Posts Tagged ‘Traffic’

Today everyone wants a website and for that a web designing company is the best place to make one. However, do web designing companies make a website that is good in all terms like structure, color, programming, etc? Some would surely say yes, but I do not agree with that. I would say, web designers just create a website, but there is more to that for a client to look into while getting the website built. The following article describes the points that one must keep in mind when contracting with a web designing company to develop a website. Website Structure and Placement:What kind of a website are you looking for? How many columns do you want the website to have? Where do you want to place what and why? What kind of programming do you want to have for the website? What kind of technology do you want the website to be built on? For example: HTML, Drupal, PHP, Dot Net, Joomla, etc. W3C Validation:In most cases the client only sees if the website is running well, all the pages are opening correctly, and the content is correctly placed on each page. Very often the client and the web designer neglect the number of errors that are present on the website. With W3C validation, you will know exactly how many errors are there on each page. Besides the errors, you will also see the number of warnings for each page of your website. This is extremely important from an SEO perspective. Tip: Ask the web designer to show a few websites they have built and check them for any errors and warnings. This is the best way to ascertain the quality of work of a web designer or a web designing company. On Page Optimization:When a website is built by the web designer, it is important that the client gives specifications regarding on page optimization. On Page Optimization refers to the meta description, meta keywords, meta title, alt tags, and header tags. There are so many websites that are built where these points are ignored. If these points are kept in mind, you can save a good amount of money that would actually be spent towards On Page Optimization. Additionally, it will also help the spiders to crawl your website and also index the pages properly. Now that we have the 3 main elements in our control, we need to look at another element that plays an important role towards the success of a website. Multi-variant testing is an essential element to know which pages are preferred best by the visitors and what is not preferred. This technique is used to determine which creative variation or content creates the finest perfection in the defined objectives of a website design. This could be focused on either the home page (index page) or all of the internal pages of the website. If implemented correctly, you will see a phenomenal increase in the number of conversions, traffic and also ROI by testing the different elements like layout, background colors, copy text and landing page images. An important point to note is that all elements may not generate the same increase in conversions. It’s through conducting different tests it would be possible to ascertain the elements that generate the rise in conversions!

To put in a layman’s terms, latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a technique of indexing— analyzing, listing or categorizing certain keywords or phrases in the contents of various websites, books or documents in such a way that they have contextually and conceptually the same or related intent and meaning despite the different words used in them. The technique used in latent semantic indexing aims at finding the keywords in the text that carry a latent relationship in structure and usage. The idea behind the concept of LSI is to collect data that is conceptually akin in meaning and context to the search queries entered by the searchers in the search engines. The search results may, therefore not share the specific words or phrases entered by the searcher. For example, if you use the word ‘Saddam Hussein’, the search engine may return articles about the Gulf War, situation in Kuwait or Iran, the elite force of the Iraqi despot, UN sanctions, oil fields in Iraq and much more without even mentioning the search word ‘Saddam Hussein’. The technique of LSI automates the process of categorizing the documents almost the way the human beings do. The text selected may not have the same words or sentences. The results returned may have lists, free notes, web content or even emails. Advantages of latent semantic indexing Sometimes the web searcher is conscious that he is not using the right keywords or phrases due to the lack of knowledge of appropriate vocabulary. He, therefore, uses only approximate words which may not return the desired information if the search process follows the Boolean pattern. Latent semantic index technique facilitates the retrieval of the related conceptual content even if the search queries do not use the ‘correct’ words. Latent or true information LSI technique returns information in its true conceptual representation, which is not easily possible through the traditional search approach. It uses synonymy that can bring forth the underlying concept even if the searcher uses different words or phrases. The traditional retrieval process does not always discover the right content on the same topic that uses different vocabulary. Polysemy A large number of words have multiple meanings. So, if a searcher uses numerous polysemous words, they may reduce the chances of getting the precise information. LSI helps to weed out the unnecessary words from the data and tries to arrive at the average meaning, which is close to the real meaning of the search queries. Sifting close and distant words LSI examines the contents of the different websites or documents and tries to find out which of these contain semantically common words, similar words, closer words or distant words. This is almost working like a human being. Although LSI does not understand the meanings of the words, its algorithm does notice the word patterns and indexes them accordingly. This process proves the astonishing intelligence of the LSI technique. How should one use latent semantic indexing? Latent semantic indexing is a very useful tool for search engine optimization of your website or copywriting.   You should, therefore, use the keywords and phrases very carefully. For example, if you are using the keyword or phrase ‘buy jaguar’ you should explain what the word ‘jaguar’ stands for since it is a polysemous word. It may mean a cat, a car or an aircraft. It may also be a brand name of some sanitary product.   Using the word ‘jaguar’ in isolation may confuse the LSI tool. You should, therefore, clarify what your ‘jaguar’ stands for. Otherwise, you will defeat the very purpose of launching your website. You should also be careful in the use of synonyms so that they convey the meaning that you exactly want to communicate. Synonyms are very helpful in clarifying the meanings of the words. But stuffing keywords for making the site SEO compliant may also defeat the purpose and your site may be blacklisted for spamming. What happens if one does not use latent semantic indexing? The search engine spiders or the software is making a paradigm shift in selecting the sites for front-page ranking. Google and many other search engines use LSI to determine the relevancy of your keywords and phrases in context of the subject matter of the site’s content. If you do not use the keywords and phrases judiciously, you may not be able to optimize your site for high ranking. Not using the synonyms or theme related words may not help the LSI tool to identify your site’s relevance to the search queries. If your website is about barbeques, you should use words such as grill, patio, sauce, charcoal, recipe, etc which are related to the main keyword. If you do not use LSI, your site is doomed to stay unnoticed.

One of the facts about search engines is that they utilize software programs known as bots or spiders that crawl the web and build their database. These spiders are sent to view and index pages which are later processed and retrieved from the database. If ranking on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for you, then it is important you understand the basics of creating a search engine friendly website. Below it is explained in detail as to how a search engine works. CrawlingFirstly, search engines crawl the web to gather information and build their database. This is done by an automated software called a search engine crawler or spider or a bot. These spiders crawl through a site and look at the content (mainly text) to know what the site is about and then start collecting, parsing and storing the data so that it can be easily be retrieved from its database. However, since there are over billion pages on the web, it is practically impossible for a spider to revisit a site on a daily basis only to see if a new page has been added or an existing page has gone through any modification. Many times the spider may not visit your website for a month or more also, therefore, the true impact of SEO efforts cannot be known immediately. It is also good to know that search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, javascript, frames, directories, and similar stuff. Therefore having lots of these on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view as these will not be crawled and indexed for further processing. Search Engine IndexingOnce a page is crawled, the next step involves indexing the content. This process entails finding those words that can best describe the webpage content and then assigning the webpage to specific keywords. The indexed page is then stored in the huge database for retrieval later. At times, the search engine may not be able to correctly identify the meaning of the page and in such a case optimization of the page can help it classify it rightly and achieve a better ranking for you. ProcessingThis is done when a user enters a search query – in simple terms, the search engine analyses the information it has indexed in relation to the search request. Since there will be millions of pages containing the same search term, the search engine calculates the relevance of each page in its database to the search query. The relevancy of a page is calculated based on various algorithms. These algorithms assign different weights for general aspects like Meta Tags, Keyword Density, and Links. However, one basic truth that you need to know is that all major search engines regularly change their algorithms and if you want to continue to appear on the top of the search results, you need to keep your pages up to date. Also, it would be a wise decision to think about SEO to rank on the top and also gain an edge over your competitors. RetrievingThis is the last step in the process where the search engine retrieves the results, that is, it throws up all the relevant results before the user. The uses can see a vast pool of information related to their search query. There may be questions regarding how differently each search engine functions. However, one basic thing that you need to know is that there are differences in the manner various search engines function but at the end of the day they all perform three fundamental tasks: * Searching the Internet based on the search query entered by the user. * Maintaining an index of all the information that gather from various pages. * Permit users to search for words available in that index.

Keyword Density means the number of times a keyword exists in a webpage compared to the total number of words in that webpage. From the SEO perspective, keyword density determines whether a webpage is related to a particular keyword or not. Once you have conducted a proper keyword research and narrowed down your keyword list to those keywords that have strong relevance to your website, high search volume, and relatively less competition, the next step would be to find out what would be the best keyword density before placing text on your webpage. The concept of an ideal keyword density is debatable and has led to an extensive discussion among SEO experts and webmasters on what the recommended density should be to achieve a good search engine ranking. There is no fixed keyword density percentage that needs to be maintained for a webpage; however, you must make sure that your website keyword density is neither too low (which will not bring in optimal gain) nor too high (which will be considered as spamming and can lead to you site getting penalized). Maintaining an ideal keyword density will help search engines to use the information to understand a website’s theme and decide which keywords the site is related to. It will also help you get a higher search engine ranking. However, when trying to achieve this, it is important to avoid overloading your webpage with too many of these keywords because search engines consider this practice as keyword stuffing and this can lead to your site getting banned. Finding Out The Best Keyword DensityThere are several tools available online that help SEO’s and webmasters attain an ideal keyword density for a set of keywords. All you have to do is enter your URL in them and these tools will analyze the webpage and check the density of your keywords and keyword phrases contained in your text. Usually these tools indicate the number of times a keyword appears in the content on your webpage and also the percentage.

Article Submission is an ethical SEO strategy that is generally used to promote a website and also gain a steady flow of quality one way links. It is a powerful technique which involves submitting articles in various article directories to gain quick results. When such articles containing unique content are distributed across the web, they can be viewed by a larger audience. This helps the website gain greater publicity, popularity, and traffic. How Article Submission Works?The first step in this process is to write unique and content rich articles. This can either be done by you or by writers hired to write articles for you. Once your article is ready, it should be posted in the article directories. This can be done in two ways:* Using article submission software – here you will have to buy the article submission software in which you can load all your articles and submit them. The software will automatically submit your articles in the article directories. * Hiring professionals for article submission – you can hire professionals who can submit articles for you and save your time that would be spent in doing it yourselfHow Does Article Submission Help?* First, it helps you to get quality one way backlinks which helps in increasing your page rank. * It brings more targeted traffic to your website, since people clicking on the links in any of your articles are prospective customers already. * Article submission helps you gain more credibility in terms of the information provided through your articles. This is because your articles indicate to readers the knowledge that you possess about the topic being discussed. * Article submission is also a very successful marketing strategy for a website as it provides immediate and effective results. * Links that are generated from such content rich pages are always preferred by search engines. * On continuously submitting articles to article directories, it will get a continuous flow of links to your site and this is something that search engines love. How Should Your Articles Be?You must ensure that your articles are unique, SEO friendly, and credible. You must try using the best of your keywords more often in your articles as it will make it more keyword rich. Additionally, make sure that your articles do not contain duplicate content and are exclusive, since search engines usually filter out articles or sites that contain duplicate content. Also, it would be a good idea to create several articles over a period of time and keep submitting them to article directories instead on writing only one article and submitting it to a lot of directories. It is also important to know that regardless of the articles you submit online, if their content is not trustworthy, they will not be of any help. Therefore, you must write articles which contain valuable information so that users will be enticed to click on your link which in turn will drive traffic to your website.

Blog commenting today is another interesting process in SEO that helps in attracting people to a website. By blog commenting we mean leaving behind keyword rich comments on others blogging websites. This technique is used by many bloggers to attract users to their website or entice them to click on links pointing to their website. Usually, if you leave comments on others blogs that are related or relevant to yours, you stand a higher chance of driving more traffic to your website. There are two ways of finding relevant blogs with whom you can exchange links. The first way is to conduct a blog search by submitting an article and then doing a search for your article to know who else is blogging on it. The second option is to perform a search on Google to find the right blogs. If you decide on leaving blog comments to boost your SEO efforts, it is important to pick blogs that contain keyword rich and quality content that is similar to yours and also those that are not overloaded with too many comments. Posting comments on blogs that already have too many comments may not be very helpful as the blogger may or may not link back to you as you would hardly be noticed. However, in order to get the bloggers attention to your comment or posting, you can ask thought provoking yet relevant questions on the subject in the blog. This will help you attract the attention of people towards the link pointing to your site and at the same time will catch the blog owner’s attention as well. This can lead to the owner also engaging in exchanging comments with you. Blog commenting will be mutually beneficial to you as well as the blog site owner since there would be an exchange of words containing keywords and phrases that are generally searched by users. Besides, search engines also love keyword rich and fresh content. The main advantage of blog commenting is that it does not cost you anything to post your comments on blogs and also it acts as a word of mouth publicity for you and establishes your credibility.

If you have gained an insight into the SEO world, you would have come across the word “backlinks” several times. For those new to the SEO industry, you might wonder what backlinks are and how essential they are for the success of websites. In short, a Backlink indicates a link from another site to your website. These are also known as inbound links and their number indicates the popularity of the website. Backlinks are considered as votes by search engines: more the number of votes (backlinks) your website has, and based on the importance of websites linking back to yours, your site is assigned a trust rank. Backlinks today are an important part of the SEO process because when you build quality backlinks, your website stands a higher chance of getting indexed faster by the search engines. Also, from the long term perspective, it will help in boosting quality traffic to your site. Apart from this, building backlinks serves your bottom-line of website visibility by improving your page ranking and ultimately your ranking in the search engines. Additionally, it is not just enough to have lots of backlinks, but, it’s also the quality of backlinks that helps in achieving a better ranking in search engines. When calculating the relevance of a website to a particular keyword, search engines usually take into consideration the number of quality backlinks to that website. Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to websites that contain more number of quality backlinks and also consider those websites as more relevant when compared to others in search results. A backlink is considered as a quality link if:a) It links back to your site with the keyword which you are optimizing for. b) The website linking back to yours has the same theme as your website – this means that when your website contains an inbound link from another site, and that site has content related to your website, this inbound link will be considered as more relevant to your website. However, if this inbound link comes from a site that is totally unrelated to your site content, then it is considered as a less relevant backlink. Therefore, higher the relevancy of backlinks, the greater will be their quality. For instance, if you have a website about furniture and you receive an inbound link from another website also containing furniture, then this backlink will be considered more relevant and of higher quality when compared to a backlink from a florist website. Today, search engines watch out for websites that build quality backlinks slowly over time. Though it is quite easy to maneuver links on webpage’s in order to attain a high ranking, it is much tougher to manipulate search engines with inbound links from other sites. This is also one of the reasons for backlinks gaining increased importance in search engine algorithms. Recently, search engines assessment for quality backlinks has become even tougher as there are many webmasters out there who make use of unethical techniques and deceive search engines to attain a higher ranking. These techniques are not only illegitimate but can also lead to your site getting banned. Lastly, building quality backlinks could be a very time consuming and tedious process requiring a lot of patience, efforts, and also funds. However, it is a crucial step in creating blogs or any website since the quality and relevancy of backlinks can determine the success or failure of the site. Therefore, it is very important that you prioritize this in your SEO activity and hire professional SEO experts to whom you can outsource this task and achieve a better search engine ranking.

Do Follow blogs are those that allow the readers to write their comments on them. As against them, there are No Follow blogs that prevent the placement of comments. While some blog sites allow the readers to offer their comments irrespective of their quality, there are others such as Wordpress that do not allow that. This is done by appending HTML attributes called ‘Do Follow” or “No Follow” to the blogs according to their policies. How to identify the “Do Follow” blogs? If you want to make creative, informative and useful comments on a blog, there is a simple way to identify the “Do follow” blogs. Just hit on the View button on the browser page of the blog post and click on the ‘source’ from the drop down menu. It will open up the source code of the blog post. Then you can use the Search or Find function to see if it has rel=’external’ term near any comment. If you find one, it is a Do Follow blog. If you find the term rel=’external nofollow’ or rel=’nofollow’, it means you cannot make any comments. Advantages of Do Follow Blogs There are several advantages of Do Follow blogs. When you write unique, informative and useful content in a blog, it tends to inspire admiration or disagreement in the readers who are usually impelled to express their opinions by commenting upon it. They may make some references to other relevant content either in their own blogs or in the blogs of others by providing links for further reading. This is how it should be. This is one way to widen the area of knowledge or discussion on the subject of the blog. Another advantage lies in the optimization of the blog from the search engine’s perspective. The comments create back links for the commentators’ blogs. This kind of inter-commenting builds up an interactive community of bloggers on a particular niche or subject and a network of connecting links that are helpful for all the participants. Unfortunately this kind of commenting has degenerated into a kind of spamming for promoting the websites for search engine optimization. The readers of the blog, instead of making any creative and useful comments, just add some inane words followed by links to their own blogs. This may be called artificial link building. Some webmasters have developed software that can find out the blogs of your niche. All you need to do is to fill up the search bar with the niche words or phrase and you get a list of blogs in your niche.   Some software even provide comment templates which can be filled up in the comment areas to get the back links for SEO purpose. While the “No Follow” attribute prevents needless seoing of useless content or spamming, it also prevents the publication of genuine and creative comments. Some adventurous souls have found plugins to circumvent even Wordpress HTML commands for No Follow. What is needed, therefore, is that instead of installing No Follow attributes, the blogger community should encourage its members to desist from spamming and contributing only   informative and useful content in their comments. At the same time, the robots of the search engines, too, have become more sensitive to link harvesting and blacklist the sites whose webmasters resort to such unhealthy practice of link building.

It is evident that quality backlinks are a key factor to the success of SEO. A more important question that now arises is what best you can do to get backlinks while avoiding getting into problems with search engines. The purpose of having backlinks as an element of page rank algorithm is that people will want to link to pages that have quality content. The more the number of backlinks a site has, the better it is. However, practically speaking, you cannot be relying on the fact that your website content is of high quality and therefore people will link to it. No doubt if your site has the most relevant and high quality content, you can get many quality backlinks including from websites that contain themes similar to yours. Nonetheless, getting such inbound links may not always be easy and require a lot of efforts, therefore, you may want to look out for other ways to get quality backlinks. Ways to Build Your BacklinksEven if you manage to get lots of backlinks in a natural way, it is never a bad idea to welcome additional quality inbound links. There are several ways for acquiring backlinks which may be ethical while other ways may be illegitimate and unacceptable and can lead to your site being penalized in the long run. The legitimate ways of getting backlinks include directory submissions, forum posting, linking to other blogs, press releases, etc. Among the unacceptable ways are linking to link farms, buying links in large quantities, getting linked to websites hosting illegal content, linking to other websites that belong to the same person, etc. To start building backlinks, the first step would be to identify sites from where you can acquire quality backlinks. This can be done with the help of Backlink Builder tool which generates a list of websites on entering keywords. Once you get the list of potential sites where you can post messages, articles, or backlinks to your website, the choice is up to you to visit these sites and start posting your content along with an inbound link to your website in it. You may have a question about how websites generated by the backink building tool can provide backlinks free of cost. The answer to your question simply lies in the fact that such sites need content for their site. With you posting and feeding them with content without getting paid for it, helps you to get free quality backlinks in return from them. It is like free trading where you offer something required by others for free and get what you want for free. However, this free trading lasts as long as you post your content to sites that are respected and also as long as you do not end up posting fake content. Below are some of the most successful methods that can be used to build backlinks. Directory SubmissionGetting your site listed in various directories is one of the basic steps that you should start with in your efforts to build backlinks. It may be unlikely to get any significant traffic through directories; however, the idea here is to get backlinks to improve your page ranking. There are several directories to which your site can be submitted. These can range from general directories, blog directories, SEO friendly directories to non-reciprocal directories (directories that allow you to list your website in their directory even if you do not link back to them). Additionally, it is important that you submit your site to only those directories that have a high page rank. It is also important to know that listing a site in directories is a time consuming process as it requires you to first find out quality directories to which you want to submit your site. Once this is done, you have to search through the categories and sub categories in these directories to find out the specific category to which your website belongs. Therefore, keeping the time constraint in mind, it is a good idea to hire a professional SEO company that provides directory submission services so that you can save time and concentrate your efforts and resources on your other core business functions. Forum or Blog Posting and Article DirectoriesForum posting and Blog posting is another way of getting quality backlinks to your site because search engines usually index forums as well. Getting backlinks from blogs or forums that are reputed can be very helpful. However, at times there could be a possibility of your post being edited or deleted by the forum administrator if they find that your posting does not adhere to the forum policy. Moreover, there may be times when the administrators may not allow any links in posts until they are totally relevant. While posting in forums and blogs can be done faster and require lesser efforts, submission of articles to various directories can take a very long time since articles are longer when compared to posts and also involve a though process to write them. However, it would still be worth the time and effort in the long run. Press Releases and News AnnouncementsThough this is not a day to day practice to build quality backlinks, it does fetch good results if done the right way. There are several websites out there which publish press releases or news announcements free of cost or may charge a fee. A press release that is well written can boost visitor traffic to your site and also a backlink from a reputed site to your site is a value addition to your entire SEO efforts. However, a press release can be used as a medium only if there is something newsworthy. That is the reason why press releases and news announcements do not factor in as a daily way to build backlinks. Content ExchangeContent exchange can also be very helpful in getting you quality backlinks. For example, you can provide free RSS feeds to websites that are interested in them. When your RSS feed gets published by the other site, you will get an inbound link to your website. This will also drive a lot of visitor traffic that will visit your website to get more details on the headlines and abstract they read on this other site. Creating Quality ContentCreating professional and quality content is also very important to get more backlinks to your site. This is because content that is well written is always noticeable and there would be more number of people who would want to link to it. Leaving CommentsTo create awareness and get visibility for your site, you can also leave comments on others blogs. Leaving comments that are appealing to read will always have a good chance of drawing the attention of more people to your site. Practices to Avoid While Building BacklinksThere are several ways in which links can be built, however, it is important to realize that certain link building ways can ruin your SEO efforts. One such practice to avoid is link exchange, wherein, when you place a link on another website, that website in return will place a backlink to your website. There are a few things to be considered with this concept of link exchanging. First is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Having more outbound links than inbound links is not good. Second, there could be a possibility of your link partner being a link farm. In this case, your site can get penalized or banned by search engines as link farms are considered as unethical SEO practice. Additionally, you must also be careful about linking to sites that are suspicious or host illegal content. Though search engines will not penalize you for having backlinks from such websites, since you do not have control over what they link to, linking with such sites can ruin your SEO efforts.

It hardly needs to be mentioned that you succeed or fail in your marketing by the amount of trust you generate among your target audience in your brand name. A slight chink in the trust may tell adversely on your reputation as an honest businessman and your sales will start falling immediately. Another reason for a fall in your reputation may be the smear campaign launched by your competitors against you. They may tarnish your name and your business without any valid reason or fault on your part. This kind of injustice is a common phenomenon in the internet marketing. Your competitor writes just one article against you and submits it to hundreds of directories. Alternately, your adversary sponsors AdWords ads against your site on the first page of some popular search engine. The ad may be somewhat like this: Be Careful Of This Fraud (keyword). This is sufficient to annul years of hard work put in by you to bring your business to its present level. Taking steps to maintain and further boost your reputation as an honest businessman in such circumstances is called online reputation management. One way to persuade your competitor is to request him politely to remove the offending comments and then threaten him with legal action if he still persists. If this tactic also fails, it would be better to fight him out at his own ground, that is, by playing the SEO game with him. You can try to push the page/site with offensive comments to the second results page of search engine, for example, Google.   This can be achieved through several steps;1. Push other sites that have lower rank than your competitor’s site above it on the Google research page. Assuming the site with the negative comments against you ranks fourth on Google page, you should try to boost the rank of the sites below it to supersede it to a higher rank. You can do so by applying SEO techniques. You can, for example, add favorable comments on this site. Book mark it in as many social media sites such as Technocrati, Digg, Delicious etc as possible. You may even write positive reviews about it on the home page of your site by placing links at suitable places. 2. Ask someone you know who commands authority for his site to write a good review for your site and publish the same on your home page saying: What others are saying about us. 3. Create new content and syndicate it through articles, blogs, newsletters, etc for seoing your own site. You may also submit the content for syndication through RSS feeds. In this way you can indirectly persuade the audience to ignore the comments against your site. 4. Create new sub-domains or sister domains of your site. Google often considers the sub-domains as different sites, but they command the same authority as the primary domain. Post preferably new content on the sub-domain site. You need not fill it with hundreds of pages. Just 10-12 pages should suffice. Reputation management basically involves delivering (sometimes over-delivering) what you promise in terms of quality and quantity. Once this trust is built up, it is difficult for your adversaries to shake it.