From the category archives:

Search Engines

Is Your SEO Strategy too Google Focused?

Of course, Google is undoubtedly the most important player in the search engine landscape, and they represent the lion's share of where people go to conduct their searches. As such, it would make sense to social media marketers to focus almost exclusively on Google and figuring out how to optimize for its respective algorithms. Although Google will certainly not go away in the near future, there are other outlets where millions of people go to share and browse.

According to a Search Engine Land article, “Beyond Google” there is some value to looking at some other sites other than the search engine juggernaut. The SEL article focuses on a search engine strategy that incorporates “social media engines”, which include Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg. The advantage of having a presence on engines like these is that they are user-driven, not algorithm driven. As such, if you have high quality content, then it's possible for your content to “go viral”, to use the now-popular phrase used to describe any web content that has achieved a cult-like following.

In a more recent article published on Reve News, writer Eric Bratner notes that there is even value in moving beyond the more popular social media engines like Digg, and instead trying to sustain a presence on niche social media sites. Bratner explains:

“Sure, going hot on Digg could get you about 20,000 visitors to your page, but the quality of the traffic leaves something to be desired. The quality of traffic from niche social media sites is usually higher than from a mainstream one. In fact, Tamar Weinberg did an interesting case study to find which generates better traffic: niche or generic social media sites. According to Weinberg the trend indicates that niche traffic is better.”

Bratner goes on to explain that getting involved with niche sites will build greater authority within your industry. Considering the incredible plurality of industries out there, it's best to shoot for something more specialized if you want to remain competitive. Other benefits that Bratner includes are generating more relevant inbound links, becoming part of a community that is traditionally more supportive, and not taking the risk of putting all your efforts into one or two hugely competitive sites.

Along with looking at other venues besides Google in which to establish a presence as an internet marketer, it is also a good idea to venture beyond Google's PageRank metric. A Six Revisions article explains the weaknesses of only using PageRank. What's more, the article also gives a thorough rundown of different SEO metrics, as well as an explanation of what each offers that PR doesn't. Some of the metrics included are Domain Trust, MozRank, and

By-line:

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

Three Essential Apps for Search Engine Optimization Pros

One of the most difficult and fascinating aspects of successful blogging is search engine optimization. Many individuals first enter the blogging world expecting to become successful bloggers by simply writing quality posts and hosting them on a webpage. However, as many of us know, blogging has become far more involved than simply having some minimal tech knowledge and a writing interest. Bloggers who wish to be really seen within the blogosphere must develop ways to get their articles and webpage ranked highly on the major search engines throughout the web. There are several ways in which search engine rankings are determined and it can be difficult to keep up with them at times. These three applications can help bloggers perfect and keep track of their search engine analytics.

Pokeseo

This app is available for the iPhone and is heralded as the "first" SEO reporting application for the iPhone. Pokeseo allows you to check your Google page rank and reported backlinks for your domain or a competitor's domain at anytime from any place. Pokeseo has a built in email support system that allows you to email an SEO statistics report to any individual when needed. This can be particularly helpful for businesses or marketing companies trying to keep track of their site's web analytics and share them with other business members. Pokeseo has a very intuitive and beautiful interface that is very easy to use. The simple interface enables users who are new to the blogging and SEO world to stay on top of and understand important web analytics for their website or sites.

Analytics App

With dozens upon dozens of web apps available for search engine optimization and web analytic reports, this app is the closest thing to logging into your Google Analytics account. This analytics app offers over 55 different reports, the ability to track multiple domains, custom date views, and the ability to inspect your adWord's campaign traffic. This application has a sleek and clean interface that is easy to navigate and simple to learn. While the Analytics App offers everything that Google Analytics does, it does have a few added features you cannot find anywhere else. The "Today" report and the "Yesterday" report are features you can only find on this app and can help you stay up to date on your site's web analytics.

SEM Calculator

This iPhone app is free on iTunes and allows you to do numerous calculations based off of common search engine marketing equations. This app is slightly more involved than the others that made this list. In this way, SEM requires a little bit further knowledge of SEO methods and analytics. With various calculators, including CPM, CPC, CPA, CTR, and more the SEM Calculator app is useful for all different types of users. There is a calculation cheat sheet included in the newer version of this app that allows users to understand relevant formulas. So, if you are an SEO beginner this app may not be for you quite yet, but it can be extremely helpful once you gain a greater understanding of what SEO is and how web analytics work.

About Author

Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @gmail.com.

My website got banned by Google [Part 1]

Hello! I am writing post after long time due to several reasons and one of them is that I was busy to migrate my server to another company because of poor support. In the mean time, one of my friend Muhammad Faisal (Karachi) contacted me and told me something that made me worry.

He told me that his website is not getting any search engine traffic and has dropped about 75% traffic. This was very amazing for me as he worked hard to get his website indexed in search engines and he also got a very good position in SERP (His website was in top 3 results). I checked his website in Google using site: url and found nothing in result and after this I tried to search some phrase relating to his website but the result was same.

I thought that this may be a temporary ban from Google and website will be indexed soon again but that was nothing but a nightmare only. I, then, started to crawl the reasons for this and found lot of causing this problem. If you want to save your website to get banned by the SE then review your website and follow the instructions below.

1. Duplicate Content or Websites

Don't know why people copy someone else data to get their website indexed. Actually, people wake up in the morning, create website and then starting copy data from other website. This is the main reason to get banned by the Google as Google has powerful Algorithms to catch your fraud. Google can easily distinguish between original content and copied one.

If Google finds multiple web pages have the same content they may penalize each website for this. Of course, someone may have copied your content and Google banned you even though it was your original content that was taken. Make sure no other site is using your content. You can do this by performing a Google search using some of your text with quotation marks (") around it. If you do find someone is using your original copy visit here to learn more about copyright infringement: http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

2. Robots and Meta Tags

Yes robots and meta tags can also help your website not to be indexed in search engines because robots.txt can be treated as an Oxygen pipe to your website. So it will better to check your robots.txt file, if you have. Also if you find the text like something this is in your pages.

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX">. If you find something similar to this then your website is blocked to be accessed by search engines.

You can deny and allow access to search engine bots via robots.txt. Here is an example of such 2 tasks.

The line given below will allow all robots to crawl your website

——————————

User-agent: *
Disallow:

—————————–

This example keeps all robots out:

—————————-

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

—————————

3. Cloaking

Google says: "The term "cloaking" is used to describe a website that returns altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the web server is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they'll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings."

This is the biggest fraud that is done by the webmasters. In this case a page is shown to user is much more different that is presented to search engine. Actually, this done to rank higher position in search engines and to acheive high PR. Google has latest technology and can easily detect such kind of fraudulent activity. So, keep your website clean from Clocking.

4. Hidden Text and or Links

Search engines hate such kind of fraud and your website can be banned permanently. Not really used frequently but in some cases. Webmasters hide text of a webpage in different ways such like by applying white color to the text while the page have white background or tell the CSS file to not show the text but as we know that search engines are more intelligent as compared to us.

5. Keyword Spamming

Keyword density must not be over crowded as most of the webmaster want to rank higher very quickly and they adopt this technique. A webpage must have a reasonable quantity of keywords that are being used in a phrase. If search engine founds that some words are being repeated in a page then your rank will be reduced and you may get banned.

This is the first part of post because I can't write the second part of the post as I am busy in exams. So, as I get free will write second part as well. Your comments are welcomed.

January 2011 Google Page Rank Update

Finally, Google has rolled out a Page Rank update after nine months. Before this, most of us were thinking that Page Rank technology has stopped to work but this PR update has confirmed that still PR is important in the eyes of Google. I am looking many new threads on different forums such like DP, sitepoint and v7n etc.. where many members have confirmed their PR update.

The last update had been on April 2010, so around nine months ago. That is quite a long time, especially if you consider at some periods in the past Google would roll a new PageRank update every three months or so.

Is PR important or not? This can be very well understand from the quoted text.

The take home message here is that PageRank is important, but it certainly is not worth obsessing over; there are many other factors involved in website ranking that should be given nearly equal consideration. In addition, simply building a good website is the best thing you can do to attract visitors, even without a great PageRank. PageRank, however, will likely follow – consider it a welcomed byproduct of your hard work.

The PR on most of my sites hasn’t changed a lot. Some of my niche sites gained 1 or 2 points, but that was it. My blog is still on PR 2 and may be it would gain some higher PR.

Meta Tags importance in Search Engine Optimization

As this is described in previous posts that meta tags can boost up traffic for your website and you can be top of differnet search engines. So, I will explain that what the meta tags are and how they work??

Meta tags are hidden HTML tags placed in the <head></head> section of a web page. These tags are used to describe various aspects of a web page like Keywords, Description, Author Info, Copyright info and much more.

In terms of Search Engine Optimization there are two Meta Tags which are really important and these are Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags.

Sample Meta Tags:

Meta Description Tags

The content of meta description tag is displayed below the title in search results however now a days this info is ignored by most search engines as meta description tag is often misused with misleading or even false information about a page.

It doesn’t mean that we should stop using this tag as some search engines still index the contents of meta description tag for its search results. If we don’t specify meta description tag, the search engines will usually extract first few lines from the body text.

Normally search engines will index the first 140 – 160 characters of meta description tag content. I would suggest use the description thats sells the page and make sure its the summary of the page content.

Meta Keywords Tags

As the name suggest Keywords are the important words and phrases which describes the content . Actually, keywords represent your contents that what sort of data it contains but remember that irrelevant keywords can place you at millionth page in any search engine.

But, Content is the king, most of the search engines rely more on the content and if you use the keywords in meta tags its an advantage and help search engines to correlate the most relevant information to display in search results. Before selecting the keywords do some research as described in my previous post.

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