Archive for the ‘SEM’ Category
Friday, November 25th, 2011
Google makes around 500 changes to their algorithm every year to make the search easy and to provide updated results to the users. Anytime there is a change in the Google Algorithm, it becomes news. There have been some recent changes to Google, but there is no need to guess these changes as Google has released the details of the changes and how these changes impact the search results and rankings of the websites in SERP.
Here is the brief of the recent Google Algorithm changes:
1) For queries in language for which limited content is available, Google will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. For webmasters, it will be beneficial as they can now search new markets, which couldn’t be done previously due to language boundaries.
2) The snippets on the search result page now show more page content and less header/menu content. It points out that Google is starting to put more attention to the text in “Actual Page Content” than headers and menu content. For webmasters, they need to ensure that they are presenting right content on the right page.
3) Google found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so these will be given less emphasis. For webmasters, they need to understand that site wide linking (in headers, footers and blog rolls) will not lead to any better ranking.
4) An Autocomplete prediction in Russian has been improved. Now, Google will not do predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already practiced in English. This is good news for Russian users but not useful for English users.
5) Users searching for software applications will see more rich snippets including cost and user reviews, within their search results. For webmasters, it would be useful to add descriptive rich snippets for software applications in order to get a higher ranking.
6) Google retired a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web. This tweak is aimed to improve image search function. But maybe Google is trying to decrease the link juice from sites like Flicker, Dailymotion, etc.
7) Google made a significant change on how to rank the fresh content. This change impacted around 6-10% of the search results and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query. This change would highly benefit the news websites. For webmasters, they need to update the content on regular basis in order to rank high in Google.
8) Google will tend to rank official websites even higher on Google’s result page. And this change is intended to provide the users with more relevant and authoritative results. Basically, this is good news for long-established brands. The official sites will get better rankings and the industry giants get a stronger hold on search results too!
9) Date-restricted queries have been improved to ensure that users get the most relevant results for that specific date range. It means if your company’s news is in Google News then expect it to be given more prominence now during the time the news is still relevant.
10) Autocomplete predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic have been improved. There is nothing specific about it; just the user experience for non-English speaking users will get better.
For website owners and webmasters, they need to work accordingly to get their websites rank high in search engines. Focus more on the content part of the website as it is given more importance and try to use the variations of anchor texts for linking.
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Sunday, May 1st, 2011
Siteopsys, an exemplary SEO Tools product of RedAlkemi, has been constantly working towards delivering optimum level of service to its registrants, thereby adding more credibility to its Slug line – ‘Delivering Measurable Online Success’.
How Siteopsys acts as a helping hand to SEO Analysts, Business Owners, Consultants and Website Evaluators is indeed very simple; or better said, ‘has been made simple’ with the way Siteopsys is designed and the usability that it offers. The structure of the complete product has been created precisely classifying all the tools as per their serviceability and the derivative branch of Search Engine Marketing that it helps to analyze.
Practically demonstrating the ease of use being talked about, the classification of tools has been done into 7 broad categories, which help a user select the right tool to derive explicit information for analyzing a website for its SEO credibility:
1. Website Evaluation Tools – These tools help extract parametric information regarding a website from its functional perspective. The parameters if intact not only will help the website function smoothly, but will also assist its Search Engine Quality Score (the score search engines use to decide how well optimized a website is) directly or indirectly.
2. SEO Evaluation Tools – These tools focus on deriving insightful information about a website from search engine perspective and make recommendations for further improvement in the respective aspect. Analyzing a website with these tools can help an analyst to minimize the analysis time along with presenting a much more detailed picture of how a website fares.
3. Link Analysis Tools – These tools assist in checking Links related factors like – verifying website’s link presence, approximate PR value passed from the linked website, link counts, etc. These link parameters ultimately help improve quantity & quality of link promotion giving a boost to the off-page promotion being carried out or being planned.
4. Competitive Analysis Tools – These tools find primary direct as well as indirect competitors of an online business for specific keywords / business services & products to help analyze multiple facets of a one’s website vis-à-vis competitor’s website. This analysis again in-turn uplifts evaluation depth and optimization levels, if worked upon.
5. Keyword Analysis Tools – These tools lend a helping hand in the primary pre-requisite of SEO analysis, i.e. Keyword Analysis. Keyword selection and exploration is the first step on deciding the path of optimization for any website / online business. The complete optimization process is eventually streamlined based on what keywords are finally targeted.
6. System Administration Tools – System Admin tools are designed to help a system administrator / webmaster to keep a website functioning smoothly by analyzing admin specific parameters. These also contribute to overall optimization of the website.
7. Data Mining – Internet Marketing also involves fetching large amounts of specific information from the World Wide Web. The Data Mining tools are the ones, which come in handy when there is need to gather information based on specific criteria from the Internet.
Apart from being well organized into these categories, the SEO tools – Siteopsys is designed to be user-friendly for any kind of user who wants to do basic or advanced analysis. Take a pick from these SEO tools and feel the difference you could have never felt before!
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Thursday, February 24th, 2011
What are SEO Tools?
Search Engine Ranking is a relative system. It conclusively depends upon estimating where others stand, in order to know what efforts will be required to do better.
SEO tools help you assess the current parameters, from both Search Engine and usability perspective, both of which ultimately help the analyst in making the website a tightly knit structure, optimized well for search engines and users.
Only once the pages of a website are indexed /recognized in Search Engine Databases, can one move further towards optimization of the site through enhancing its various SEO parameters.
How does Siteopsys help?
Siteopsys tools make the analysis process easy and pleasurable, bringing out intuitive results that help in making the analyzer’s job easy and productive. True to the tag line, these tools are Fast, Accurate and Insightful. The well categorized tools are developed with an idea to make the evaluator’s work automated and cut down the unnecessary time spent on analyzing various website, SEO and link parameters, without compromising on the quality of analysis.
These tools not only add more depth to the analysis, they are also designed in a way that allows them to be operated by anyone – be it a layman or an expert. People with brief knowledge of search engine marketing and online promotion can also use these tools and learn more about the process.
Thus, SEO and Siteopsys share an inseparable link.
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Thursday, January 27th, 2011
The process of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves very well executed and systematic analysis. Siteopsys is a product that offers over 20 proficient automated tools classified into 7 categories that help an Analyst, SEO Consultant, Webmaster, Website Developer, and/or a Website Owner to analyze a particular website for various SEO and website parameters.
Following are the major aspects that are evaluated in the analysis course:
• Website Evaluation 
Evaluation of website parameters like content, sitemaps, server response, etc., which help in knowing the intricate details, that ultimately help in the optimization process
• SEO Evaluation
Evaluation of webpage / website parameters that are directly related to optimization, like – search engine rankings, indexed pages, HTML Markup, Meta Tags, etc.
• Link Evaluation
Evaluation of links’ parameters to know what kind of links exist (in terms of both quality and quantity); and gauging what kind of efforts are required in the next stage
• Keyword Analysis
Analysis involves evaluation of various parameters of keywords, including choosing the ones that have greatest tendency to bring out maximum ROI (Return On Investment)
• Competition Evaluation
Evaluation of direct industry competition online as well as indirect competition – competitors implementing marketing campaigns targeting similar audience as that of the industry segment, for which the marketing process is being executed
• System Administration
System administration analysis involves checking of parameters that help ascertain current position of an online business / product / website. This information includes evaluation of factors, which ultimately help a website administrator to maximize the output.
• Data Mining
Extraction of relevant information / data that can directly or indirectly assist in online marketing analysis and execution
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Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
A microsite can be defined as a small website that is intended as an offshoot of the primary website with a focus on specific purpose. Sometimes, microsite is being tagged as separate entity as it may present different information and even have a different URL. Microsites play a vital role in boosting up company’s search engine optimization efforts and are extremely useful in engaging existing customers who are already familiar with a company’s brand image.
What makes a Microsite different from Corporate Website?
A microsite is capable of doing everything that a corporate site does and that too in a better way. The main aim of creating microsites is to provide specialized information that may be either commercial or editorial in nature. As the microsites are dedicated to a narrower practice area, they can be effectively used as hub pages talking about specific product or service and their detailed attribute. This makes them a dedicated portal targeting picky topic thereby making the content of high value. Due to this reason they can be easily optimized for the search engines as well as several Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. With a more specific and focused approach, microsites provide a very powerful opportunity for excellent online presence, SEO, and conversion no matter a company’s business.
Search engines are always on the look out for quality content as they satisfy the users’ hunger and microsite being a dedicated platform to talk about a specific topic is best suited for the optimization process. Microsites are quick and easy to produce and play an instrumental role in the promotion of keyword targeted, product specific web pages. This way, they attract highly qualified leads, increase the likelihood of converting visitors into customers and help you achieve your business goals.
Additionally, a corporate website is too big for a user to surf and readability becomes a big problem on these websites. The company’s web pages are usually laden with loads of content and information about numerous offerings that may be irrelevant to the kind of specific services a user is looking for. Often, the content on the corporate site is not in much detail, which hampers the user’s ability to understand the authenticity and the technical know-how of the business. Since microsites offer focused information, it helps in keeping the visitors engaged and interested so that they keep coming back thereby harnessing user loyalty.
RedAlkemi has already achieved a greater success by building various microsites for Online Furniture Stores, Kitchen Remodeling, Bathroom remodeling, Wedding Flowers, Home Security Alarm Systems etc. With diverse array of promotional microsites, and search engine marketing strategies such as PPC campaigns, RedAlkemi has been able to increase exposure of a new product or offering and has gained tremendous profit in its incremental revenue.
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Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
With the growing trend of online marketing, micro sites has become the “THE next BIG thing” that is revolutionizing businesses across the globe. A micro site is an individual web page or group of web pages dedicated to deliver information and soliciting ‘call-to-action’ responses for particular products, services, market segments, demographic groups, marketing campaigns, initiatives or promotions.
The main difference between a micro site and the parent site is that the micro site focuses more on one main topic or theme as compared to the broader scope of the parent site. Micro sites play a pivotal role in targeting new markets or to create focused content for niche geographic specific audiences. These mini websites offer a great chance for the companies to add value to their brand by informing, entertaining, engaging, and interacting its visitors. These micro sites can also be optimized with keywords for better search engine rankings and click through rates.
How to create Micro site that outshines it’s competitor sites
1. Choose the size and scope of your micro site wisely - You should be able to make a wise and informed decision when choosing the depth and scope of your microsite as it may directly affect your resources and budget. You can create one-page microsite that acts as a great landing page for pay-per-click campaigns, back links to the parent site that can solve all your marketing and communication problems at an affordable price.
2. Securing good search engine ranking for your microsite - You should be able to take full advantage of the focused content you are presenting by using topic-specific keywords and key phrases throughout your microsite.
3. Adding a compelling call to action to the micro site - You should create good, up-to-date content that appeals to the online visitors and your web designs should be incorporated in such a way so as to grab the attention of the browsers immediately. Your ultimate end goal could be filling out a form, calling a number, downloading a file, making a purchase, or simply clicking over to the parent site. Taking care of these goals is crucial and can be done easily with a product such as Google Analytics.
4. Deciding on a domain name depends – If the product or service is something not normally associated with the parent brand, then it may be best to consider a secondary, non-branded domain name. Keep in mind, however, that branded URLs generally produce higher click through rates.
RedAlkemi has successfully created multiple micro sites for Home Security Alarm Systems, Kitchen Remodeling, Online Casino websites and has achieved outstanding success with these microsites. Combining the usage of microsites along with the other search engine marketing initiatives such as PPC campaigns has helped in maximizing the exposure of a new product or offer to a greater height and thereby creating a buzz of excitement to stand out from competition.
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Friday, October 8th, 2010
On the 8th of September 2010, Google launched its Instant Search interface, which shows results as you type, in real time. Searchers, particularly from the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry, have reacted sharply to the new interface. Many users find the new interface distracting, even annoying.
Google Instant is being sold as a faster and better User Interface
Matt Cutts from Google says that the change is more about rolling out a new User Interface (UI) rather than an algorithmic change. Matt attempted to allay the fears of the SEM industry by suggesting “SEO is not dead” but may change due to instant search query feedback to users, which in turn, may change their search behaviour. He believes that the searchers will diversify their queries within the scope of the original intent.
The effect of predicted query suggestions on user behavior
While Google claims that the Search Ranking Algorithm remains unchanged, the new feature will surely change search behaviour of users due to instant feedback mechanism. A lot of users are likely to select the predictive results, which fulfil their original intent, and stop typing further. Some users may get distracted from their original intent as ‘irrelevant but interesting’ results may lead to unintended searches. For example a user may digress into “home improvement loans” after typing “home improvement” instead of following his original intent of searching for “home improvement ideas.”
As more and more search users select “predicted query” suggestions, it would increase the traffic on the “head” keyword terms and lead to keyword aggregation. In essence, they would be searching more of what “other users” are searching. This usage trend would create a loop-back effect and drive out the long-tail keywords from the popular suggestions. Consequently, over a period of time, the long-tail keywords search count may diminish significantly. Where possible, Google is pushing local results for terms having local context like weather, pizza, movies, jobs etc.
The change in usage trend will throw new challenges to SEO & PPC professionals. They will need to focus their campaigns more on lead terms, creating a fiercer battleground.
How will PPC campaigns get impacted?
As per Google the AdWords impressions are counted in the following situations -
* The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
* The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
* The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.
For PPC campaign managers, this is bad news. The AdWords impressions would unnecessarily increase due to ads display even during partial typing process. Ads would sometimes be displayed for irrelevant or partial keywords. For example, search intent for “Car Insurance” displays ads for “Car Rentals” just after the user has typed the word “car.” This means that the “Car Rentals” PPC campaigns will waste impressions, reducing their CTR.
Predictive query push of popular terms will diminish the long-tail keyword opportunities for PPC managers. Pressure will mount on the “head” terms of their campaigns; pushing up their CPC costs while wasted AdWords impressions will make their CTR poor. Since the CTR is likely to be affected across the board for most users, it is not clear how Google will treat the fall in the “Quality Score” of the ad campaigns.
In any case, PPC campaigns are likely to become costlier to run and the campaign managers will need to make frequent updates in their campaigns to target newer and popular keywords to keep up with the changing trends of search users. Some website owners may even consider diverting part of their PPC funds into SEO campaigns in order to get some traction of natural traffic and mitigate their long term investment risks.
How will SEO landscape change with Google Instant?
Challenges for SEO managers will not be easy. With diminishing long-tail inventory, SEO will need to focus on popular search terms, which, by no means is a mean task. Changes in SEO will also need to be made frequently, in line with the changing keyword trends. Where relevant, optimization for local search terms will help. Due to the instant display of results, fewer users will need to scroll down the page. This means that “above the fold” results will become prime property. Clients would no longer be happy with the top-10 ranking and may demand top-4 rank instead, making the SEO’s job even harder.
Gaming the Google Instant Predictive Search System
It is important to note that the predictive search suggestions of Google Instant is not about suggesting important terms, but suggesting “popular” terms. For search terms, which do not have a high search volume (or for long-tail keywords), it is easy to “game the system” by artificially inflating search terms popularity.
Several years ago, we ran a test on WordTracker keyword research tool. At the time, WordTracker used to fetch search data from only Dogpile & MetaCrawler search engines, which had a miniscule search market share. Since it was easy to game these two ‘low traffic’ search engines, we artificially inflated a ‘test query string’ search in these search engines and discovered that the test search term indeed appeared ‘high’ in WordTracker’s keyword search count, just a few weeks later. Similarly, search terms for low-volume searches can be pushed up in the Google’s predictive suggestions. This manipulation of Google Instant was successfully tried for the term “Nathan Deal Ethics” to highlight the allegations against Nathan for corruptions.
As the dust settles down, the users will get more comfortable by evolving their own techniques of narrowing down their search queries. Perhaps over a period of time, a new usage trend may emerge. How the PPC & SEO landscape will shape up over the next one year may be difficult to predict. However, one thing seems to be clear – with one masterstroke, Google has ensured higher revenues from PPC advertisers; made SEO a lot more difficult and with increased search pattern of distracted searchers, increased their page-views (read market share.)
Posted in PPC, SEM | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
Hotel Mountview on 29th and 30th September 2010 witnessed the two days conference, e-Revolution 2010. The panelist included eminent professionals from the IT industries to speak like Mr. Atul Gupta, CEO RedAlkemi; Mr. Alok Ramsisaria, Regalix; Mr. Vinod Harith, founder-director of CMO Axis and Mr. Rajesh Lalwani, founder-principal of Blogworks.
The concept was – “New Age Marketing”: How next generation marketing tools like WEB 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc are being used for rapidly growing SME’s and citizen centric governments.
Mr. Atul Gupta said the relation of people with the Internet has changed. “Earlier, the users surfed the net and it was a passive means of communication for them. This has changed. People want instant reactions. Instead of listening to a recorded message asking them to buy a product they want a review from their peers,” he said.
Another panelist, Mr. Alok Ramsisaria, technology marketer of Regalix added, “It is easier to tap and nurture consumers through social media simply because of the measurability of the online media and the social media,”
Vinod Harith, founder-director of CMO Axis, said, “The trend of using social media as a marketing tool is going to shape the way of communication and dissemination of information. We know more about people through their Facebook profiles than personally and this helps when you are selling a product. One of the biggest plus points of using social media is inclusiveness. One can reach a broad spectrum of people.”
“Another big advantage of using social media as a marketing tool is that the gap between big and small companies diminishes. Everyone is equal marketing their products through social networking websites,” said Rajesh Lalwani, founder-principal of Blogworks.
In nutshell, what was concluded from the conference was that the Social Media Market has a huge amount of scope and potential in itself provided it is done in a planned and more structured way.
Posted in General, SEM, SMM | No Comments »
Monday, September 13th, 2010
RedAlkemi, the leading provider of search engine marketing and website promotion services to businesses and organizations has added another feather in its cap with the introduction of multiple micro sites for its clients’ websites. This all has greatly helped our clients to exercise more control over their online marketing campaigns or website optimization efforts. These Micro sites are being excessively used for commercial purposes to create in-depth information and relevancy to a specific product or service.
Technically speaking, these micro sites are small, self-contained web destinations that are separate from company’s primary or parent site, have their own unique URLs and consist entirely of content focused on promotion of a particular product or service. Having a tight focus, these micro sites can be effectively used as hubs for a specific marketing campaign. These micro sites can more easily achieve higher online visibility and if their content is fresh and engaging, they can drive word-of-mouth or viral marketing through linking and pass-along.
There are many benefits of using Micro sites as listed below:
· Micro site has a unique domain name as compared to its parent site and contains different pages of topic-specific content, setting the stage for high organic search engine rankings.
· Micro sites do not have to follow the brand guidelines of a parent website so creative and quirky designs can be incorporated to immediately capture a visitor’s attention.
· A micro site offers the freedom to go into more details like specifications, history, press coverage etc. as it may not be possible to go into too much details on one parent site.
· Micro sites help in driving targeted traffic to the parent website as they provide the visitors with exactly what they want without having to look for it. The whole site can be geared towards a single call to action.
· A micro site is generally found to have higher search results having a domain name with relevant keywords in it, and highly focused site for a particular product.
RedAlkemi has effectively built multiple micro sites for Auto Insurance, Long Term Care Insurance, Online casinos websites and has achieved high levels of online success with these websites. These micro sites play an important role in providing the prospective buyers of the products with deep information on a product, information that cannot be handled by single parent website. Micro sites have been designed mainly with the aim to convert the online visitor into a lead, but that lead capture is handled through a more content-heavy approach. With expertise in online marketing business, RedAlkemi has been able to actively track ROI and measure the success of these focused sites in a way that will be most beneficial to the business of its clients.
Posted in SEM, Services | No Comments »
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Web analytics softwares have changed the way we measure the success of our online marketing campaign. Earlier, measurement of SEO efforts revolved around the search engine rankings of a website for a set of targeted keywords. The use of server log details gave online marketing professionals and website owners some more insight into the website usage and helped them define some new metrics to track the progress of an online marketing campaign. With the advent of more advanced page tagging and hybrid web analytics sofwares, both free and paid, we have a whole lot of data and performance metrics at our disposal. However, it is quite likely for someone to get lost within the heap of data provided by these applications making it difficult to find the meaningful data out of it. I am going to mention some of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) pay attention, what useful information you can derive from them, and how other performance metrics affect these KPIs. Please note that this post focus mainly on Google Analytics which is most widely used web analytics software.
Visitors: This is the most obvious metric to look for. All the hard work done in an Internet Marketing campaign is derive good amount of visitor traffic to your website. More the visitor traffic, better the website is performing. However, it is not only the quality of the visitor traffic that matters but the quality as well. For e.g., if am only running an SEO campaign, then majority of my traffic should be organic search engine traffic. We should also check the top 20 keywords deriving traffic to our website. Are majority of these the ones we are targeting? Are most of my visitors coming from the geographical area/country where I offer my services?
Bounce Rate: When a visitor visits your websites and exits the website from landing page itself, it is known as a Bounced Visit. I.e., visits with a single page view. Bounce Rate is calculated percentage of bounced visits as against total number of visits in a period of time. A high bounce rate means that users are not associating your website with the product or service they were expecting to look for. Or your webpage design and architecture needs overhauling. Check the top list of 15-20 top landing pages and sort them to find pages with highest bounce rates. Then check the keywords through which visitors are landing on these pages. Are these keywords relevant to the page content? Are all the navigational and functional elements working fine? These top landing pages receive majority of your visitor traffic and hence changes made to these should impact your overall bounce rate. If you have enough time, dig deeper into the landing page list to work out the pages with high Bounce Rates.
Goals/Conversion: A Goal or Conversion can be defined as a transaction, sale, download, subscription, page views or any other metric which shows if your website is fulfilling its business objective. This is by far one of the most important KPI to measure. The number of conversions will provide you the real picture on whether your online business is really succeeding or not. The main purpose of every online marketing campaign should be to increase conversions. And it is the conversion rate of your website which tells you the quality of visitor traffic and that of your website itself. Typically, the conversion rate of 2% is considered to be an average but it can vary considerably depending upon the industry segment and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Site Overlay: This is the least known feature in Google Analytics but can be of great use for usability experts who want dig deeper to the level of user behavior in order to improve the website structure. This feature shows the number of clicks on each hyperlink of the webpage as the percentage of total number of visits on that page. You can check which links attract most user attention and which the least. Based on this info, you can restructure your webpage like changing the navigation menu and making the Call For Actions (CFAs) more prominent.
PageViews Per Visit: This is one of the important but a bit overrated factors. This is also one of the most misinterpreted factors. Universally, a lot of average page views per visit are viewed as a sign that the website is engaging and users are finding it interesting to dig further. But on the other hand, a lot of page views per visit can also mean that visitors are not able to locate the product or info easily on the website. A higher number of average page views can also mean that visitors are distracted from main goal i.e. conversions. The number of page views per visit should be correlated with the conversion rate of the website to see if is beneficial for website or not. Higher number of page views is particularly beneficial for websites providing information, news or websites with impressions based advertising.
Benchmarking: This feature in Google Analytics helps you compare your website’s metrics or performance with industry averages. Although the data sources are ambiguous, still it can provide introspect as to what others have achieved. To view this data, you must first agree to share your websites’ data anonymously with Google’s benchmarking service. You can see where your website stands as compared with other websites within your industry segment. This can provide a thorough understanding of the areas in which we are beating our competition and in which we need to improve.
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
It is not a secret that Internet is the biggest marketing medium; it helps the organizations and individuals to sell their services and products all over the world. Also, it allows them to get in-touch with their clients and customers directly. Most of the organizations are trying to establish their E-presence and launch their business on the Internet.
However the drawback of any online business is that it restricts the customers with a choice of browsing things, and the customers start referring to the other sites. Therefore it is very important for the online business to have an effective website. Having an impressive website is not enough, it should be well optimized and easily recognized by the search engines.
So when the entrepreneur successfully launches its business on the Internet, the next step is to find the ways to promote the business online. The best techniques to promote the business online include:
- To get the website optimized by effective SEO services to make it popular on the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN)
- Submission of your website to all the major directories.
- Promoting your business in different social networks. (SMM)
- Organizing effective PPC campaigns on search engines.
- Use some good tools like Google Analytics to monitor the demographics of your audience
Services providers known as Search Engine Marketing Service providers provide all these services online. It is the best tool to promote your business online as they use different and effective promotion techniques. SEM service providers assist the companies by offering them with best and professional SEM services to enable them to achieve enhanced results from their Internet business.
I believe, in this 21st century customer depends largely upon Internet for collecting information on any products, services, companies etc. So, if any organization or entrepreneur wants to sell its products or services, then it becomes necessary for them to make the website, product and services more popular on the search engines. In other words, Search Engine marketing service providers offer to its client services that can make their website popular on the search engines and also get high listing in the result pages.
As the demand of search engine marketing is increasing, so the number of SEM providers in also increasing. So it is very important for the companies those who need SEM services, to look for the service providers who offer them professional and best search engine placement and marketing services. It is very important for the companies or entrepreneur to look for the provider whose services are aimed at assisting the organization in facing the online business challenges more proficiently. The best SEM techniques and professional services offered by the providers helps your company in getting the better results in your online business that too in lesser time.
Posted in SEM | No Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2009
All of you must have heard about web feeds and RSS but many of you might not aware that exactly what these terms mean. Simply put, a web feed is a data format used to syndicate (or distribute) your website’s content, allowing users to subscribe to these content updates. Web feeds allows subscribers to be aware of any addition/update of content or articles on your website without actually visiting the website check the updates. This is the same concept as subscribing to a newsletter. News websites and blogs are common sources of webfeeds.
Web feeds are often XML based documents and RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is one of the most commonly used formats of web feeds. Another format called Atom format is a bit outdated nowadays. There are three main components involved in web feed subscription mechanism -
Feed: The article or content which has been added on the website
Feed Generator: Software which generates feeds. A typical website needs RSS feed generator software integrated in it where as a WordPress Blog has a built in RSS feed generator. An Orange web feed icon in the address bar indicates that web feeds are available for subscription.
Feed Reader: Also known Feed Aggregator, this is a program which allows users to view feed. It is the feed reader which checks and ‘pulls’ the feed rather than feed generator ‘pushing’ the feed into the reader.
One of the most common forms of subscribing to RSS feeds is by Live Bookmarks. To use these, just click on the orange feed icon address bar of your browser and choose Live Bookmarks from the drop down menu. This will palce dynamic bookmark in Bookmarks Menu of your web browser, containing links to latest feeds. These links will keep on updating as new posts are added and old links disappear from live bookmarks. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, check ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ in your bookmarks menu to view the recently subscribed feeds.
Apart from live bookmarks, you can also subscribe to webfeeds by websites such as iGoogle, MyYahoo, Google Reader or Bloglines. All you have to do is select Google (or Yahoo) from the drop down menu after you have clicked on feed button. Then, select Add To Google HomePage or Add To Google Reader. A gadget containing feeds from the website will appear on you iGoogle page if you select the former.
Though web feeds have similarity with email newsletters, they have certain advantages which make them preferred method of subscription. First, you don’t have to share your email id, thus reducing the risk of spam and virus attack. Secondly, rather than sending an “unsubscribe” request, you can simply remove the feed. All these features make RSS and webs feeds most popular technique of syndicating website content. So don’t forget to subscribe to feeds for our RedAlkemi Blogosphere to keep you updated with latest informative articles.
Posted in SEM, Software Concepts | No Comments »
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
The term relevancy plays important roles in each process of search engine promotion of a website. Whether you are finalizing the keywords, optimizing the website with keywords or doing link building for your website, if there is any confusion in relevancy, the promotional campaign can be mislead. Generally from relevancy we understand ‘related to’, however the specifications of relevancy varies in SEO depends upon the situation. Here I am discussing some relevancy factors that can have a great impact in a website’s success on web. From SEO perspective, there are lots of definitions for relevancy on web. Keywords, content or link partners that represent or can impact your website/services most would be best relevant to your website.
Keyword Research: As keyword research is a complete topic in itself to discuss and we’ll also discuss it in our future posts. However from relevancy point of view, a keyword that is focused to your website services/products will be best relevant. During keyword research, each keyword should be relevant and focused to website services and products rather than website industry. We can understand it better from following example -If you are searching for keywords for the website of a dentist, here targeted audience would be the people who are looking for dentists services. Then you should not take keywords like “dental equipment” however it is relevant to the industry still it is not be able point targeted audience.
Keyword Grouping for Website Optimization: You need be more detail oriented in this practice. After have finalized the keywords to be targeted on your website, you now need to group them to distribute on different pages of the website. If you are grouping the keywords in such a way so that all related keywords will be targeted on same page then the relevancy gain would be maximum.
Link Building: A link should be able to pass relevance and importance to the website on search engines as well as relevant referral traffic. There is no specific scale to measure the relevancy. However, we can have a fair amount of idea if it will be useful to place your link on particular website if
• The industry segment of that website is exactly same as yours
• People interested in product or services offered by that website might be interested in your products or services as well. For e.g., people interested in a trip to Hawaii might also be interested in scuba diving or parasailing.
• If your website provides supporting services or accessories for the product. For e.g. people buying an iPhone might also be interested in buying a case/cover for their iPhone.
The above mentioned points are not only valid from search engine perspective but from user perspective as well. If we ignore the user intent and consider only how search engines work, then opposite of last point mentioned above is equally true. In some cases where your website’s industry is not general then you might have problem to find relevant link partners for your website. Then you can search for broad industry relevant link partners to do link exchange.
So be careful next time, all it needs is a little thought process and business sense.
Posted in SEM | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
Ask an SEO next door to tell you reason for the poor ranking and indexing of your website of your website, the first statement he will come up is – “Cmmon, how will your website rank, when it doesn’t even have a sitmep.xml file”. Yes, we all know that sitemap.xml helps to improve indexing of a website, but is it actually as important as the most community hypes about it? Certainly not. Infact, I think that XML sitemaps is the most overrated SEO tactic ever. Sitemaps don’t really solve the problems (I mean all the problems) where indexing and crawlability are concerned. What I mean here is that if you have a website that has 150 pages and the Search Engines can only access 30 of them, don’t think that uploading a sitemap.xml is a sure shot way to index 100% of your pages. It’s very much like applying a 2 inch band aid after open heart surgery.
By now, you must be wondering – “If not sitemap.xml, then what’s the cure?” – I believe instead of just spoon feeding the Search Engines with pages with the help of a sitemap.xml file in a hope that it will pick all the listed pages one day, you must rather focus on making the un-indexed pages better and worthy in the eyes of Search Engines by improving the content, acquiring better/more links to them, and so forth. When Google, doesn’t indexes some pages on your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Search Engines had trouble finding the page, but actually the Search Engines never found those pages worthy of keeping them in its main index. Just because a website doesn’t has a sitemap.xml doesn’t mean search engines wont crawl it unless the website has weak internal linking and information architecture.
Please don’t get me wrong here. I am not against the use of sitemap.xml file but what I want to say is that if your website has indexing problem, don’t just rely on the sitemap.xml as the sole indexing factor. Consolidate the internal linking of your website, use nofollow to control the link juice flow and most important – add quality content on the pages and get quality back links for those pages.
Posted in SEM | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
No matter how good a developer is, each one makes few mistake while writing HTML code. And I am talking precisely about mistakes which the Search Engines don’t like – some small ones and some fatal search engine disasters. These mistakes happen not because we don’t know how to write an HTML code but because after we are done writing the code, we say to our selves, it’s done and it’s looking fine; why bother change it now for Search Engines. Not every developer is a Search Engine guru and very few know (or bother to know) that couple of such coding mistakes here and there might cause the site to choke to death. But don’t panic yet, it’s easy to avoid these mistakes – just consider the following while you code a website next time:
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Make it a thumb rule to avoid repeating yourself. If it’s a commonly used object property, place it in CSS. If it’s a repeated Javascript, store it in an external file and call where ever required.
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Don’t mess up the code with unused or unclosed DIV’s. If a DIV opens, it should close as well and if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t open. It’s as simple as that.
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The most common web developer mistake – every page has it’s own unique title and description, please do not put the title and description tag in the include files.
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Please make all links and references to images, CSS and JavaScript root relative by starting them with a slash, “/”. Dreamweaver users, please set the “Links relative” option to “Site root” in the Site Definition wizard. This is handy because root relative links don’t break when files are moved from one directory to another.
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Don’t put too many files in a single directory. Keep the heirachy going and manage the files in different directories.
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Use Validator to keep the code and CSS clean. Clean code is easier to manage then something that’s messed up.
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Don’t use <br> for <p> tag as it’s unprofessional and results in inconsistent layout in different browsers.
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Avoid spacer graphics and nested tables. Use heading tags, unordered lists and numbered lists to organize content instead.
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Make it a habit to put a forward back slash ‘/’ at the end of every URL.
Image credit:Flickr
Posted in SEM, Web Design, Web Development | 3 Comments »
