Advanced SEO

December 7, 2011

So many website owners believe Search Engine Optimization is magical, at least that is how they act when the topic of SEO comes up. I almost always hear black hat Search Engine Optimization techniques when people talk about how they get traffic to their Website. When I tell someone that their advertising strategy is black hat, they look at me like I am speaking another language.

What is a black hat?

I always explain that the term black hat originates from Country Westerns where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats. When the term black hat is used in reference to Search Engine Optimization, it means you are doing something very stupid and while it might be helping your site right now, it will destroy your site in the long run.

Some very popular black hat SEO techniques that we will be covering and explaining why they are bad will be keyword stuffing and abusing HTML code.

What is Keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing can be done in several ways and all of them are very bad and will get your website removed from search engines, so your site really is invisible. One popular way to stuff keywords is to write the same word or a variation of words over and over on a page to up your SEO traffic. You may see a boost in traffic to your site, but how long do those people stay at your site? Most likely less than 3 seconds, just enough time to hit the back key. Another popular keyword stuffing technique is to do what is listed above, but make the words invisible so people won’t see them. People may not see them, but Search Engines will! If you view the source of the webpage you will see the so called “hidden” text. These techniques are surefire ways to get you banned from search engines like Google.

What is HTML code?

HTML code is the most popular language used to write a website in. HTML is very easy to learn, but also very easy to abuse. People who are desperate for traffic will hear about metadata description tags (that is already out-dated as an on-site optimization source for better rankings) and that search engines use them to help rank a website. Some people will fill the description tag to the brim with words that are irrelevant to their site. People will not want to go to a site that has a description that makes no sense and search engines will remove you for this or at least lower your ranking on their search engine. Another form of abusing the description tag is stuffing it full of words that are relevant to your site, but put together make no sense whatsoever. Sure, you may have a site about electronics and technology, but having your description just full of words that have to do with electronics and technology, well that will get you banned. A well written description uses terms that are searched for a lot and has to do with what your site is about.

Black Hat SEO — Image by Searchenginepeople.com

Another abused tag is H1.
H1 stands for Header 1, which is the biggest font that HTML generates on its own. This tag is used for titles of a blog or the title of a page, but some people decide to use h1 for their entire site. Yup, this will really hurt your sites ranking when the search engines find out and trust me they will find out. two last abused tags are the strong tag and the b tag, they both do the same exact thing, they make the text bold, but to much bold text can be bad for a site. Bold text is used to say something is important. I know your entire site is important, but you have to decide which words or sentences should be in bold. This is very important, because if bold is used properly it will raise your ranking with the search engines, but if used improperly, well the search engines may find it as spam.

In conclusion, if you need your site to show up well on a search engine do a lot of research on SEO, watch videos by Matt Cutts, the lead anti-spam Engineer that works at Google and if you can’t learn SEO, then hire a firm that does it for a living. Be careful when hiring a firm, because there are a lot of firms out there that still practice black hat SEO, so the least you should do is tell them not to do anything that I list as being black hat.

This article has been written by Ryan Satterfield from Planetzuda.com, a game reviews, tech news and reviews website.

Advanced SEO

Effective Web Design Can Boost Your SEO

November 29, 2011

Rad Basta

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There is a big debate as to whether good website design and layout can really help search engine optimisation, with many branding it as a trick to convince businesses to get a new website. However, I am going to present the argument that a well thought-out, error-free and well coded website, is easier to rank, than a site that is outdated, slow and poorly structured.

My first piece of evidence is taken from Google AdWords. Quality Score in Google AdWords is worked out partly through click-through rate and keyword relevance but also page relevance. This shows that Google does look at landing pages to determine the quality of a listing in their search network. So why should Google not think to take a look at landing pages in their natural search listings, where competition to appear here is far higher?

Next, the Google Webmaster Central blog continually hands out advice on optimising your site for search – including canonical URLs, duplicate content and redirects. Why would Google give these tips out if it wasn’t looking for sites to be updated with the information?

As competition gets higher and higher to appear on the coveted first page of Google for selected search terms, Google must be looking to always improve the quality of the sites shown. Once all pages on page one have on-page SEO sorted, and a similar number of links built with appropriate anchor text, it will need something else to look at to determine which site should be shown where. Quality websites will most definitely have a lower bounce rate and a better page/view rating. With all that access to Google Analytics data, is it too far-fetched to consider that Google wouldn’t consider these elements in its rankings?

At the end of the day, it is in your interest to have a well-designed site. It will attract more website visitors, and most likely convert more visitors into sales or enquiries. As more and more people visit your site, they are more likely to share it using social media if they have enjoyed using it. People might write reviews, blog posts or simply just social bookmark your site. All of these actions lead to a ‘natural link portfolio’ that hasn’t been ascertained using spam methods, and are therefore likely to help your site rank higher and stay higher.

If you’ve had any experience in ranking high quality sites over poorly designed ones, feel free to let us know by commenting below.
This article has been written on behalf of Bigfork Ltd, a Norwich web design agency.

Advanced SEO

Top 5 Ways to Know the Psyche of Target Audience and Traffic

November 21, 2011

Rad Basta

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We generally miss lots of traffic related data. These data are extremely important for us because they help us to analyse the various aspects of viewers’ activity. Once these data are analysed, they can be extremely helpful in planning our online promotion strategies.
Many of the site owners use Google Analytics for analysing traffic behavior. However, many information/data still remain unexplored. By not collecting or exploring traffic related data of a site, the site owners are really leaving huge amount of opportunities. Once you collect these data and analyse them, you can chalk out a better online marketing plan, reach more users and monetise the unexplored traffic.

Many SEO services are helping site owners with these advanced traffic data services so that a comprehensive plan can be chalked out to get more targeted traffic and business. With more data and information you can get better insight and deeper engagement. 5 types of actionable data are given below that can leverage your site’s performance:

1. PollDaddy

It is a site that provides you with quantitative survey solution. This is a paid service, but the charges are less and affordable. In the business world, PollDaddy is considered as one of the most talked about site. It provides you with one-off polls along with survey data. Now, a question may arise that if it provides polling solutions then why not get the same service free of cost from other free polling sites? PollDaddy is not a polling site only. It gives much more information to its customers and some of these survey data include:

Report generation
Exporting of data
Management of Twitter polls

If you opt for its free version then you will get limited survey solution, amounting to 100 responses per month. In case of the Pro version, i.e. the paid version, the price of the service is less than $20 per month.

2. Urtak

This site is a relatively new one. Urtak conducts collaborative polls. It helps bloggers and site owners to know precisely what a community is thinking on a certain topic. Urtak can be placed on a website as a widget. This site is not same as any other polling site because Urtak.com allows its users to frame and place polling questions at the site. Thus, a blogger or website owner can get more customised data on issues concerning its own business.

3. Formspring

Formspring allows anyone to ask questions publicly. This site is a new one in the block and is online for the last 6 months only. However, its popularity is expanding at a rapid pace, which in one word can be regarded as explosive. Within this short span of time, it has recorded a whooping 50 million visitors per month. The most interesting aspect of this site is that it caters to all types of business verticals and topics (musicians, high school kids, rabbis, bloggers, etc.). Now, businesses, celebrities, bloggers or site owners can know for sure what their users, followers or fans want to know about them or their products/services. Formspring gives enhanced interactivity with friends, followers, fans and users and consequently better insight in the business demand, eliminating the guess work.

4. UserVoice

UserVoice is a unique and fast feedback delivery concept. You can now place a feedback form in your blog or site by cutting and pasting the UserVoice script. Installation of this feedback forum allows users of a site or blog to give their suggestions/ideas and also vote on various features that are needed to be included in the design and content. Free as well as paid options are available.

5. Hunch

It not only provides its users with advanced recommendation engine but also provides psycho-graphic and demographic data. A business or blogger or website owner can know about the needs and thinking pattern over a certain spectrum. You can get census data as well as cross blog comparisons from Hunch.com.

About Author: Derick Branson is an experienced writer, SEO analyst, web design expert and online marketer. He has amassed a total experience of more than 10 years. Derick has worked for many leading online marketing companies. Read his articles to know more about SEO services, social media marketing and web designing.

Advanced SEO

The Pitfalls of Guest Blogging for Webmasters

November 10, 2011

Rad Basta

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Guest blogging is often ultimately regarded as a controversial technique due to abuse by both bloggers and webmasters. Although many bloggers do take it seriously and many far-reaching relationships have been established thanks to the joy of guest blogging, it is widely known that a dark side also exists (as with pretty much anything). However, in most cases, we talk a lot about the pitfalls for bloggers without stopping to consider how these can also affect webmasters. Thankfully, this article does just that, as it outlines how the act of opening one’s blog to guest writers can often backfire.

The first thing that pops to mind is that guest blogging needs a hefty dose of moderation. Due to the number of people trying to build links en masse with absolutely no regard for the webmaster’s feelings, simply announcing that you are open to guest submissions and allowing posts to be automatically published to your blog is bound to lead to many people adding your blog to their automatic link building software. Unfortunately, automatic link building software is labeled as such for a reason, which means that any articles obtained through these will be of extremely poor quality.

Guest Post — Image by mollermarketing.com

As such, as the webmaster you will find yourself dedicating a lot of time to deleting garbage submissions that relentlessly advertise those high suspicious Viagra and pornographic websites. This may sound manageable for a little website but as the news get out among the black hat community that there is no screening process for a submission, you may suddenly find yourself inundated with guest posts that eventually turn your once cherish blog into an A-level link farm.

Of course, the act of moderating each post before publication can prevent this but as your blog becomes more important and thus more visited, you may find yourself dealing with unmanageable levels of spam submissions. Obviously, there are anti-spam functions to deal with these but spammers are also becoming cleverer, and the ease with which they can change IPs or submit spun versions of the same article 15 times within 10 sections is becoming absurd. Many blogs that used to accept guest authors and were great places to reach out to a new audience have had to shut down their guest blogging option for these simple reasons.

The problem of spam and garbage guest post submissions is still only the one (albeit the biggest) problem from the webmaster’s point of view. There are other pitfalls that most webmasters will need to learn to successfully navigate through once they start accepting guest articles. The first is that they will need to learn how to handle with people from different backgrounds. For example, you may find yourself getting submissions from people who are actually trying to make acceptable submissions but for whom English is not their first language.

Once this happens, you may feel like lashing out, especially after having to wade through two dozen of horrible guest posts on a single day. This would of course be quite unfair on the blogger who is only trying his best and is a far cry from the hordes of spammers you are usually dealing with, and something like this can tarnish your reputation with your existing audience. The bottom line is that once you open your blog to guest authors, you need to be able to cope with several situations that you have probably never encountered before.

Ashvin writes on behalf of the New Emerald Cove Hotel, a Seychelles private island hotel located in Praslin. To find out more, visit the Emerald Cove website at http://www.emerald.sc.

Advanced SEO

How News Became Central to Content Marketing

November 7, 2011

Rad Basta

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Content marketing is one of the fastest-growing forms of online marketing, with more businesses than ever looking for a content strategy in order to give their website more authority with both the users and the search engines.

One of the biggest obstacles facing businesses looking for content, however, is what to write and how often. Sourcing a constant stream of content to publish on a website is more difficult than it sounds, with many writing a great deal of contention the first days and weeks before finding the ideas begin to run dry.
For this reason, news feeds have become more popular for businesses looking at content for their websites.

Content Marketing Cycle — Image by contentmarketinginstitute.com

With it being ever-changing, news provides exactly what marketers could want – authoritative and informed topics that are refreshed extremely regularly. Depending on the business, news stories could create any number of articles; from just a few to many scores each month.

News feeds also provide ways to link in to your website, giving readers an easy way through to the part of your business that deals with the same subject as the news story covers. By linking these “keywords” in the news story, users can read up about the topic, and then click through to the relevant part of your business page.
Not only this, news are highly regarded in the eyes of the search engines, provided that the written content is unique. Simply copying/pasting from news sites is not only plagiarism but publishing duplicate content, something the search engines deem as “spammy” and therefore punish the website with lower rankings as a result. By writing it in a different way, however; it is deemed unique and given more authority.

So content itself may be a struggle to come up with, but seeking a news feed will provide you with an endless, constantly updated stream of topics. This could allow you to publish content regularly to your website; endearing it to both the public and search engines alike.

content marketing usage by tactic — Image by marketingprofs.com

SSL Implementation by Google – "Not Provided" Keywords Issue

October 27, 2011

Rad Basta

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“On Tuesday, Google announced that signed-in users will, by default, be routed to the SSL version of Google (https://www.google.com)“
This sentence written by one of the most respectable SEO’s in the industry Mr.Rand Fishkin generated big quakes in the SEO world.
Now, you’re asking why? You think, it’s just SSL protocol, some people used it before this move by Google. You’re partially right, but just partially.

Main idea behind this (at least according to Google) is to provide enhanced privacy to Google users, not showing their searches and so on.
“Less important” change after this update will be that the average webmaster (me including) will not be able to see some of the keyword data anymore (cause it’s considered an intrusion into user privacy, right?). Yeah… not so much.

However, Google in his all-knowing wisdom decided that the user privacy has a price (isn’t that always the case) and with simple adwords account you can still see all the data that you could before this so called “datapocalypse“. Yeah, just give Google a “few bucks” for ads and voila, everything you need for your deep keywords analysis is available.

Now, this move from Google triggered very negative reactions from the SEO community all over the world. Webmasters are complaining that they now have crippled data with those “Not Provided” keywords that can’t give them accurate data for their deep keyword researches and modifications. Of course, this will not influence all of your organic data. Google estimates that only 10% of all keyword referral traffic will be “Not Provided”.

Now, there is another side to the coin, something that just a small number of webmasters thought about. This update doesn’t have to be that bad actually.

If we consider what the phrase “signed-in users” exactly means, we can see that in this case it stands for the person with customized SERP to match his or her search history and social activities. To explain further, by removing those results that are “polluted” by mentioned influences and Soc.Media variables (how many social media accounts are linked, how engaged with social-search their connections are, etc.) Google is giving us only relevant, clean keyphrases that are served directly from its main algorithm. And that’s the stuff you want to optimize for, since 90% of visitors will still find you in that manner.
What more can you need for you precise analysis, research and site wide alterations?!

This, of course, this is just my personal opinion, and I would love to hear what you have to say about this turmoil, positive or negative, so ladies and gentlemen, comments are all yours.

Advanced SEO

SEO-friendly Content

October 26, 2011

Rad Basta

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You don’t have to rely on statistics to see that the online business industry is booming. Millions of domains are registered everyday. Today just an ordinary person can build multiple websites on his own. There are definitely large profits from owning a websites but it all depends on the traffic. The big question is, do all websites get decent traffic? No! Some are actually struggling to gain visitors (and profit).

The first thing to consider is the source of the traffic. Organic searches can drive huge amounts of traffic depending on how you optimize your webpage. And the simplest and easiest to do is to focus on keyword-rich content. And when we say keyword-rich, it means that the article has a centralized idea, quality and well written content. Following that basic rule of the quality content helps you creating a SEO-friendly content.

Good SEO-friendly content is what brings visitors to your website, and each of those one time visitors might become a long term reader or user of your services, thus bringing you increased revenue. It’s important to remember that these visitors didn’t just stumble upon your site accidentally, they searched for keywords related to your business.

How is search engine optimization related to your keywords?

The main ingredient to generate targeted web traffic through SEO is usually the keywords. They are highly optimized in site title, meta tags, categories and description. But most of all, in the content. When individuals search online, they rely on keywords. Some keywords are certainly more often utilized than others. If you realize which keywords are widely-used more often, you can incorporate them in your web content without sacrificing the quality. Remember that your goal is not to link bait but to provide helpful information to your readers. While link baiting could work, it has drawback to your site performance and authority.

Once you identify the keyword to work on, start publishing articles. Distribute your keywords and keyword phrases equally and reasonably on your content material. Ensure your keyword density doesn’t go beyond 3 – 5% of the total number of words. If this is done properly, search engine spiders or bots will crawl your webpage and index the new SEO-friendly article content for a better web site ranking.

The good thing about being indexed right away is that your new content might appear in search thumbnails. Whenever people browse the web, and enter the keyword located in your content, the link of the source and part of that content are shown together with other search results. As online users click on your site which is displayed among the others ranked for that keyword you gain one unique visitor that might be interested in your site or products and services offered. Therefore, keywords can really improve the overall visibility of your webpage.

Try to play around with your keywords. Keyword phrases (long tail keywords) may be derived from keywords. They improve site rankings and thus attract more visitors to your site. The higher the traffic, the higher will your sales conversions be provided that the bounce rate is not too high. After all, with quality content you can be sure of longer page views.

You can use Google Adwords to acquire keyword-related information and analyze the keyword competition. We know that Google is the top search engine so you can just as well work with them. Plus, Google Panda has consistent updates which may hit your site if you are not up to their standards. There are also a lot of SEO online tools that you can take advantage of. They can help you with important keyword search and analysis.

Guest Post by:
Liz D. has been blogging since 2005 and started her personal SEO campaign just recently with positive results. Her Make More Money Online website is currently on the first page of Google search for the keyword “make more money” and she is currently optimizing more sites. Top Keywords for SEO is just one of them and it is doing pretty well.

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Search Engine Optimization and Cowboys

What is a black hat?

What is Keyword stuffing?

What is HTML code?

Effective Web Design Can Boost Your SEO

Top 5 Ways to Know the Psyche of Target Audience and Traffic

1. PollDaddy

2. Urtak

3. Formspring

4. UserVoice

5. Hunch

The Pitfalls of Guest Blogging for Webmasters

How News Became Central to Content Marketing

SSL Implementation by Google – "Not Provided" Keywords Issue

SEO-friendly Content

How is search engine optimization related to your keywords?

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