Archive for the ‘SEO Tips’ Category
Monday, September 6th, 2010
Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is an advanced feature in Adwords and some other PPC platforms that lets you insert the actual query searched by the user in the ad at the runtime. All you have to do is insert a code in the Ad text and each time the ad is shown, the code will be replaced by keyword that triggered the ad. The syntax of DKI is
{keyword:default text}
The default text is shown when the keyword is too long and exceeds character limit. Given below are some examples given for ad title “{keyword:SEO} Services” with a maximum limit of 25 characters.
| Query |
Ad Title |
| SEM |
SEM services |
| Online Marketing |
Online Marketing Services |
| SEO |
SEO services |
| Search engine optimization |
SEO services |
Although DKI is a versatile and useful feature for PPC management, it should be used carefully as some completely irrelevant keywords can cause jumbled up results. For e.g. query “SEO services” in above example can lead to ad title as “SEO services services”.
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Friday, September 3rd, 2010
When optimizing images, most of the webmasters concentrate on only three factors namely image Alt Text, Title Attribute and Image Name. But there are a few other factors also that play major role in ranking of images.
- The images should have surrounding text and page title optimized for keyword you want to rank for
- Smaller images (generally less than 400X300 pix) have lower chances of ranking than larger images. If you don’t have large enough space on your webpage, try creating a standalone landing page for each image where users can go after clicking on it
- Try to place your image further up in the page if you want them to rank
- The number of images on a given webpage and number of times an image has been used on the website also effects it’s rankings
- Group and save similar pictures in different directories. For e.g. thumbnails in one and full size images in other
- Build a few inbound links to the image URLs as well
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Monday, August 30th, 2010
Speaking of user intent, it is very difficult to gauge the user’s objective when he searches for very generic term such as “apple”. One of the ways to detect the user intention is to know query refinement i.e., what other keywords most of the users use before or after searching the given keywords if they are not happy with the search results. MSN adCenter Labs has one such Search Funnel tool which lets us know search sequence of popular terms. It lets us see what users searched for before (incoming funnel) or after (outgoing funnel) a particular keyword along with their search share. Though the user profile of each search engine is slightly different from each other, based upon these results you can have an idea about how users are more likely to search for particular product or info.
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Friday, August 27th, 2010
Google has recently made an official the update where it lets a single domain dominate the first page results for brand related keywords. Search for Apple or Microsoft in Google.com and 8-9 results out of top 10 will be from apple.com and microsoft.com respectively. Earlier, Google used to show no more than two results from a single website. While this is good for companies concerned about reputation management and want their website to dominate top results, critics denounce it for neglecting user intent by not serving diverse set of search results. For e.g. a person searching for generic term such as “apple” might looking information on Apple Inc., looking to buy an Apple product available only through retailers, buy second hand Apple products which are available on eBay or Craiglist, download songs from iTunes, looking for latest news on Apple or just want apple as a fruit.
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Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Google Analytics is an important tool for monitoring website traffic and measure performance metrics. But sometimes the data tracked by Analytics does not seem to be entirely correct. The problem may lie in the way code has been implemented. Some of the most common mistakes in Analytics to look for are:
- Missing code on important pages
- Mission code on conversion (Thank You) page
- Using wrong tracking code with different ID number (UA-xxxxxx)
- Mixing new and old version of the code (urchin.js and ga.js)
- Using same “Thank You” page for more than one forms
- The URL of conversion page is entered wrong
- Filters misused or implemented in wrong way
- Campaign tracking tags mission (for AdWords, Email campaigns etc)
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Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
Guest Blogging is one of the latest trends in search engine marketing. It is one of the most effective and legitimate method of getting back links or interesting content for a website. It involves a person who is expert in his niche or has done some research, producing a highly informative and interesting article for publishing on one of the leading websites or blogs in his industry segment. The website publishing the article gains from fresh content, increase in traffic and subscription, improvement in link popularity and rankings. The author gains highly valuable links, referral traffic, recognition and fan following by publishing on top industry websites.
It differs from the article syndication by the facts that the articles should be highly useful and unique to publishing website. Also, the article should not be promotional with multiple linkbacks to author’s website. Though most publishing blogs offer only single, usually editorial link, they are highly valuable since they come from established and reputed websites.
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Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
In many situations the information architecture of a website leads to optimization of multiple pages for a single keyword. This is known as keyword cannibalization. Though it is not harmful (or is useful in many cases) to optimize multiple pages for a single keyword, it is always recommended to designate one webpage, which you would like to rank, as more important than others. Otherwise search engines would either dilute the value of pages or start ranking wrong webpage for a particular keyword which may not have much conversion potential. Some of the things you can do to make your desired page rank on search engines are:
- Link to the important page from other webpages using the targeted keyword as anchor text; possibly from within the page content
- Try building all or a major portion of your links targeting a keyword to just one webpage
- Use the exact keyword more prominently on the page you want to rank while using variations on other pages
- In case the wrong webpage has high PR or page authority and cannot be beaten by on-pages changes, try 301 redirection or simply swap the page content
- Try to flow PR to your desired webpages by linking it from other pages within the website having high PR
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Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Although search engines are able to read webpages with large page size, they are still reluctant to fully index the pages greater than 150 KB. Search engines have allocated a certain amount of bandwidth for each website and therefore may leave out pages more than 150 KB so that they can index more and more pages of a particular website. However, this rule is usually overlooked if a particular webpage is deemed too important to leave by search engines. For e.g., if site has good domain authority or the webpage have a number of inbound links and PR.
This also holds true for Google’s original recommendation of not placing more than 100 outgoing links on a webpage.
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Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
Inbound links are by far the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Some website owner and SEO specialists devote their time to generate such a content which could attract some natural links. Link Bait is the term used for content which have tendency to become popular and get shared by users, thereby attracting many inbound links. Some of the most popular ideas of link bait are:
• Creating free automated tools or widgets
• Surveys, research and data collection
• Sharing useful tutorials, tricks and tips
• Creating top 10 best or worst lists
• Latest industry news analysis or humor
• Conferences or events coverage
• Competitions, contests or giveaways
• Interesting Videos or animations
• User generated content such as reviews, rating, pictures etc.
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Monday, August 16th, 2010
Videos are nowadays an integral part of content hosted on most of the websites. Many websites have promotional videos, video tutorials, webinars and recordings etc. Video optimization can draw some additional traffic to a website if done appropriately. Most of the top search engines provide video search and also incorporate videos links on web search result pages as a part of universal search results. Therefore, it will be certainly beneficial to rank your videos higher in search results. Some of the methodologies of Video optimization are:
1. Insert keywords in your video filename
2. Host your Videos on YouTube
3. Optimize YouTube page with relevant Meta data, Tags and content description
4. Embed the videos in from YouTube into your website surrounded by related content
5. Build some links to page containing video and a few to video itself
6. Apart from YouTube, host the video on other video sharing websites such as MetaCafe with same name and description.
7. Promote your videos on these channels so that they get high views and shares
So remember to include image and video optimization as part of your SEM promotional efforts.
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Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
A Click Fraud is the term used for illegitimate or bogus clicks incurred by an advertiser during a PPC or display advertising campaign which may have been done for competitive advantage or financial gains. There are two types of click frauds.
Competitive click fraud – Bogus clicks from advertiser’s competitors to cause financial loss
Network click fraud – Bogus clicks (or impressions) from ad publishers in order to increase their revenue
Although Search Engines have mechanism in place to detect and discard some of the false clicks they not fully effective. Advertisers on their part can try to monitor click fraud on PPC campaigns and other advertising networks by following steps.
• Look for sudden spike in clicks or traffic which is significantly higher than normal
• Increase in clicks without any increase in conversions
• Large number of clicks from same IP or geographical location
• High traffic from locations other than where your target audience exists
• Large number of visitors who leave you site quickly
Although there is no foolproof method to detect the click fraud following these methods to detect the click fraud can certainly save some money. Once you detect some of these bogus clicks, do report them to search engines or network authorities.
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Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Robots.txt protocol also supports some wildcard characters in Disallow (or allow) command which can be used for certain form of pattern matching. A asterisk sign (*) is used to specify any number of characters whereas a dollar sign ($) is used to mark the end of any filename. For e.g.
To block folders starting with word private:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private*/
To block dynamic URLs with question marks in them:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?
To block all .pdf files:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.pdf$
If a ? indicates a session ID, but there are other URLs which end with ? which you want to index:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /*?$
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Friday, August 6th, 2010
A TrackBack is the option available in most of the Blog softwares which can be explained as a kind acknowledgment (in the form of linkback) to other blogs who have mentioned my article in their post or have written on a very similar topic. It is a method of having two different blog articles cross-reference each other automatically and can be used effectively in Blog management and marketing.
So when writing a post on your Blog, it can be beneficial to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs as many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. Some blogging tools are able to discover these TrackBack URLs automatically; others require the commenting blogger to enter them manually.
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Friday, August 6th, 2010
The nofollow tag was long being used in internal PageRank sculpting of a website i.e. passing more PR to the important pages of website which needs to be ranked than other less important pages pages (e.g. privacy policy, login etc). But Google has changed the way it looks at a nofollow tag. Suppose there are 5 links on a webpage having a PR X and one of these links are nofollowed; each link will be passed a PR of X/5 rather than X/4 as it did earlier. It means that nofollowing a link will no longer pass higher PR to rest of links as it once did.
Inconsistently linking from the navigation will lead to bad user experience. There are other ways of conserving Google PageRank such as using JavaScript links or embedding less important links in Flash, but the best option will to combine multiple pages using # (name attribute) within a single URL. This way, lesser number of low importance pages will be linked from the site navigation. Some of the page combinations can be
- Privacy Policy/Disclaimer/ Terms of Service
- Login/Register/Subscribe
- Contact Us/Request a Quote/Branch Locations
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Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
Many websites employ a trick for link building called fake PR, whereby a webpage shows high PageRank in the Google toolbar which is not actually the true PageRank of that particular page. It is a form of cloaking that sends browser agents to the actual webpage and in case of Googlebot, it is redirected to a high PR webpage. Hence the Google toolbar reflects the high PR of some other webpage. There are many fake cloaking and fake PR detection tools available online. The easiest way is to check the cache: snapshot of the in Google if you are suspicious about a webpage having unusually high PR.
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