Robert Snell » SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO, Don’t forget the content.

Robert Snell — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:24:59 +0000

Gone are the days when you could rank high in Google and other major search engines with loads of directory submissions and article marketing. During early times, blog comments provided valuable back-links and made life easy for the SEO folks to improve the page rank and overall performance of the site pretty quickly.

As a matter of fact, folks used to even run extraneous blog commenting campaigns, doing up to 100+ comments on a daily basis to quickly gather valuable back-links, drive more traffic and rank higher in the Google search results.

But, pretty soon the content king – Google realized the irony of the situation, and started penalizing websites that sold or gave away non nofollow links. As a result, even the default comments in all the newer versions of blogging engines like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and the likes of them, had nofollow links by default.

Ever since then it has become a trend, and currently everybody has started using “nofollow” link tag – and even from social networking sites like FaceBook or Orkut, all that you can get is only nofollow links. But, social media is now becoming a great way to drive massive traffic and expose your business identity to the public.

Blog commenting has become a dying art and it is only a good way to build good rapport with fellow bloggers and improve the daily traffic to your website/blog. Something similar goes with the social networking and social media platforms, as one can only improve the traffic not Page Rank and search rankings with these links!

When it comes to link-building with so many constraints, a word of caution would be to remember the sheer fact that links to too many directories can make your site look like a link-farm – so beware Google is watching you!

Article directories are definitely the best bets to generate good backlinks. You may try running an article marketing campaign at reputed sites like EzineArticles.com GoArticles.com, Constant-Content.com, ArticlesBase.com and generate some targeted traffic as well as quality links.

Then the social bookmarking services like Digg Buzz.Yahoo, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, can come in handy in exposing your website to a wider range of audience and getting more traffic!

But, the bottom-line is that quality content, on-page organic SEO, and seamless user experience are the most effective ways to improve the overall SEO and search rankings of your website.

Last, but definitely not the least, you may want to add a robots.txt file on your root directory to exercise control over the pages that you DON’T want to be indexed by Google Crawler, Adsense Crawler and other bots. For instance, in a Wordpress blog, you don’t want Google to crawl the /wp-admin folder, so you can add following line in robots.txt file –

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-admin

Note: Adding a sitemap to your site is a must!

Google Buzz ….

Robert Snell — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:06:22 +0000

A blog post that is a work in progress. Thoughts, Ramblings and Opinions on Googles Buzz. What are your thoughts and who will be next to enter the social fray?I had asked the question a few days ago “Google Buzz will it go anywhere” and thinking about it now, I think it will.

The Google Buzz has definitely created a buzz, and is acclaimed to be one of the smart moves by Google. Buzz is not a competitor to Twitter, Facebook or other social platforms, but rather a gateway, something to aggregate your social existence in one space and further share with the web.

Giving this some more thought, how many companies will start to take into consideration the business side of things, there’s more to it – Google Buzz and the inclusion into search results as Twitter is, can greatly affect ones presence on the net and how we do business. Google is the source for info, phone numbers, feedback, reviews etc … Buzz is going to add to the pile, further generate more info for people to take into consideration when determining a purchase or decision and affect or influence customers further.

Basically upon performing a search for businesses in Google Maps, you can find the “Buzz about this place” option. Now, this turns out to be more or less like a Facebook community or Twitter group for the specific business, as you have the choice to Buzz about a business you like or the one you don’t. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Buzz has the ability to be seen by more people, the conversations are public and distributed by the most popular site on the net.

So, Google Buzz polls about a business will turn out to be much more than a review? Well, sure thing, you’ll enjoy the positive buzz about your business and increase in the business (if you’re lucky enough to get only positive Buzz). On the contrary, if you get lot of negative Buzz about your business or a particular product, you’ll have to essentially interact with the ‘dissatisfied customers’ and help them in resolving their issues as with any social channel.

Well then, it looks like Google is all set to pull more to the party, to participate in Social Media activities and engage them to keeping talking with the new Google Buzz! If you’re not too happy with the Buzz, then you can opt out (This option is based in the footer on Gmail). While I wouldn’t encourage opting out, if you are going to I would suggest you monitor it.

Prepare for the challenge and see how Buzz morphs over the coming months, where it appears and how it is used. The social web is growing, channels are appearing daily and the conversation will continue. Take part and enjoy.

Page load times to impact search rankings

Robert Snell — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:53:01 +0000

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, suggested that page speed will soon become a ranking factor in Google search results. Speed has been a consistent factor for comapnies for quite some time now. It is quite evident that Google is giving considerable importance to page speed after all, to improve the user experience by delivering the best possible results. The quicker Google can crawl you, the quicker your results will appear.

Is using the speed factor a good idea?

Webmasters do welcome this idea of speed being used as a ranking feature in Google. But many feel that it might only benefit corporations and negatively impact the small people who might never end up reaching anywhere in the search engines. Moreover it can become a political issue as small nations whose internet infrastructure is poorer than technological developed nations. It also depends upon the affordability of the service and those who can afford a high quality bandwidth and dedicated servers stand more chance of a better page rank.

Many sites today have video blogs, rich content, and that definitely takes time to load. Once the search engines decide on the speed factor, these sites will be affected. All said and done this speed factor is sure to be a significant factor in the search results shortly and we can only follow the best tips offered by none other than Google itself for better site performance using its webmaster tools. This tool demonstrates a cumulative speed numbers, based on the frequently visited pages with the activated page rank feature. .

It’s highly recommended that you monitor the load times over a select period. If you see high load times then examine the factors that could be impacting your site. Poor design, too much rich content, bad website hosting provider? All issues that should be addressed.

One more page is included which is Page speed suggestions where Google lets you know the areas where your page has to be optimized for better speed performance. Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plug-in is used to find these suggestions.

Working with highly competitive keywords.

Robert Snell — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:45:02 +0000

Whenever you target certain keywords, putting in relevant data on your web pages with decent keyword density is the very first step. But, that’s far from the end of the story as you have a long way to go.

When you target keywords with low competition you may be able to make it to the top of Google search results pretty quickly. For instance, if you run an online cell phone store, getting high rankings for keyword phrases like “buy 32GB iPhone 3G in Chicago” may be considerably easier in comparison to keyword phrases like “buy 32GB iPhone 3G”.

But, that’s all fine – few more powerful in-bound links and lot of keyword rich data about the product should do the trick – what if you’ve got to compete for keywords like “buy iPhone 3G”.

Making it Happen

Do you think you’ll ever be able to make it to the top 5 results of Google even with 10,000 high quality in-bound links? Well, you know it for sure that the answer is a big NO!

So, how do you get higher search rankings for extremely popular keywords that have terrible competition?

Back to the Basics

Well, it all comes back to the basics. Why did you think you could make it to the top of Google when you had to compete for keyword phrase “buy 32GB iPhone 3G” instead of “buy 32GB iPhone 3G in Chicago”?

If your answer was the fact that there are 1,000 competitors for the second keyword phrase and 10,000 for the first but 10million competitors for “buy iPhone 3G” then you’re completely wrong on this one.

Make your way to the Top of Google progressively – Don’t try to Jump!

If you try to compete for the keyword “buy 32GB iPhone 3G” instead of “buy 32GB iPhone 3G in Chicago” right away, there’s very little chance that you’re going to taste any success.

Remember, before you can compete for keywords with higher competition it is essential that you compete for keywords with low competition and make it to the top of Google search results for several such keywords. This will essentially help the Google spiders and bots to identify that your site is closely related to iPhone and once that happens, it will be a lot easier for you to get higher search rankings for keyword phrases containing “iPhone”, “buy iPhone” or “buy 32GB iPhone”.

Now, it is time to again go back to the basics and try to make it to the top of Google search results for keywords like “buy iPhone 3G”, “buy 32GB iPhone 3G”, “buy 16GB iPhone 3G”, and all possible keyword phrases you may think of.

Having done that, you’re ready to enter into the bigger competition and target the extremely competitive keywords like “buy iPhone 3G”. But, this time around you can easily make it to the top 5 search results with the help of a good link-building campaign and publishing fresh content on your web pages, maintaining high keyword density.

So, it all about doing your basics right – don’t try to jump straight away. Everybody has progressed steadily and you’ll have to follow their footsteps because there are no short cuts that pay off!

Are You Making Full Use of SEO?

Robert Snell — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:37:17 +0000

If you start a new online business, be it an online store, an interactive website or just a simple personal blog, you’re never going to make it big in the world of internet without making use of some serious SEO.

So long as you keep trying things randomly, you’re not going to get any results for your hard work. However, with a proper strategy and decent investment on building, optimizing and marketing your online venture, you can expect very high returns. You can realize the true power of SEO only once you successfully market your website, optimize it in all the aspects and generate some stable income through it.

Remember, you need not sell anything to make good money through your website. By putting on informative original information on even your personal blog, you can drive a lot of traffic. Over time, you can start building in-bound links from various popular sites and do some link building to increase the popularity, search ranking and page rank of your website/blog.

Once your site becomes highly popular, you can generate even higher revenues by selling the precious one-way reciprocal links to your web pages with high page rank and traffic.

How to Get Started?

All this sounds simply fascinating, but you need to put in a whole lot of efforts before you reach that point wherein you can generate stable income with your website. To start off, you should try to optimize the on-page elements of your website, including the title, meta,

,

, alt, image title and most importantly the anchor tags and the body content.

By maintaining good keyword density in web page content and inter-linking your pages using anchor texts as the targeted keywords of your concern, you can significantly improve the search rankings of your website.

Link Building: Stay Away from Black-hat SEO tactics

Next, you should try to generate some high quality in-bound links and improving the page rank of your website.

Remember, you must never adopt blackhat SEO tactics, no matter how effective and tempting they may promise to be. Sure thing, you can even boost up the page rank of your site to 3 or 4 right away, but things aren’t going to be too pretty after a while.

Avoid building links from link-farms! It is fine if somebody links to your website from a link-farm but if you also link to a link-farm the search rankings of your website may be hampered to a good extent.

More so, if Google or any major search engine makes out that majority of your links are coming from link farms and irrelevant sites, and the content of your web pages isn’t worthy enough to drive enough traffic, they may even DROP OFF your site from their search results. That’s right, all your hard work may go in vain, with just a small mistake. This is precisely why most experts advise to stay away from Black-hat SEO tactics and stay clear of any kind of problems.