Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Is SEO a Necessity for Website Promotion?

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Being a website owner, you strive for business growth and increase in search engine rankings for better productivity. For all the website owners, the challenge is to promote the website to register high traffic and enhance organic search engine rankings in Google and Yahoo! Consumers consider your ranking to analyze your company’s products and services. When so much rides on the ranking of your website, it is but natural on your part to seek a boost in traffic and increase in conversion rate. Therein lies the role of SEO. Search Engine Optimization can help you achieve the result you desire.

Doesn’t matter how good or attractive your website is, if you don’t have a strong online presence, the effort is well not worth it! Your website is your “billboard” that needs endorsement to attract business. While all the advertising, banners and paid ads can add to endorse your site, it’s only search engine optimization that can boost your website ranking, generate more web traffic and build up site popularity.

While SEM or search engine marketing is arguably the best way to improve website ranking through the use of search engine optimization, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion, not always are these paid services a cost-effective bet for site owners. Comparatively, search engine optimization is a far lucrative stake in boosting site visibility and ranking.

SEO is no small business and involves humungous management and constant innovation. To ensure that your website ranking stays on top and to steal the spotlight, through optimization you constantly need to come up with competitive keywords and unique content to reserve the top slot. Remember that strong content is the only key to survive the race and draw constant traffic.

The key to remain in the race for long and survive higher website ranking is to constantly furnish your site with relevant information. This would draw loyal customers and will help to erect a strong customer buildup in the future. SEO helps to equip the site with significant content and hold on to the customer buildup.

Search Engine Optimization supports indexed form of promotion. This means that if you are allied to a search engine or an online directory which uses the SEO technique, you will automatically connect to all other search engines which would gain your site immense popularity world wide with just one search engine.

Directory submission is an inexpensive search engine optimization technique chosen by millions of internet savvy business owners across the globe. Other than being affordable, there are numerous benefits of directory submissions. Website promotion through directory submission service can bring a difference for your internet business and give it the standing edge amongst its competitors. The first and the most beneficial reason is that directory submission as a part of your website promotion can boost your link popularity significantly. In the search engine ranking algorithm this is one of the significant ranking factors. Directory submission helps your website get listed on prime search engines, improves visits from search engine robots, targets keywords and so on. These factors make directory submission a popular choice for website owners.

SEOMixi.com is one such manual directory submission provider that offers the benefit of quality SEO service combined with other useful SEO tools like press release distribution, social bookmarking etc. qualifying for best website promotion services to ensure great results.

Possible Ways to Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Keyword stuffing is a SEO black hat technique where you repeat the same keyword or key phrases in a webpage (which includes title, meta, hyperlinks and content) again and again. The page looks very unnatural when anybody reads it. Since this is one of the ways to manipulate search engine results, if caught you will be penalized for it. Penalty can range anything from a drop in your search ranking to getting totally removed from search page ranking altogether without prior notice.

Until sometime back there were a lot of websites which used keyword stuffing to increase their search engine rankings. But to overcome this problem and deter rank tampering, Google devised ways to avoid this so that the search results were authentic, and its algorithms were not tricked with by such keyword stuffing. Though the actual checks which Google algorithms impose to find out if a webpage has been keyword stuffed is unknown, but there are some pointers on what to do or what not to do to avoid keyword stuffing.

First of all your content should be natural to read: If you repeat the same word again and again it will become annoying and not make any impression on its intended readers. So if you write something like this:

‘Mobiles are everywhere. Mobiles help us to be mobile. There are various mobile companies, Nokia mobiles, Samsung mobiles, Tata mobiles, LG mobiles’

This will turn out to be a classic case of keyword stuffing. But that does not mean you cannot use keywords. Generally 3 to 7 percent of keywords in the whole of your webpage are considered to be a good practice. Something over 10% is doing too much. It is always a better idea to add your keywords in the beginning of your composition. In fact adding keywords in your title and Meta tags is advisable. Search engine algorithms give more prominence to keywords if they come at the start of a page. But you cannot do that every time as that way your content flow may look odd, so in that case you can add keywords in the middle or end of the page as well.

Sometimes it is expected that you will be using a word again and again in a page. For example, if you are in the business of cycles, then it is expected that ‘cycle’ word will appear repeatedly in your text. This type of usage will not be considered as a spamming tactic and you will not be penalized for it. Also, it will be better to combine and use both the plural and singular form of ‘cycle’ than using just the singular ‘cycle’ word. This is because if an exact search is being carried out then in that case ‘cycles’ word will not turn up in search results whereas vice-versa is possible. Exact search is when a user types the words for which search query is to be made within quotation marks.

Keyword optimization and not keyword stuffing is the correct SEO technique. Besides, the directory submission service of manual directory submission to web directories for website submission, article writing and submission, blog writing and submission, social bookmarking and other SEO tools are helpful in the overall optimization of a website.

How to Create a Sitemap

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Sitemap is a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users. It can either be a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design or a web page that lists the pages of a website, typically organized in a hierarchical fashion. Home page and other pages of a web site have a link to the web site’s sitemap. These links let you know as to where you can find each type of page. Site map facilitates navigation, and is beneficial both for the users as well as the search engines. Site maps are used by search engines to index your site; hence it works as an effective tool for SEO.

There are two types of sitemaps, HTML page or an XML file. HTML website is a single page showing all the pages of that website with their links. XML sitemaps are used by search engine crawlers to find the pages present and the changes made. Site map can be created by hand coding HTML or by using sitemap tools called sitemap generators. To create a site map manually, what you need is a note book and a program editor. First of all, make a list of all the parts of your website on a note pad or any word processing program. Make a draft including all pages and links. Now insert the site map on either one of the pages of web site or an altogether new page. Tag your site map using your website creator program. Then, create a link for the site map on the front page of the website for an easy access to the users. Check the functionality of each and every link on your sitemap, and remove the loop holes, if any. Finally, upload your work by placing your site map on a live browser and double check it.

To create an XML site map, go to xml-sitemaps. Enter your full website URL, choosing other options. From the drop down list, mention the frequency of updation. Choose an option of last modification, and let the priority be automatic. Click start, and wait for your site map to be generated. Download your .xml file by clicking the link. Finally, upload the sitemap.xml file to the directory of your website.

Web sitemap generators like Google Sitemap Generator, and XML Sitemap Generator create sitemaps automatically that are supported by search engines like Google and Yahoo. Sitemaps are so important to Google that they recently launched a free service where site maps can be created and submitted directly to Google, so that indexing and crawling of pages can be facilitated. Whether a site map is manually generated or automated, purpose served is the same. A site map greatly helps the users to visualize as to what exactly your site has to offer, help with indexing for your site and improves the ranking of your web site. Just like directory submission, site maps also contribute in increasing the number of inbound links. Site maps which are an integral part of any SEO package besides other key tools like keyword analysis, content management, link building campaigns, directory submissions and rank monitoring, work collectively in order to achieve a common goal of optimization of the web site.

How To Improve A Website Loading Speed?

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Who doesn’t like things that are fast and instant? In today’s scenario, no one has time to wait for anything. We take aid of equipments to save time and speed up our work. In every sphere of life this is applicable. And online business is no exception. Tools that can assure better and faster results are getting accepted globally.

A slow website loses visitors while a faster website lures in more. If your website is running slow, it can pose as a threat for your future growth. It is important to detect the reasons that are slowing down your website and rectify them at the earliest. Though there are several factors that can slow down your website, the tricky part is that those problems can be solved depending on your ability to decipher them. To ensure a great online experience for your visitors, enable quick website loading time and fast browsing speed. Here you can read about the vital tips to speed up your website and drive in more traffic to your site.

Tips To Improve Website Loading Speed

Does your website take a painfully long time to load, taxing user’s time and tolerance and causing them to move away? If yes, then getting a fast speed and less-loaded web server should make sense. Ensure that your host server is not overcrowded and has low ping values, more so if you use dynamic files like ASP, PHP etc. or have a database.

If slow site load speed is cutting into your website efficiency, then using XHTML instead of tables should help. Tables take much time than DIVs to be rendered by the browsers which have higher compatibility ratio. However, for more logical usage like drawing a “tabular data” and other simple images, tables are any day a better option.

Another good way to improve web speed is to merge and compress JavaScript Files to reduce multiple includes. For instance, if you are using JavaScript file for a couple of pages, its best to compress these files within the page. Doing so wouldn’t just lower the size of the page but would also increase the efficiency of your site.

Web pages at times include files like JavaScript files for widgets, social sites, and statistics services etc, CSS files and more actually slows down your website. The cue is to decrease the number of files from your site. Always use host files and never use web addresses as file paths. If possible use only one statistic. PHP Speedy is an effective solution to increase web speed efficiency.

Websites that do not employ well-coded systems like Expression Engine, Drupal, Wordpress etc. have unusually slow performance. Dynamic coding directly influences the performance. Having static and dynamic content and smart and effective functions will help. Also try to keep the database sizes small.

Besides increasing the website speed to improve your online business, off page methods like directory submission too play a vital role in the overall success of website optimization. But it may not always be possible to get the desired results in short time or to sustain them over a long period. Directory submissions may not always be able to produce great and instant results in the short run but are proven SEO tools for long term online success. Thus you need to keep your focus on directory submissions to emerge as leaders over a long haul. At SeoMixi.com we offer the best directory submission service for manual directory submission to make your website reach thousands of other websites across the web.

Promotion of a Blog Page

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Are you one of those who have just started a new blog but do not know how to make it popular? To make your blog popular you need to promote it in various ways. Some of the ways to promote your blog and get people flocking to it are:

1. Create an RSS feed of your Content to make it popular: RSS feeds helps in distributing your content in the form of blog summaries to others. Most of the blog services provide this facility but if you do not have one, you can generate it using free software available on the internet. Also add URL of your RSS feeds across various RSS search engines.

2. Article Directories are a great way of getting backlinks and traffic to your blog: To be popular, submit some well-written articles in these article directories. You need to add a link to your blog at the end of these articles. If people find content of your article good enough they would like to read more of your content and for that they will click the link of your blog and reach to you. You can take the help of an article directory submission service company like SEOMixi.com for manual directory submission of your articles.

3. Social Bookmarking sites can be great way of generating traffic to your blog: For that you need to write a great article and submit it to various social bookmarking sites. If article has some worth it will get bookmarked by many which will drive traffic to your blog.

4. Comment on other people’s blogs to become popular: This is one of the easiest yet quite effective ways of promoting your blog. But the comment should not be just generic like ‘Hello, nice Blog’ types. You should write relevant comment to the blogs so that your comments add quality to the after-discussion of the blog post. Since most of the blogs these days make the comment section of blogs as “nofollow” so you need to write a genuine comment to be noticed by others. Also you need to be regular in putting up comments. When you keep on leaving comments in various blogs then sooner or later the blog owners will start coming to your own blog as well and your blog will become popular.

5. Use social media websites like Twitter, Digg, and Reddit to promote your blog, since social media is a great medium of communicating with people whom you know or would like to know. So posting link of your blog post will be a great way of telling them about your latest post and driving traffic to your website.

6. Provide answers in your niche areas in various forums: This way you can share your knowledge with others. If you provide some valuable suggestions to questions put up in these forums then forum members will be more interested in reading rest of your content as well. And if they like what they see, they will do more publicity of your blog and you can see traffic exploding in your blog.

How to increase your website traffic using blog sites

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Writing blogs is an excellent way of increasing traffic to your anchor website because blogs are a medium to become visible and popular through active interaction with other web users. Blogs become the link between the main website and potential customers. They start collecting valuable backlinks and direct them to your website.

Starting a blog is quite easy; blog sites like Word Press and Blogger.com offer ready-to-use formats. You can customize a blog page by selecting from different template looks, lay-out of the page, colour etc. You can start posting immediately, but there are a few areas to pay attention to for optimizing the blogs so it can send maximum traffic to the parent website.

Blogs should be themed on the website: The content of the blogs should be built around the website that you wish to optimize. The niche of your blog will determine the type of links it will garner so to direct relevant traffic to your website write on related topics. Also, your blog can start attracting free traffic from social bookmarking sites around the niche.

Optimizing the title: As with article directory submission, blogs too should be optimized by giving correct titles to blog posts. Include keywords in the title and try to keep the keywords in the beginning of it, because that is the route the search engine spiders take. A good title is also essential for catching the attention of a reader.

Winning subscribers: Getting a reader to subscribe is important because chances of conversions increase with regular visitors. This can be done by adding a prominent RSS feed button or offering subscription via e- mail or adding a line at the end of the post that says-‘Liked this post? Subscribe for more.’

Update with new blogs: Especially in the beginning few days of starting a blog try to post once a day. Write about the new products/ services on your website, illuminate readers to their benefits and leave a link to the website. This is important because search engines index active blogs fairly quickly, giving them higher Page Rank. This will ensure that your blog appears on the 1st result page, in plain view of net searchers.

Communicate with other blog writers: Browse for quality blogs on related topics and interact with their writers through meaningful comments. This is the best way to build links and direct traffic to your website.

Follow your commenter: Respond to genuine comments that you get on your blog, engage the commenter with queries etc., you can expand on the benefits of your products/ services but do not be too pushy.

Directory Submission: Manual directory submission of blogs to high PR blog directories will get you natural contextual links. These quality links will drive huge traffic to your website.

Blogs are a natural search engine driver. By choosing the right keywords, good content, regular post updates and right directory submissions, they can become instrumental in increasing traffic to your website.

Common problems with SEO

Monday, August 30th, 2010

When optimizing a website, you cannot afford to make mistakes that can mar your page ranking in the search results. There exist some common SEO problems which the webmasters around the world face, varying from site to site, but are subsisting throughout. It doesn’t matter if you are an amateur webmaster or a savvy site author, picking the wrong keywords is a blunder that even the most pro SEOs can’t seem to evade.

Keywords make-or-break your website rankings! So it’s important to get your keywords right to peak your search engine listings and multiply web traffic. Here are crucial guidelines that can fix your problems and help you avoid the common SEO mistakes.

One of the sure-fire ways to botch up search engine rankings is to duplicate meta-tags from any other source. Most SEOs seem to bungle up with their meta-tags so far as originality is concerned. Understand that original and innovative meta-tag is one definite way to pep up search rankings. The cue is to use unique title, meta-tags and keyword tags for each page.

If you are a pro webmaster, then you possibly are no stranger to the importance of title tags. Title tags are the text that appear on the browser window and get displayed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Translating your keywords into title tags will step up your rankings. However, make sure that your title tags don’t exceed 60-70 characters. Title tags with more than required characters are overlooked by the search engines. So keep an eye on your character count when framing the title tag.

Most web designers tend to integrate animated banner advertisements and flash intros to add a professional feel to their websites. While Flash ad adds to the attraction of the sites, it could lower the search rankings. Search engine spiders or crawlers find it difficult to index the content text that in a way decreases the ranking. Always offer an HTML alternative to your Flash website to boost its usability and your ranking.

Proper way of directory submission is also vital to achieve the right SEO goals. What webmasters need to realize is that automated directory submission can pose as a hurdle on the way to achieve your long term targets whereas manual directory submission with exclusive descriptions and headings on each directory can aid with better page rank. SEOs while doing the link building and directory submission should use unique title and descriptions on each link through manual directory submission.

Organization is another oft-ignored aspect of SEO which most webmasters tend to under rate. Know that websites with well-organized content have greater chances of winning higher web rankings. Always use heading tags like h1, h2, h3 etc. to organize your text. It will improve the readability of your content and the way search engines index it.

In order to avoid problems and mistakes with on and off page optimization of your website, it is prudent to hire the services of specialized professionals. SEOMixi.com is one of the leading SEO companies offering top notch optimization services like directory submission, social bookmarking, blog writing, press release submission etc. to their clients through a skilled and efficient team of professionals.

Best way to generate a sitemap for Google

Monday, August 30th, 2010

A Sitemap is a list of all the pages of a website and the URLs contained within them to facilitate the search bots in finding and indexing them. Sitemaps help in search engine optimization of a website and are especially useful for large and dynamic sites using menus such as Adobe Flash, JavaScript and Ajax that do not include HTML links, because these are not normally processed by search engines. Sitemap is an index of a site for the benefit of the search engine spiders. Google started Google Sitemaps to facilitate web masters in optimizing their sites and now all 4 major search engines viz. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask follow the same Sitemaps Protocol.

The best way to generate a Sitemap for Google is the Google Sitemap Generator. It produces Sitemaps in XML and can be easily installed on various operating systems and web servers including Windows and Linux. It works by analyzing the web server traffic to your website and then building Sitemap files containing the URLs that you want to be tracked by search engines. It also processes each URL for metadata such as the latest updates, frequency of change and its relative importance vis-a-vis the other links in the site.

It is better to create Sitemaps under The Sitemap Protocol 0.9 because all the main search engines support it. This format consists of XML tags. (XML is considered more precise than HTML coding). You can use an XML syntax validator like ‘W3C Markup Validator’ to help make your pages error free. Sitemaps can also be just a plain text list of URLs- the Sitemap Protocol file specifications of XML Sitemaps include text Sitemaps as well. The file must be UTF-8 encoded.

Google Sitemaps generated are easy to configure and have the options of a) Generating and submitting Sitemaps for not only the web but also Google powered Mobile, Code search and Blog search. b) Different URL collection mechanisms such as web server filter and file scanner. c) Specifying patterns for selection of URLs. d) Setting Sitemap generation schedule. If you want to tweak the initial configuration settings, it can be done by using web- based administration console.

Once a Sitemap has been created, it can be submitted to the search engines by configuring the Sitemap Generator in one of the following ways: a) Put the Sitemap URL in the robots.txt file so that it can be found by the spiders, b) To submit (ping) directly to specific search engines, c) Submit through Google Webmaster Central.

Sitemaps generated through Google Sitemap Generator also take care of keeping your private user data safe. All URL query fields which may contain private information such as passwords and names are removed from the URLs before including them in a Sitemap.

Another benefit of using Google Sitemap generator is that once it has been installed on the web server, you can use it for all your sites on that server. Each site can be configured individually through the administration console.

You can opt for getting Sitemaps for your website done professionally by soliciting the services of SEO companies like SEOMixi.com. At SEOMixi you will find a whole gamut of SEO services including article directory submission, forum posting, RSS directory submission etc. which are all done through manual directory submission.

Boost the page rank of your website

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Once you are through with the creation of your web site, the main concern now will be to stimulate traffic and add more visitors to your website to achieve a high page rank. One of the most important elements of online business success is a website’s ranking with the search engines. Overall importance of a website can be estimated through its page rank. SEO is definitely the finest approach to achieve a high page rank. Below are certain important factors that can boost the page rank of your web site.

Good content: This automatically increases your site’s popularity and rank as quality unique content is much valued by search engines and readers alike.

Give an effective title to your site: Title should be short as well as descriptive, including a few important keywords. Though short, title should be able to explain as to what exactly your site has to offer. If the title is attractive enough, it will definitely grab clicks from the users. Title should be moderately rich in keywords, using less of filler words.

Write a descriptive Meta tag: The description should give complete and a clear idea as to how this site can be beneficial to the user. Meta tags must include the keywords on the page, but one has to be cautious of overcrowding keywords.

Using keywords in headers (H1,H2,H3): Make sure that your desired keywords appear in one or two header tags as search engines consider keywords that appear on the page headlines and sub heads to be important on that page.

Keywords in the first paragraph: Locating the keywords in the beginning of a composition as compared with the rest of the body helps it to get accounted for by the search engines faster.

Search engines reads only texts and not images: Use meaningful and short Alt text to describe your image. Image linking, image title and clear file names add up to visibility of the page. Do not forget to hyperlink your keywords.

Navigation system should be search engine friendly: Regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, supplement Java script and Flash menus ensure proper hyper linking to take a search engine spider to every page of your website from your home page.

Site map creation: A Site map lists all your pages in a single page layout so that visitors and search bots have an easy idea about all your pages, thus increasing your page rank.

Promoting local business on the internet: Aim should be to inform maximum people about your site and its products. So advertize on each page of the website your business address, phone number etc. to get noticed by users.

Optimize video, audio content: As search engines like Google display not only the webpage content but also videos and audio clips in search results, including them in your website can help boost overall web ranking.

Linking Strategies: Inbound links from popular and top listed sites raise your web site’s rank. Page rank determines quality and quantity of incoming links.

Directory Submission: Directory submission is an important tool of SEO to boost up the page rank. Manual directory submission creates one way link to your website, thereby increasing the flow of traffic towards your site in order to gain a good rank. It is a good optimization strategy to submit your site to specialized directories by utilizing directory submission service.

Issue new releases: Regular press releases about your business and industry improve traffic as your site covers the latest news and catches viewer attention.

The general optimization list is endless. Linked with other functions like article writing and marketing, forum posting, social bookmarking etc. together with all the above factors, one can expect guaranteed returns in terms of good page rank.

SEO – Friendly tools and their benefits

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Search Engine Optimization is a technical process that helps to get a higher page rank for a website. There are many different software designed specifically to assist in SEO called SEO tools. Some are provided by search engines like Google and Yahoo! and some are created by other companies. A lot of software is available free of cost while some have to be bought for a fee. Based on their function, the primary SEO tools have been categorized below:

Web Analytics Tools:

Web analytics help you to measure your website’s performance. They let you track the number of visitors to the site, number of times each page was viewed, which landing pages lead to higher conversions, which are the keywords that sent you the most traffic and which external links are sending traffic to your site. This data will allow you to track the profitable areas of your website and the areas that need improvement. Some popular web analytics tools are:

a) Google analytics is a free but powerful tool that gives you data on all the above said points. It allows you to integrate Google Adwords to track the conversion rate of each keyword.

b) Advanced Web Statistics (AWStats) and Webalizer - both are good for basic data analysis and are available by default on some servers.

d) Clicky and Mint- both are inexpensive tools similar to Google analytics.

f) Click - is relatively expensive and can be downloaded or hosted. It offers superior analysis and is very easy to use; even for non- techies.

Keyword Research Tools:

These provide you the keywords that are more likely to be typed in by an internet user when browsing the net. Some of them are:

a) Google Adwords Keywords Suggestion Tool gives list of useful keywords appropriate for your niche.

b) Google Suggest Tool for key phrases.

c) Word tracker Keyword Question shows you the likely questions asked containing your keyword.

Competitive Research Tools:

Knowing your competitors’ strategies for promoting their website can give you valuable insight for SEO of your own site. Some competitor analysis tools are:

a) Compete.com Search Analytics shows the keywords that send the most traffic to competing sites.

b) Keyword Spy shows the keywords that competitors are buying.

c) SEO Digger shows you keywords and search positions against a domain name.

d) SEMRush shows you which keywords send traffic to a particular domain, list of top ten sites using those keywords.

e) IndexRank compares the ranking of your site with your competitors’ on Google.

PPC Tools:

Help you analyze your Pay Per Click advertising budget. You can analyze dynamically how much to bid for which keywords.

a) Google Traffic Estimator gives an estimate of number of ad clicks and bid prices for Google Adwords.

b) CPC ROI Calculator and CPM ROAS Calculator show you how much you should pay for an ad.

c) Click tracks Bid Optimizer

d) Google Conversion Optimizer helps you increase your profits by maximising your CPA (cost per acquisition) hence ROI.

Link Analysis tools:

Link building is essential for SEO of any website. There are tools to tell you if they are inward or outbound links, good sites to get links from and sources of your competitors’ links.

a) Back Link Analyzer lets you analyze link anchor text and know the sources of competitors’ back links.

b) Link Harvester tells you the sites with multiple links to your website, total pages indexed and number of C block IP address.

c) Google Webmaster Central for an overall view of your links shows you any breaks in the link chain and gives you access to Google site maps.

d) Xenu Link Sleuth tracks broken links.

Search Engine Rankings Checker:

Lets you track your rankings on the search engine pages and see the progress. It lets you see your rank on multiple keywords. These tools save you a lot of time from checking each keyword individually by manual input.

a) Advanced Web Ranking

b) Rank Tracker

For those who find the many tools of SEO mind – boggling, you can easily engage a SEO service provider like SEOMixi.com which offer optimization services like manual directory submission and other directory submission service like article submission, search engine submission etc.