours as well. 


Try the above mentioned SEO ideas in your daily SEO work and experience the change in the results yourself.


Website SEO Services 
Web Design Company 

How to Play the Game of Paid URL Inclusion


There are many ways to promote your website and one of the most efficient ways is to use search engines. Search engines are the first stop for most people trying to find information, services, and products online. Because of this, it is essential that your website appears quickly in search results.

The Internet contains numerous search engines, some of which provide what is known as "paid inclusion." This means that you pay the specific search engine an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.

Of course, every search engine already has an automated program commonly called a "spider" that indexes all the web pages it locates online, and it does this for free. So whether you pay or not, your web page will eventually be indexed by all Internet search engines, as long as the spider can follow a link to your page. The major issue is, then, how quickly your page is indexed.

A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses an extra spider that is programmed to index the particular pages that have been paid for. The difference between the spider that indexes pages for free and the spider that indexes only pages for a fee is speed. If you have paid for inclusion, the additional search engine spider will index your page immediately.

The debate over paid URL inclusion centers around the annual fee. Since the regular spider of these search engines would eventually get around to indexing your web page anyway, why is a renewal fee necessary? The fee is necessary to keep your pages in the search engine's index. If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be aware that at the end of the pay period, on some search engines, your page will be removed from their index for a certain amount of time.

It's easy to get confused about whether you would benefit from paid inclusion since the spider of any search engine will eventually index your page without the additional cost. There are both advantages and disadvantages to paid URL inclusion, and it is only by weighing your pros and cons that you will be able to decide whether to spring for the cost or not.

The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapid re-indexing. Paid inclusion means that your pages will be indexed quickly and added to search results in a very short time after you have paid the fee. The time difference between when the regular spider will index your pages and when the paid spider will is a matter of months. The spider for paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day or two. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to your pages, the regular spider won't locate them at all.

Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to your pages often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this is that you can update your pages constantly to improve the ranking in which they appear in search engines, and the paid URL inclusion spider will show that result in a matter of days.

First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a ten-page website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for AltaVista, and you have to pay each engine their annual fee. How relevant the cost factor is will depend on your company.

Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search engines, Google, Yahoo, and AOL, do not provide paid URL inclusion. That means that the search engines you choose to pay an inclusion fee will amount to a small fraction of the traffic to your site on a daily basis.

Google usually updates its index every month, and there is no way you can speed up this process. You will have to wait for the Google spider to index your new pages no matter how many other search engines you have paid to update their index daily. Be aware that it is only after Google updates their index that your pages will show up in Google, Yahoo, or AOL results.

One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a good deal for your company is to consider some common factors. First, find out if search engines have already indexed your pages. To do this, you may have to enter a number of different keywords, but the quickest way to find out is to enter your URL address in quotes. If your pages appear when you enter the URL address but do not appear when you enter keywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. This is because your pages have already been indexed and ranked by the regular spider. If this is the case, your money would be better spent by updating your pages to improve your ranking in search results. Once you accomplish this, you can then consider using paid inclusion if you want to speed up the time it will take for the regular spider to revisit your pages.

The most important factor in deciding whether to use paid URL inclusion is to decide if it's a good investment. To figure this out, you have to look at the overall picture: what kind of product or service are you selling and how much traffic are you dependent on to see a profit?

If your company sells an inexpensive product that requires a large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may not be the best investment for you; the biggest search engines do not provide it, and they are the engines that will bring you the majority of hits. On the other hand, if you have a business that offers an expensive service or product and requires a certain quality of traffic to your site, a paid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.

Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated frequently. If the content changes on a daily or weekly basis, paid inclusion will insure that your new pages are indexed often and quickly. The new content is indexed by the paid spider and then appears when new relevant keywords are entered in the search engines. Using paid inclusion in this case will assure that your pages are being indexed in a timely manner.

You should also base your decision on whether or not your pages are dynamically generated. These types of pages are often difficult for regular spiders to locate and index. Paying to include the most important pages of a dynamically generated website will insure that the paid spider will index them.

Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search engine, although these pages usually reappear in a few months. There are a number of reasons why this can happen, but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid the possibility. Paid URL inclusion guarantees that your pages are indexed, and if they are inadvertently dropped, the search engine will be on the lookout to locate them immediately.

As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when it comes to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuable investment depending on your situation. Evaluate your business needs and your website to determine if paid URL inclusion is a wise investment for your business goals.

Source or About The Author
Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of Free Internet Marketing gifts at www.internetmasterycenter.com.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Top 5 useful url rewriting steps using .htaccess

If you are looking for the examples of URL rewriting then this post might be useful for you. In this post, I’ve given five useful examples of URL rewriting using .htacess.

Now let’s look at the examples

1)Rewriting product.php?id=12 to product-12.html

It is a simple redirection in which .php extension is hidden from the browser’s address bar and dynamic url (containing “?” character) is converted into a static URL.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product-([0-9]+)\.html$ product.php?id=$1

2) Rewriting product.php?id=12 to product/ipod-nano/12.html

SEO expert always suggest to display the main keyword in the URL. In the following URL rewriting technique you can display the name of the product in URL.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([0-9]+)\.html$ product.php?id=$2

3) Redirecting non www URL to www URL

If you type yahoo.com in browser it will be redirected to www.yahoo.com. If you want to do same with your website then put the following code to .htaccess file. What is benefit of this kind of redirection?? Please check the post about SEO friendly redirect (301) redirect in php and .htaccess.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^optimaxwebsolutions\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.optimaxwebsolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4) Rewriting yoursite.com/user.php?username=xyz to yoursite.com/xyz

Have you checked zorpia.com.If you type http://zorpia.com/roshanbh233 in browser you can see my profile over there. If you want to do the same kind of redirection i.e http://yoursite.com/xyz to http://yoursite.com/user.php?username=xyz then you can add the following code to the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ user.php?username=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ user.php?username=$1

5) Redirecting the domain to a new subfolder of inside public_html.

Suppose the you’ve redeveloped your site and all the new development reside inside the “new” folder of inside root folder.Then the new development of the website can be accessed like “test.com/new”. Now moving these files to the root folder can be a hectic process so you can create the following code inside the .htaccess file and place it under the root folder of the website. In result, www.test.com point out to the files inside “new” folder.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^test\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.test\.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/new/
RewriteRule (.*) /new/$1

SEO and Webdesign Support

URL Redirect .php to .html using with .htaccess rewriting

What is the benefits of rewriting URL?


When a search engine visits the dynamic url like product.php?id=5 it does not give much importance to that URL as search engine sees “?” sign treat it as a url which keeps on changing. so we’re converting the dynamic URL like the product.php?id=5 to static url format like product-5.html. We’ll rewrite the url in such a way that in browser’s address bar it will display as a product-5.html but it actually calls the file product.php?id=5. So that why these kind of URL also named as SEO friendly URL.


What is required for URL rewriting ??


To rewrite the URL you must have the mod_rewrite module must be loaded in apache server. And furthermore, FollowSymLinks options also need to be enabled otherwise you may encounter 500 Internal Sever Error. If you don’t know much about mod_rewrite module then please check this post to know how to check and enable mod_rewrite module in apache?

Examples of url rewriting for seo friendly URL


For rewriting the URL, you should create a .htaccess file in the root folder of your web directory. And have to put the following codes as your requirement.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1.php [nc]
The following example will rewrite the test.php to test.html i.e when a URL like http://localhost/test.htm is called in address bar it calls the file test.php. As you can see the regular expression in first part of the RewriteRule command and $1 represents the first regular expression of the part of the RewriteRule and [nc] means not case sensitive.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product-([0-9]+)\.html$ products.php?id=$1
The following example will rewrite the product.php?id=5 to porduct-5.html i.e when a URL like http://localhost/product-5.html calls product.php?id=5 automatically.

SEO and Webdesign Support

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Google practices dividing to conquer


SAN FRANCISCO--Google's 8 billion-plus Web document index may not multiply, but its search engine will learn to better divide the data.

That was part of the message from Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality, who on Tuesday gave a keynote speech here at the Semantic Technology Conference. Norvig, a former NASA employee and an author of books on artificial intelligence, highlighted several research projects the company is developing to help classify data and improve the relevance of search results.

Those projects focus on adding new clustering capabilities for search results, providing suggestions for related searches, personalizing listings, and returning factual answers to specific questions, Norvig said.
"We want to have a broader bandwidth for that kind of communication," Norvig said. "It's a question of what's the right language."

Despite heavy competition in recent years to own the largest document index, Norvig also said he couldn't foresee Google's database adding many more Web documents without cataloging bogus or useless pages. Still, the company has numerous programs to add otherwise inaccessible data, like that from books and TV shows, to its Web search engine.
Norvig highlighted a research paper written by a Google employee last year regarding a classification engine the company is testing. The technology can parse a proper noun or compound nouns into several categories in order to deliver clustered results, for example. For a query on "ATM," or asynchronous transfer mode, the engine would be able to use the terms "such as" on Web pages indexed with the term to discover that it can be linked to the expression "high-speed networks." As a result, a search for high-speed networks might pull up a cluster on ATM.

Norvig said the same technology could be used to mine factual answers from the Web for queries like "President Lincoln's birth date." The technique could offer an edge over Microsoft's recent addition of encyclopedic answers to its database, thanks to its Encarta software, Norvig said. That's because MSN's engine could miss the chance to deliver the desired factual answer if the searcher's query is inexact. In contrast, Google draws on the semantic Web and various language sets from pages to find a match.
 

Norvig also demonstrated Keyhole, Google's satellite mapping service. He said that over time, the company will greater integrate its maps and local information on businesses and places. "It's important to deliver information about the real world as people carry devices around," he said.

Share This

Bookmark and Share

Search This Blog