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Friday, August 17, 2007

Search Engine Optimization

Steps For Getting a Website Started

There are many things to take into consideration when starting up your website for your business/marketing. You of course have to have your idea and be ready to go with it, if you’ve not already gotten it started, but you also have to think about the structure of your website. Not really sure where to start?
Dharmesh Shah from OnStartups.com breaks it down for us, with an easy to follow and understand list of things to do.

* Choose a name for the website - memorable, easy to type
* Put up a very basic website - ugly, but gets the search engines rolling
* Link to it - link from your personal site, get friends and family to link to you
* Start a Twitter account - match your company and/or domain name
* Allow people to sign-up for email - a simple form will do
* Have a nice logo made for you - ask friends you know or create a contest
* Facebook Business page - also known as a fan page
* Make a clean Facebook URL - facebook.yourdomain.com
* Startup a Blog - look into free blog software like Wordpress
* Write articles - reveal how you got to this point
* Google Alerts - setup at least your domain name and industry
* Find Competition - you need to know what you’re up against
* LinkedIn Profile Update - mention your site and link to it
* Business Cards - keep them with you
* Twitter Grader Search - follow high profile twitter users, form relationships
* StumbleUpon - create an account, make friends with similar business and vote
* LinkedIn Answers category - answer questions, build credibility, not self-promote
* Follow Bloggers - similar interest, leave relevant comments
* Obtain Facebook Contacts - organize business, friends, family
* Website Grader - grade your website
* Web Analytics - start tracking and following where you traffic comes from

Seems like a lot of steps? Well, that’s what they are, steps. You certainly don’t have to and cannot do them all in one day. Take your time doing it, but really dedicate yourself to it. Don’t stop until it’s finished and you’ve worked your way through all of these steps. These steps will increase your ratings, rankings and popularity on the internet. You want people to remember you, and making it easy to find ways to get to your website is definitely a plus. You always want to give several ways to get to one destination. Don’t just build a one-way road, build a two-way street.


SEO On Your Own

From forum listings to backlinks, to images to keywords, this entire website is full of tools and tips to help you maintain your own SEO. SEO on your own may seem like too much for one person to do, but when you’re pointed in the right direction, suddenly it becomes far easier than once thought.

Israel Rothman from SocialMediaSystems.com has written a most helpful article called “Businesses Can Do Their Own SEO and Social Media Marketing”. He gives five helpful tips that function similar to a checklist:

* Customize tags – use keywords
* Customize content – similar products/pages deserve unique content
* Text-based info on all pages – utilizing robots.txt
* Links on your site, for your site – link back and forth through your site
* Blog – write content that makes people want to link to you

Rothman goes on to say, that when you over think SEO it becomes a task too complicated to comprehend.
Simplifying SEO is all anyone really needs to get started. Of course, a handy list helps too, but that’s all part of the simplification process. When a subject as broad as SEO is cut into little bite-size pieces, it is far easier to digest than someone just throwing the whole subject down in front of you. That’s why I didn’t write everything in one article, but rather several articles, breaking it all up into more specified subjects. That’s part of my job here at patilsanjay4u.blogspot.com. I’m here to help you understand SEO, by teaching you what I know, and giving you helpful information that brings you steps, and leaps, and bounds closer to your SEO goal.
With some time and tips, World (Wide Web) domination will soon be yours! Or something like that.

Why Social Networking?

When you think about social networking sites, you may or may not think of them as a lucrative way of getting the word out about your business, but it’s really a fantastic opportunity. The SEO involved in these sites is substantial; you’ll increase statistics like your backlinks in no time. These sites are not just for kids, or people to look up long lost friends anymore, they’re effectively utilized by businesses. Social networking sites are of course social, and give you the ability to network with many people. There will be more people to keep in contact with, and more people you’re going to connect with. People who are interested in what you have to offer will flock to you!

There are quite a few networking sites that have sprouted and flourished in the past few years: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, to name a few. So, which one do you go with? Why not choose more than one of them? It is after all a good idea to have your information on several sites, so why not boost your business by having accounts on at least two of these social networking sites? The more the merrier.

You’ll have to do a little research on these sites to really choose which one(s) will suite your needs. Find out what kind of people are on each of the sites, what other kinds of business/professional accounts there are, and how the whole site works. Learning the infrastructure will help you tremendously.

An article called “Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing” by Lee Odden from TopRankBlog.com, lists several fantastic tips to both get you started and keep you going on these sites. Here is a basic rundown of them:

Start with a whole plan
Get involved - listen and participate
Time spent will reap rewards
Transparency with intentions – why you’re there
Protect your identity and encourage opinions
Encourage feedback
Objectives will influence goals
Odden goes on to explain some of the Worst Practices like not listening or being too pushy when networking. You can’t force people into wanting what you have to offer, you have to work with them and influence them in an unobtrusive way.

Social networking will help you build a framework to success online. Is it necessary? No, not necessary, but yes it is helpful. Why not get involved? There may be some confusion at first, but you’ll get it in no time at all, and increase your traffic substantially if you keep with it. Just be sure to remain professional and keep your shirt on in your pictures.


Optimizing Keywords

Keyword selection, where it sounds like an easy task, can be a little difficult when it comes to the full optimization of your website.

When choosing keywords, you tend to gravitate towards words that describe your site, which is what you should do. However, there are instances where people do not choose keywords that are either generic enough, or precise enough, which will of course affect your search engine ranking.

You need to have specific keywords to get more traffic to your page, but you don’t want it so specific that only five people are ever going to search for it. Having a keyword that is too generic will also count against you. Sure, it will eventually bring someone to your website, but if you used “cat” like everyone else, it’s going to take you forever to get to the top of the rankings. Narrowing it to “ocelot” might be a better idea (of course if you have ocelots on your site).

There are some helpful tools out there that make life a little easier when it comes to keyword-decision-making. SEO Chat’s Keyword Difficulty Check Tool allows you to input a keyword or phrase and check to see if it would be difficult to rank. Your goal, after all, is to get your website at the top of that list that pops up when you do a Google, Yahoo, or whatever kind of search. The more difficult it is to rank, the more you need to change it. SEO Logs also has a Keyword Difficulty Check Tool for the same purpose. They both gave me similar results, when checking the difficulty of the word “cat”.

SEO Tools - Keyword Difficulty Check
Keyword Difficulty Check Tool

After re-entering a search for a more specific “ocelot”, I got a much lower difficulty rating, thus making it easier for me to score higher in the search engine ranking results.

SEO Tools - Keyword Difficulty Check

Confused? Remember: the lower the number, the easier it is to rank towards the top. The higher the number, the further down the list you’re going to be. It’s kind of opposite, but you’re rating your difficulty, higher numbers being a negative. You want it easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
So, keep in mind what words you want to describe your site with, but don’t restrict yourself to those words only. Branch out, utilize a thesaurus, use some phrases, and check them out in your keyword difficulty searches. This will be a lot more helpful to you in your SEO than placing a bunch of meaningless words.

Readability is of course of utmost importance when you have a website. You don’t want anyone to struggle with any part of your site, especially your content. This is after all what keeps them coming back for more.

You would be surprised how often the small details are overlooked when people do their content. In order to cement your readers into your website, you must have good, quality writing. It’s okay if you’re not the best writer in the world, but it is essential that you follow some specific steps to make it as professional as possible.

Here are some steps you should always practice:

Type It Out: Never type your content straight into the webpage. You always want to go through another program first. There are a lot of things you’ll see when you type it in Word (or a similar program) that you wouldn’t by just typing directly into the webpage. Besides, it is always a good idea to have a back up of your content, should something unexpectedly become corrupt.

Spellchecking: There are a multitude of resources out there for you to check your spelling with—utilize them. Use the spellchecker in your text editing program, an actual dictionary, Google search for a correction in spelling, and/or Dictionary.com. Regardless of what you use, you should be able to find the correct spelling. You don’t want a simple mistake like the spelling for “lose” and “loose”. These have completely different meanings, but very similar spelling. If you are unsure of the meaning on any words you use, always look them up. It’s a good idea to be thorough.

Proof Read and Edit: Read, reread, then edit your work. I generally write something, then read it and decide if I think it sounds okay. I then reread it and begin the editing process. I replace words, especially overused ones, and sentences. Sometimes rearranging sentences will make content flow a little smoother as well.

Unless you’re a huge company with tons of clients, no one is looking for perfection in your writing, but it should be as close to perfect as you can get it. Don’t get hung up on this and think you’re writing a book. You are simply striving for accuracy and competence.

Once you have typed your content and it looks and sounds great, you need to put it in your webpage. This sounds easy enough, right? Well, believe it or not, this is where some people go wrong.

For whatever reason, Microsoft Word and WordPress do not get along. Sometimes when you copy content out of Word and paste it into WordPress, there are tons of new characters that appear. Some of your quotes and apostrophes, among other characters, have been replaced with random symbols. Not to mention some other symbols that snuck in where there were no characters at all. It can be very frustrating.

Microsoft Word Script Error:
When you’re in your WordPress there are a couple options for how you view your post: Visual and HTML. A lot of people overlook this section, but this will save you a lot of trouble. You always, always want to work in HTML view. If you don’t know HTML, that’s okay. You’re just pasting your text straight in from Word so you don’t need to know anything about the programming of the webpage.

WordPress HTML Mode:
Pasting your text into the HTML section shows the text for what it is, and nothing more. When you paste it into the Visual section, it automatically tries to attach Word’s style sheet to your text.

Microsoft Word Style Sheet:
This is where the frustration comes in. It doesn’t always interpret the text the same way. Sometimes it will look okay, and you think you got lucky, and other times you have the jumbled mess of characters and symbols. So, to avoid this headache, always use the HTML mode.You’re probably wondering at this point how this is incorporated into SEO. Well, as I have said before, if you can read it then so can search engines. You don’t want a bunch of nonsense appearing on your website. Search engines could see this as a spammy site if the content doesn’t make any sense. No, the search engines cannot actually read your webpage, but if it sees a lot of characters that do not belong (particularly in a repetitive fashion), it will not reflect positively on your site. You want more traffic, in any honest way possible.

Getting More Traffic to Your Site:

Traffic is the term used to describe visitors to your site and one of the ways for your page to move up the rankings in web searches is to have many backlinks. These are links generated by people who tag your site.The value of the backlink is based on the value of the site where your link is tagged. It is preferable to have a few quality backlinks but having many less quality backlinks also serves its purpose in creating SEO. One way to gain many backlinks is to generate traffic through the free options out there. There are paid options in getting traffic for search engine optimization(SEO) but there are many programs out there that offer free traffic...
Click here for the more traffic tips

At this point you’re probably tired of reading about how you’re supposed to read and edit your work, and make sure it looks and sounds good. Blah, blah, blah, sounds like English class. Tired you may be, but I really can’t emphasize this enough. There are huge companies and corporations out there that have typos in their information, or missing words, and you can only find so many before you start to lose faith in them.

Here is an image taken from one of Google’s official pages:

Missing a little word like “to” is not at all a serious offense, especially for a company as colossal as Google, but it could result in poor traffic for your website. You are likely a smaller business, getting your feet wet with SEO and trying to draw traffic in, and the last thing you want to do is lose people because of something silly like a typo (“to” will probably not cause you to lose credibility, but a collection of grammatical errors will). By sheer lack of trust in the information you are providing, people will not return.

There is a book I stopped reading because there were too many typos. There were spaces missing, there were too many spaces, misspelled words and improper punctuation. These typos were primarily featured – located in fact sections that were outlined, purposely designed to attract your attention. I found around ten before I shelved the book (I started looking for them on purpose). You think that’s harsh? Think of it this way: If you have enough knowledge and care for the subject you’re writing about, then you should have enough knowledge and care to want to display this information in the most professional way. If you don’t take your work seriously, how do you expect everyone else to? If you’re not good with writing skills, then have someone look it over before you go submitting it (and yes, the publishing company to that book should have picked up on the typos, so shame on everyone involved).

Spelling and punctuation are not the only things you should pay attention to when editing your work. Make sure your information is accurate. This should go without saying, but if you’re producing information for people to read, be extra sure your statements are as true as they can be. You’ve got two different kinds of people reading: people who know nothing about the subject, and people who know a lot about the subject.

Here is an example:
“Gigabit. Just say it and the word drips off the tongue like honey.
Gig-a-bit. A hundred times faster than megabit. A thousand times faster
than kilobit. Wow, that’s wicked fast.” –PC Magazine, June 26, 2007

If you don’t know too much about computers and speeds, this paragraph probably seems just fine to you. There aren’t any spelling errors, but the information is way off. A gigabit is actually a thousand times faster than a megabit, and a million times faster than a kilobit (now that’s wicked fast). This ended up being a big mistake on the part of PC Magazine, and caused a lot of retractions to the article. Several readers were disappointed in the magazine and many stopped reading it, for that reason alone. One article.

I hope you can see why I continue to stress the editing process. Yes, you’re an online resource (most of you), and being online immediately requires you to produce information at a faster pace – typos will happen, words will be missed. All I am saying is that you should try to pay more attention to what you’re doing. It may be difficult at first to convince yourself to reread your writing to ensure it’s kosher, but I swear it’s well worth it. You can never have too many good habits.

Optimizing Shouldn’t Stop With SEO

Search Engine Optimization is of course extremely important to your website, and should be looked at as a priority when building and maintaining a site, but it doesn’t just stop there. There are many sites out there that are maintained decently well, and have okay traffic flow through them, but are so incredibly slow that it hurts the SEO results. There are a few reasons the website is moving so slow, some you can help, and some you cannot. A couple reasons a website is moving slow that you cannot help: in the best scenario, you have so much traffic that it is actually about to crash the server it is on – and then there could be something wrong with the server. You can technically help the server with too much traffic by having it moved elsewhere, but for the purposes of this article, we’re going to say we can’t help either of these. Here is a short list of things that could be slowing your site down that you CAN help:

* Javascript
* Flash
* Large image files
* Too many plug-ins
* Too many things

Javascript and Flash are two website additions that tend to bog down the speed of a website pretty consistently. Large image files are not only referring to the size physically on the webpage, but the file size itself. It’s pretty simple: if it’s too big, it takes a long time to load. Plug-ins are nice additions to some websites, especially Wordpress, but you have to be careful with how many you use or it will greatly increase the load time for a webpage. And, along with all of these, a big factor to slowing down is that there are simply too many things. Whether it be all of these combined, or just too many of one of them. They all contribute.

There are some steps you can take to help eliminate these problems for your website.

Javascript: Not only is this decreasing the SEO of your website, but you may have too many little codes running all at the same time. Take a look at them. Do you really need all of your navigation to be in Javascript? Do you have a text alternative for it so search engines can find it? Can you just make it text instead? If you can’t change everything, make a list in order of importance. What cannot change, and what could potentially change.

Flash: Do you really need all of those Flash animations smothering your webpage? Sure, they move and they’re fun to look at, but unless your website is about Flash animation, you really don’t need all of that fancy stuff on there. People want content. Adding some Flash accents is of course a good idea for aesthetics, but do not base your entire website off of these animations. Besides, search engines struggle with finding these, so they’re not really helping the SEO.

Large image files: This is a simple one – make them smaller. There are options in your image editing programs to save images for webpages. There are a few different types of files you want to use on a website – JPG, GIF and PNG. If it’s a photo, use your JPG setting, if it has transparency or a lot of areas of flat color (like a cartoon), a GIF or PNG file will be good. Never use a BMP on your website. These files are huge.

Too many plug-ins: Same as I said earlier, do you really need all of these plug-ins? No, you do not. Too many of them activated and loading all at the same time cause major disturbances in the data flow. Often times, plug-ins load first, before your style sheet and text and images. Having one or two on your website isn’t a bad idea, but be selective, and determine whether you actually need it or not.

Too many things: This is probably the easiest one to resolve. If you have too many things on one page, it is going to slow you down. People don’t do well with clutter on a website. It’s confusing, and distracting. If there are too many things your visitors are going to miss half of the information, so clean it up! And this applies to all of the previously mentioned items on the list. If you have too many, get rid of them, you do not need them.
I hope this helps you all clean up your websites some! A daunting task, I know, especially if you have spent so much time polluting your website. It is however, well worth the time spent to clean it up.

SEO Mumbai, Borivali - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Seo Expert In India,Mumbai & Borivali

SEO India Mumbai, Borivali Blog provides SEO updates, Seo tips and discussions on various aspects of internet marketing, link building, Search engine marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Contact for Free advice from SEO Consultant.


Our Specific Goals:

1) Dominate the competition
2) Enhanced online Return On Investment (ROI)
3) Increased the targeted traffic
4) Greater websites popularity
5) Increase the rank position on search engine Ho

How To Get Traffic on your site?

Always keep in mind that the traffic cannot be generated overnight, and you have to give your time to your site.

We are going to tell you the best practices in the Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization (SEM & SEO) World to build long term traffic to your site.
There is two types in Search Engine Optimization(SEO) On-Page Optimization & Off-page Optimization.
Make your Website search engine friendly (don’t over rule search engine rules)
Do submission for your site in different and major directories. (Relevant and choose specific category)
Do Search Engine Submission.
Link popularity – One way, Three-way and Reciprocal links – Avoid Link Farms
Creat Article and do article submission.
Email Marketing
Auto responder marketing
Blog Posting & Blog Submission
Create RSS Feeds & Do RSS Submission.
Start posting in do follow forums and get signature (Forum signature Google consider as a back link)
Social Media Optimization – Book Mark, Tell a friend, Digg News, del.icio.us, technorati
Get paid visitors – Arbitrage, PPC, Adwords
Always refresh your contents because robots love fresh content.
Some more Important Points to be looked on;
Look at your keywords, which you have targeted, are they really useful and traffic driven keywords? Check it in different keywords tools like Google Adwords, inventory overture etc.
Bring more traffic and gain search engine rankings by building some good one way links to your site.

On-Page Optimization Factor

1. Update Content: Once you've done everything right and gotten your high page ranking you have to keep up on your site's content. Competitors will always be trying to find a way to tweak their sights to attract your customers; and even if they don't find it, old or out of date content will still drive customers away no matter how high you appear in their search results.

2. Use a Catchy URL: There is no replacement for an attention grabbing, easy to remember URL. Keep yours short, catchy, and to the point, there's a reason "googling" has become a part of everyday language.

3. Hire a Professional: Not everyone's a writer, and it shows. Hiring a professional to craft your page gives you the advantage of clear, concise, focused site content that will bring visitors to your website and keep them coming back.

4. Put Keywords First: When writing the content of your page, make sure that the keywords your want to lead visitors to your site appear in the first sentence, this is what is displayed in search results.

5. Use the Right Keywords: Make sure that the words you think best sum up your website are the same as the one an average person would type into a search engine when looking for a product like yours. Experimenting with different search engines, to see what websites come up for the keywords you think represent you, is a great way to get a feel for what your keywords need to be.

6. Link to Other Sites: Getting links to your site on other related sites is vital to improving your page ranking. Don't spam (by posting links on blogs or link farms), but get quality, similarly focused sites to link to you, and return the favor. A series of mutually beneficial links is a key step is getting your website noticed and ranked.

7. Use Keywords throughout Your Site: Once you have your keywords down, make sure you sprinkle them liberally throughout your site's content. Your keywords are the way your website attracted visitors, make sure that they recognize the content those keywords led them to. 8. Use Keyword Phrases: Keywords don't have to be just one word, in fact, they shouldn't be. Using keyword phrases allows you to focus your content to exactly the audience you want. 9. Know What Search Engines Want: Search engines have guidelines for getting your page noticed and ranked higher--read them. Optimizing your site to what the major engines want is one of the easiest and best ways to get noticed. 10. Use a Site Map: Hard to navigate pages drive visitors away quicker than anything else. Providing a site map to help them get around your page not only makes their experience better, it lets web crawlers search over and log all your content quickly and correctly, helping your page to get ranked better.

SEO Benefits:

Targeted Traffic: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can increase the number of visitors who are actively searching for your service or product. Promotion that doesn't sleep: Imagine having your own marketing and promotions company working exclusively just for you! One that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days every year. That's the benefit of Search Engine Optimization!

Increase brand visibility: SEO can give your brand a high international profile - and for a comparatively low outlay.

High ROI: Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, SEO brings you a higher Return On your Investment than any comparable form of marketing.

Higher Sales: SEO can mean increased sales of your product or service. Faster, smaller pages: Properly validated and optimized files will be smaller and leaner, meaning less server overheads and quicker download times. Long term positioning: Once in place, a properly designed and optimized site should stay long term in the rankings compared to PPC where costs and outlay are ongoing and unpredictable.

Cost-effective: SEO is among the most cost-effective ways of marketing. Accessibility: Observing sensible optimization procedures can make your site more accessible to all users.

Cross-browser compatibility: A properly optimized site will be as near as possible validated to high standards. This means that it should work in all W3C-compliant browsers, meaning your site may be viewed by the greatest potential number of visitors. Navigable by the engines: All links should function correctly and all pages should be accessible to the engines, thus making your site easy for the engines to index and properly categories. Usability: Observing basic optimization guidelines should mean that visitors have a more pleasant user experience.

Sanjay ready to help you sanjay.search@gmail.com


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