Saturday, August 4, 2007

Get traffic from mybloglog | Importance of comments on blogs

The thing to worry about when you are a new blogger. Where to get traffic for blogs or websites?
The easiest way to find people who are webmaster or bloggers is mybloglog which provides a platform for bloggers and webmasters of different nations and different cultures to show off their blogs to different blogger and look for links from similar blogs which results in increase of traffic.
Getting links from related websites helps in increase the ranks in search engines and also increase the authority of blogs.
Another factor which shows the popularity of blogs or websites is the comments which the websites or blogs gets from the readers.
This is important factor which shows the website visitors get involved with the post and write their views either positive or negative with about the topic.

Friday, August 3, 2007

Google Yahoo Search Engine Optimization for newbies

Why SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important for newbie Bloggers and webmasters?

The term SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. If you a blogger or a webmaster then you must surely have come across this term which many people talk about. At first it seems, why people care about SEO? When it came across it I felt it , was one theory made by scientists which would take years of hard work to understand forget the implementation .

Okie lets start from the basic need for SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) .

Assume you have made a website which is very beautiful or you are selling some digital product and trying to promote it online. How do you tell about it to people. You can not go door to door telling about it to people and ask them to visit your website which surely would not be a good idea if you are looking to get hundreds or even thousands people to visit your blog.

Lets take your example, you must have done it on the internet if you Search for things online. Imagine you are looking for information on the internet about “painting on hills”. If you do not where to go on the internet then you go to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo or any other search engine for that matter and type the keyword you are looking and you get a list of website according to the term you have searched. You would not care about the sequence of website for the search term if you are not into SEO. You will get some information about the paintings not surely the first website on the list it might be down below on the list or few pages ahead. Imagine I have made a website on “paintings” which contains the information about the term you are looking for. How Do I make it to get that website in front of visitors like you who are looking for information on paintings. I optimize it for the Search Engines. So you get my website for the Search term you have typed in.

There are various ways which all account for your ranking on the Search Engines:

1 On page factors
2 Off page factors

On Page factors

Keyword Density and Optimization.
Arrangement of Elements.
Meta tags.
Alt Tags for Images.
Page Elements ( like Pictures, Text, Links and few elements also language with which website is made of like CSS, HTML, DHTML, Javascript )

Off Page factors

Numbers of Back links.
Quality of Back links.
Authority of Website.
Anchor Text of Website.
No of Outgoing and Incoming from back linking website.
Content of website.
Placement of your link on the back linking website.
PR page rank of the website for rankings on Google.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Keyword optimization: precaution to be taken

When optimizing your blog or website for Google, you should also check for over optimization of your blog or website with the keyword for which you are targetting Google.

Google can ban you for over stuffing your website with keywords and which will result in your website being delisted from Google consequently leading to loss of valuable visitors for your website. When writing content for website you should make it for people and then go for Search Engine optimization by checking the keyword density of the content, which should be around 3-5 percent.

People sometimes try to fool spiders by stuffing website with keywords and assuming there website might result on top of the Google results, which would be day dreaming.

People should try to avoid using techniques in which keywords are hidden for ordinary users on the website and only visible to spiders by using same text and background colours which ultimately result in invisible text, visible only when that portion of the website is selected.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Search Engine Optimization Overview -By Aman Kumar

Search engine optimization (SEO), is about creating a website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search rankings. SEO is aimed at achieving the highest position in the organic listings on the search engine results pages. SEO is very useful for driving visitors through targeting the high volume, low intent generic phrases. To do this you need to define a list of keyphrases to work with. A website that’s optimized for search engines can reap huge benefits for the website and ultimately the core business. A key benefit of SEO is that it is relatively cost
effective since there is no payment to the search engines for being placed there.

SEO is a long term strategy. To identify the correct investment requires a long term cost/benefit analysis.

The data below shows the importance of appearing in natural or organic listings—which receive between 60-80% of the clicks for a given search.

· 81.7% of users will start a new search if they can’t find what they’re looking for in the first 3 pages (typically 30 results).
· Over half of Internet users search at least once a day, while around half use search toolbars from one of the main providers, Google, Yahoo! or MSN.
· 42% to 86% of websites are found through search engines.
· There are 300 million searches carried out every day.

There are three main factors that determine the search engine ranking of a website:

· Site optimization
· Site popularity
· Link popularity

Site optimization is about placing the right keywords in the right places on a website and making the website accessible to search engines.

Site popularity can be achieved through online and offline marketing and through link popularity —the more websites that link to a website the more popular it will become.

The number of searches by people trying to find information is still growing dramatically. Nielsen//NetRatings reported that there were 5.7 billion searches in the US in January 2006, a 39% year-over-year increase from 4.1 billion in January 2005. Furthermore, the number of searches in the US is more than 183 million per day.

SEO Quick Strategy

The motive of search engine optimization and submission is to attract targeted traffic by attaining very high positions in the search results using the most appropriate keywords relevant to the content of a website.

The following six steps are guidelines for increasing search engine rankings:
· Search engine optimization strategy
· Identifying competition/related websites
· Determining target keywords
· Design for the search engines
· Optimizing page content
· Link popularity building

Step one: Planning/creating search engine optimization strategy

Strategies should be created for each market and each interactive property. Every property should be looked at differently; broken down by its core sections and core user audiences. The goal is understanding how users interpret and find content on an industry-specific website.

Step two: Identifying competition/related websites

Use the search engines to identify competitors. Search with the keywords that you expect users to use to locate your website. The websites that are ranked in the top positions are the competitors whom you have to beat to reach the top. This helps when trying to build links to your website.

Step three: Determining target keywords/key phrases

Effective keyword phrases are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are three core tools out there that can help locate
good keywords/phrases.

WordTracker

WordTracker is one of the most essential SEO tool for keyword selection and research which will suggest hundreds of related phrases based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it.

Overture

Overture’s search term suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than WordTracker. It works in much the same way as WordTracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.

Google

Google AdWords Keyword Tool tells you which keyword phrases are being targeted by other websites.

Step four: Design for the search engines Search engines scour the Internet looking for web pages to index, following links from one web page to the next. To ensure a search engine ranking, all pages on a website must be accessible to search engines.

Some search engines have problems with:

· Links accessible solely through frames, image maps, or JavaScript
· Very long pages
· Very short pages
· Flash pages
· Long JavaScript (JavaScript should be placed in an external document)
· Dynamic URLs

Step five: Optimizing content

The foremost criterion for a website to be able to attain and retain top search engine ranks for a long period of time is to have a great content. In the world of search engine optimization, content is king! A real long term solution that adds significant value to a website is to create firstrate content and give related websites a reason to link to a site directly.

Lack of content can be harmful Quite simply, search engines love content—the more content there is on a page, the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 250 words, ultimately penalizing that page in the search rankings.

Step six: Linkability/popularity

Inbound links to a website play a significant part in determining its position in search engines. It’s not just the quantity, but also the quality and click-through rate of links to a website which is important.

The objective here is to get descriptive links on as many relevant and highly trafficked sites as possible. This is first done by getting on the large web directories (Yahoo!) and then the local industry-specific directories. The next step is to identify and locate related websites (typically not direct competitors) to exchange links with.