SEOTops

The immense popularity of fast food has spelt its cast significantly in different spheres of life. Today people primarily look for short term gain and even want to invest in the share market, which can be prudent in giving him an immediate return and hardly bother for a planned way, which may earn much more yield in longer duration. Likewise, SEO has become more of a crash job or damage control, rather than a systematic planning in most of the cases. As a rule of the software industry is that cost of changes become too high when you start changing after launch of a product or even of your website. So, we suggest you to develop a SEO blueprint in the beginning itself, so that your entire route becomes smooth and yields you in the long term.

SEO Blue print primarily formulates a strategy of application of various SEO techniques in various phases in your website with detailed description of tasks, monitoring and control. A proper SEO blue print will also allow you to clearly measure the success, failure and deviation in tangible terms and will keep provision for control at every step. Mostly people start ignoring a lot of issues, which don’t come under the direct notice of people like URL names or the proper organization of files and folders in the web server, which also affect your ranking to a great extent.

Here are some steps to go

1) Competition analysis
2) Content Development Strategy
3) Website Strategy
4) Meta tags and keyword application
5) URL Naming plan
6) Link Strategy
7) Marketing Strategy
A Detailed Action Plan
9) Deviation and Monitoring strategies
10) Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis

Remember Web solution also falls under the realm of software development, which envisages the need of implementation of all steps of software project management.

When most of the conventional techniques fail to yield the desired result, people have been found to adopt various unconventional procedures out of desperation. History repeats itself and the web world is no exception. At the initial stage people used to draw traffic simply by placing links in different sites and directories. The overwhelming popularity of Internet have lured most of the companies to develop and propagate through their web presence, which has generated huge traffic on the web, which in turn has prompted the webmasters of various websites to monitor even the bulk of inbound voluntary links. So, if a website owner finds his website in the higher rung of the ladder, he has started demanding a good amount of money even for placing a link of a site, who normally belong to a lower rung.

How can a website get a higher rank in the search results? In one word the answer lies in the incoming traffic or hit count. Why a new website wants to display a link in his site? The answer is very simple. As the chance of highlighting their products and services become much higher, they place advertisement of any nature in a high traffic bound website, based on the simple probability theory. The nature of business follows a similar pattern, where the most lucrative position always demands a prime price for displaying advertisements. Airports, railway stations, bus stops have always been the prime places for advertising over the ages due to their attractive millions gawking at them per minute. Similarly, a website, which can draw a sustainable amount of visitors, will surely charge a premium price for advertisements or links as it is capable of diverging traffic to your website.

In the web world, we must understand that even if a website ranks high, it not necessarily means that all the pages of the website are equally attractive to the visitors. Say the railway reservation site will a get a good amount of visitors when they ask for inputs of journey and even on the search result pages, but they don’t get that kind of visitors in the About Us page, or where they furnish their financial results or lectures. As the rule of the nature people visit a railway website to find out the desired train and for the booking process, but they are hardly interested in knowing who is running the railways, which interests only a particular segment of the crowd. So, when you are buying links, you need to ensure on which page your link is placed without going by the glamour of the page rank of the domain name or the home page of the website.

If you go through Internet, you will find many companies there selling links and they also assure links from good domains and pages. It’s better if you can find the list before registering for their services, so that you become an informed buyer, lest you never have to feel that you are cheated!

Pay Per Click or PPC is a very common phenomena in SEO since its inception. The concept goes like this: advertisers will display your links in various participating websites and the payment will be made to the site owners based on the actual clicks on the advertisements. Google Adsense or Yahoo are the leaders, that work based on the same philosophy. The unimaginable improvisation in the technology front and an accurate integration of techniques and procedures has made it possible to display only the relevant advertisements in the targeted website. There are even some websites, who rotate the banner advertisements and each click by the users entitles the users to earn. This is an example of aggressive advertisement, where inbound links are almost assured.

The concept of Pay per click is very similar to the traditional advertisement techniques, by which we can notice billboards and hoardings in various public places to draw attention of ongoing people at large. In case of physical advertisements at the cross roads on large billboards it is completely open to all kinds of people, whereas content based links place advertisements depending upon the content of the site, which enables an initial labeling as the target audiences are filtrated. The leading advertisement companies organize the display of advertisements not only based on the content, but they also try to build a harmony between the relevance of the advertisements and the main nature of business of the targeted website. The more the filtration, the more the chance of penetration, which in turn increases the probability of conversion, which is the ultimate goal of any website.

The advantage of a PPC is that the advertiser does not have to pay money until the visitors click on the links and one click means one traffic to the website! Most importantly, in this case you get more of willing visitors than generic ones. PPC is generally used by companies for a sudden boost in their website traffic, thus enabling them a higher rung in the ladder of search engines. History witnesses that people have also participated in various PPC campaigns even to boost up their sales. Any search engine can ignore the number of inbound links, but who can deny the website, which can attract a considerable amount of traffic? After all even search engines also have to survive in this competitive age!

If you start delving into the history of search engine optimization and its paradigm, you will find keywords have always played a vital role in search activities as well as bringing visitors to your website. As soon as the concept had been brought to the broad day light, people started stuffing keywords here and there in the website and in some cases even people have adopted the unethical way of camouflaging keywords unnecessarily. It has been also noticed that people have tried to hide keywords under the shade of images or even plain text of the website.

We tend to forget that search engine crawlers have improvised much today by the application of robots and any anomaly or exceptional behavior for any website can not escape the eyes of the spiders and crawlers. So, the search engine has taken no time to identifying such websites and some of them have been even panelized. Now what to do? On one hand keyword stuffing helps in ranking and visibility, on the other hand stuffing may even award a penalty.

We have got very clear cut suggestion over here to address the keywords issues. You need to first prepare your content for your sales activity. Once you have framed the initial content, now research the keywords for each of them. We hardly believe in the concept of segmentation of keywords like primary, secondary, tertiary etc, though many SEO companies and consultants emphasize on such divisions. You need to find out the main sales jargons from your content and perform the research activities accordingly. We insist NOT to increase the keyword density just for the sake of keyword stuffing. Rather use the keywords proportionately, which never distorts the meaning or objective of the content. Be very careful and nitty-gritty like spelling errors annoys the crawlers just like the normal visitors at your site.

Never try to hide keywords behind as crawlers and spiders are intelligent enough and even look at the HTML codes, before sending their observation to the search engine databases. Rather you can use the keywords in title tags and Meta Tags. Usage of keywords in H1, H2 etc. are NOT mandatory. You can also use the keywords intelligently in ALT Tags.

Finally we want to repeat, never underestimate the intelligence of crawlers and spiders. Don’t be too artificial, rather normal attitude of yours will help you in ranking!

We don’t know, how many of you have really tried to analyze the latest updates from Google, which have taken place just at the fag end of April, 2008. Have you noticed the changing Page Ranks assigned by Google for several websites/ web pages lies in the impact of their continuous updates in content. Surely it would become absolutely apparent to you that the rest of the raving principles have been rendered utterly useless.

It had been whispered for long that search engine crawlers and spiders have started emphasizing more and more upon unique and fresh content and the current update has justified our observation, which is that Google has primarily focused on content and it’s continuous updates. We have witnessed websites that have procured an inaugural Page Rank of 2 having been hosted for just a month. Also we have watched websites loosing their ground to descend from 3 to 0, wherein updates were omitted. Now let us look at some of the basic principles which need to be followed while developing content for web pages.

We all are aware that any website is the prime vehicle for brand promotion. So, even the content should be more of a sales letter rather than a very generic content, which leaves the visitors in a state of utter confusion. Leaving a few exceptions, your website must sell some products or services. You need to find out the product and do a thorough research for it’s keywords on the Internet. Once the research is done, start developing the content. Remember keyword research should not dilute your objective or the content of the web page, rather it should work as a supporting tool to give you the opportunity of using alternate keywords in your content. Please note that we live in an age when robots sent by the search engines become highly efficient in reading as well as analyzing.

The day has come when we need to emancipate from the cherished tradition of elaborate content. We must remember that time has become crucial in this age and nobody bothers to spend much time on the web page. So, avoid elaboration, be precise and to the point. You may user the bullet points to draw attention. Headers and Sub headers become effective, if used properly. Color variations also create a long lasting impact, if used in a highly preserved way. Running text may be useful, when you plan to communicate short messages. A marquee of 350 words length, can never penetrate the shell of the customer, rather it generates irritation. Efficient content can become effective if and only if it carries the thrust and that also in a precise way.

So, whenever you think of your online identity, never forget to formulate a strategy for content development and it’s continuous updates.

Newsletter can be called as a reformation of the prevailing concepts of paper inserts, which all of us have encountered from time to time in our lives. What happens, when you get a paper insert, you just have a look and then throw into the dustbin or use it for waste purpose. You give a second look, only when you find something interesting for you, but the fact of life is, a paper inserts draws your glance at least for once.

In the realm of Internet, Newsletters are sent mainly to the people, who volunteers on their own. So, the probability of going through the complete newsletter becomes much higher. Experienced marketing gurus say that approaching an willing customer increases the probability of conversion by a sustainable amount. Again the success depends upon two vital factors: Identification of your target segment and the communicative messages. If the message becomes attractive and worthy, the visitor will surely click on the hyperlink, embedded in the email. Modern technology has even given you the unique opportunity to generate an inbound link to your website, when the person opens the mail. You will get plenty of Javascripts on the Internet to help you and off course most of them are free.

The success of newsletter primarily depends on the message that you want to communicate. Messages should be crisp and clear as remember that one normal internet surfer comes across thousands of messages everyday in a developed or developing country. So, your message should cut an ice in it’s appearance, which ultimately takes us back to the basic guideline of content development and your marketing capabilities. If you are asked at any point of time about your activities thorough out the day, you will surely start ranking them according to the gravity of the incidents. Remember any human being can not go beyond this psychic philosophy, which prompts him to reiterate the most attractive slogans on his own.

Decide on the message, you want to communicate and then implement the newsletter option in your website!

Cluttered websites have got a more repelling impact just as complete disarray results in hayware. If the web page portrays too much information and that too presented in a cluttered way it becomes highly irritating to the visitor, as they become more confused than convinced. An effective website always focuses on neatness revealing systematically organized content and images to create a positive vibration in the visitor’s mind. It is not only the content and images, a website demands a clean piece of code and script also.

Presentation of content can be nicely done using several tags like h1, h2, h3 and different user defined styles. Images have to be embedded with the meaningful ALT tag. Title tags become highly useful in many cases. Please take note that even w3c insists on usage of the ALT tag vividly. If you want to use flash movies or animated gif files, they should also follow the basic nomenclature rules. In case of Flash, it is better to convert to the html version, so that the crawler can read them easily. Remember Search Engine crawlers and spiders also emphasize on tags like h1, h2, <strong> etc just like a normal visitor. Never be in the habit of stuffing keywords unnecessarily, which again draws the attention of the crawlers. You can simply take the example of a separate style sheet file, which not only enables you to reuse the code by repetition of definition of each style in every page, it also helps the web page to look clean.

Most of the web pages demand some kind of scripting to be embedded. It may be a mouse rollover script or color changing script to highlight some of your important texts or messages. Whatever the reason may be it is preferable to segregate the script in separate files. An example may be a java script may be stored in a .Js file and only the embedding can be done in the original web page. If the codes are properly commented it not only helps the developers to debug, it also helps the crawlers and spiders. Use the concept of objects and classes as much as possible, which reduces the size of the web page drastically.

We must mention that get out of the habit of camouflaging keywords in your content or tags. Keyword research had never been easier before. You have got plenty of tools like Wordtracker, Google/ Yahoo Keyword Research tools etc. So, you can easily find out the most used keywords, but never try to clutter them in your web page. Change the content accordingly as genuine and fresh content always cuts ice in the reader’s mind, which is at the threshold of every seo technique.

So, go ahead, start cleansing your WebPages right away and wait for the next updates from the search engine crawlers.

It may be quite obvious but most people know for a fact that computers and search engines can’t really “see” visual images. Unlike humans, search engines are not advanced enough to interpret each and every object within images and this causes numerous problems for both Internet companies as well as day-to-day search users. When you tap into Google (or other lesser-known search engines for that matter), the search engine locates images using a text-based process. What happens is that the particular engine starts searching for text surrounding the image, such as captions and phrases within the links. The weakness in this searching process is that the results returned are not optimal, because the engine cannot recognize what’s in the image and instead churns out results while heavily relying on text to evaluate the content.

With Google announcing that they will be unveiling a new algorithm to eradicate frustration and difficulties pertaining to image searching, searching and collecting relevant visual content will no longer be tedious. This new technology has been formulated with the aim evaluate all the images on the Internet and rank them in order of importance whenever a search query is done. During a recent web conference held in Beijing, China, Google boasted that they are the first search engine to gain the ability to do away with conventional methods of examining images and their content to determine their relevance to a submitted query. They added that this technology works by recognizing a graphic-based pattern in a series of images. Then, using that visual benchmark, Google will then assess the relative importance within an image and comparing it to the rest.

Sounds confusing? Don’t be. Say if you were to search for “Nike”, Google’s brand spanking new engine will recognize the iconic swoosh instantly and groups a set of similar images and rate highly those that contain the logo prominently, instead of depending on the image captions alone. Nifty isn’t it?

Not since PageRank, one of the best search-based algorithms to surface since the year 1997, did other similarly significant tools pop up. Incidentally, PageRank was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page who are, surprise surprise, Google’s very own founding fathers. Now with the advent of this new image-search engine christened “PageRank for Image Product Search”, you can bet your shares in Google that a new web revolution is set to take the world by storm.

Internet is flooded with eye catching advertisements like “Guaranteed Ranking in 48 hours”, “Become No.1 in 15 days” and many more, which lures the traffic and the concerned web developers, who have been continuously engaged in promoting websites in various search engines. The obvious question that comes up is about the authenticity and moreover about the long-term impact.

This is an established fact that search engine crawlers never disclose their algorithms and on top of it they change their algorithm very frequently. So, there is hardly any chance of analyzing the parameters and contribution of each parameter towards ranking. Most of the SEO consultants rely on the basic philosophy and apply them in getting their website a higher rung. Internet and newsletters have made most of the people aware about the fundamental principles of SEO like more inbound links, keywords, Meta and ALT Tags, etc. Then how do they achieve the goal? What we have analyzed is they try to give a sudden boost by incrementing the inbound links drastically and stuffing of keywords, which have been constantly in demand while searching in various search engines. A continuous presence on the Internet for a reasonable period earns them the acquaintance with various people, who allows the links on a priority basis due to a mutual beneficial relationship, which safeguards interests of both of them in various ways.

Most of the search engines including Google prefer hits on the website from versatile geographical areas. Technology marvels have made it possible to trace not only the zone but also the particular computer. Sophisticated Crawlers record those IPs and the efficient process of search engine algorithm with such attention to details gives the website a good rank. The wide network of Webmasters and SEO consultants are used to achieve the desired effect.

Now what the common website owners should do? First of all, he should surely apply all the basic guidelines of SEO while developing the website and then try to get a certain number of inbound links, which will enhance the chance of converging traffic from different resources to his own website. It can be compared with the fundamental marketing philosophy, the more, the visibility, the higher is the chance of sales. Now where to place the links to make them most effective? In the realm of Internet people are more accustomed with the jargon, relevant sites, which means a link from a site with similar theme or correlated products is most effective to draw traffic to your website. We really don’t know how much crawlers give value to such relevant links, but the common human behavior always tends to visit such parallel sites, which become coefficient of the other in any term. Like, a teen-ager, who is looking for a higher education may be equally interested in education loan. So, a link of education loan provider becomes absolute relevant in the websites of education institutes.

The cherished tradition of link building still continues, whether to draw the attention of search engine crawlers or the visitors. So, why to avoid it?

The prevailing concept of Search Engine Optimization is every inbound link works as a positive vote at the destined website. This concept has been slightly refined today, wherein the word inbound link is preceded by the phrase topical relevance, which essentially enhances the quality of links.

Let us find out quickly the options we have got for generating inbound links. Link Submission - by which you submit your link to several directories and request webmasters of other website owners for a link. Paid Links assure the presence as well as a prominent position in the other website depending upon the magnitude of the payment. Many web directories offer you featured and partner listing at a few dollars. You can participate in link building campaigns for an initial boost.

The continuous research and innovation has formulated some more effective ways of getting inbound links. Articles, Forum, Blog posting, Comments, Press Releases, Guest Books, email are to name a few. In one word, your participation in several public places is imperative. Community orientation in our earthly life gives you the opportunity of sharing your ideas with a gamut of people with matching wavelength and Internet Community sites are ready to give you the unique opportunity of buying links and sale your products or services. Never shy off, as your counterpart is also doing the same with the same objective!

When you write an article, it communicates your ideas or message to the readers. The more number of articles you publish in versatile article sites, the more your chance of converging visitors to your own site. This is just like the traditional marketing concept, which states more number of outlets of your products multiply your chance of getting business. If you can write really good articles, which adds value in the leisure of the people, then they will be eager to read the complete article to ensure a vote for you. If the reader is really charmed, then he will visit your site on his own so that you get a regular visit. Your Blog posts can also generate a good crowd. The latest is perhaps comments. When you comment on a post in a blog, you get the opportunity of placing your links over there, so if the comment attracts the visitor, he may take a try in visiting your site also.

So, come out of your shell, be generous and community oriented, it may even yield you inbound links.