1. Flash: When they ask for a fully flashed website, let them know the adversity it might make. By doing this you are helping them to establish the right online presence. Unless your client is Coca cola or Burger King ( I mean,  :-), an establish brand), they will really want to establish better Visibility to the Search Engines.

2. SEO – If a client just wants a website, let them know what SEO is and how it is going to help them. Make the site SEO friendly within the design scope (Eg. Image tags, XHTML validations, designing without tables, etc). Most of the clients will not say NO to make their site ready for SEO.

3. CMS – Ask how frequently they want to change the content, and if they do, let them do know how to do it themselves with a CMS. You may also need to let them know the advantages of fresh content. I believe instead of providing them a static site of 20 pages, you can introduce them Joomla and how to use it, for some additional but onetime investments.

4. Advantages of Opensource - Do they need a CMS or Ecommerce, You can justify why you charge less. Let them know that you can cut cost by using WordPress or Magento and still make their site professional. By doing this you are introducing standards – if your client goes to some other developers, it would not be difficult for them to take up the work.

I recommend you to keep a short write up (with some references) or articles on the above mentioned (you may keep that under your client section of your website) and ask the client to refer them. It also helps them to understand that you know what you tell them.

Keyword cloud represents most used keywords in a site visually, by showing it in different font sizes and it is known to be a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) term. It differs from larger to smaller in font sizes. Keyword that has been used more around the site and blog, which we call as keyword density, are shown in larger fonts. According to the keyword density the font size varies from larger to smaller. On looking at the keyword cloud size variation, users can see the importance of the keywords that relates to web site or a blog.

Benefits of keyword cloud

Keyword cloud is benefited to find relevant and useful web pages for user who looks for certain information. 

By using the keyword cloud, popular words (density rich words) are shown and it is as well clickable for users. When users find a keyword listed in keyword cloud useful then he will be going for a click on the particular keyword and he will be taken to the category search results page were all pages or blog posts will be listed related to the tagged keyword.

Make sure the keywords in the cloud section are not overlapped and ugly. Have it in a place were users could find it easily. The better option is to have it in the side bar of a site or blog. 

Keyword cloud generators

Here is a site that helps to generate a keyword cloud by mentioning your web link.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-cloud/

WordPress Keyword Cloud generator plugin

The below WordPress plugin helps you to install keyword cloud to your blog or site

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/resize-tag-cloud/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/keywords-cloud-for-wordpress/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tagging-plugin/screenshots/

How Keyword cloud will look like?

If you find any other interesting information about Keyword cloud, you may share through comments.

Thinking of what’s next? Do you want to leave the site with the results that you have attained and be forget SEO since you have got your results? Nope. You shouldn’t.

If your targeted keywords generates enough revenue then think of how much competitive your keywords should be and how many of your competitors will be using those keywords and working for good number of quality links for their site

Search engine algorithm gives better value for frequently updated site with keywords around the content and for site that continuously gets quality backlinks.

Watch closely you’re competitor and find out what they do to compete your site. Here are the factors that needs to be frequently monitored

(1) Content update - It is always recommended to fine-tune and update your content at least once in a month or two with keywords around meeting keyword density and keyword prominence.
(2) Brushing up your Keywords  - As always monitor your top ranking keywords and fine-tune it according to the number of total search results and compare with your competitors activity on those keywords of your target. Check out the areas in your content to know where you can focus your top keywords and build quality backlinks for those keywords as anchor text. Be sure to meet keyword density and do not stuff keywords.
(3) External site link juice - Check whether all the links build exits with time period, since some may be removed or moved out to some inner folder level and the algorithm might not identity those backlinks. So build equal and relevant links as an alternative to those links that had been masked and improve or retain the position with good number of quality links.
(4) Monitory traffic - Analyzing your traffic is one of the essential factor were you need to know how site performs with search engine organic clicks and directories or sites referrals. If you notice any drops in traffic, identify those area and work on them to set your goal.

And also here are the checklists that can help you to maintain SEO results and withstand the competition

(1) Check how your competitors rank in Google, Yahoo and Bing for your keywords?
(2) Have you updated your content that meets current target market and information?
(3) Are you tweaking your web site structure for search engine friendliness that meets current algorithm?
(4) Are you working on building quality links regularly?
(5) Are you optimizing your site with the current popular keywords?
(6) Are you analyzing you traffic to know from which location your visitors are coming from and optimize the site for those location based search engines?

These important factors and checklist will help you to measure the site strength and weakness of your site. Now you should have known that search engine optimization is not one time activity and search engine algorithm gets updated often and competitors fight for your top keywords position. Keep in mind, your website needs continues SEO in order to retain and improve your good SEO results.

Maintaining the SERPs (result/Postion) are equally important as your SEO process. Continuous SEO is within the process of SEO to generate continuous business queries to make. So keep up the good SEO, Always, do not think about stopping your activities.

Now let us see why you should avoid duplicating the content?

First of all, copying the content brings down the understanding of the concept. If you start understanding, that is only how you grow. The scriptwriter should understand why something is and how it works. If you copy, you are missing out on that. You are just resurfacing the upper layer and not getting into layers underneath when you do that.

If you are not willing to write on your own, you will not know the exact intention and get stuck at one place. You will not know how to take it forward. The originality of the content will be missing.

While it is easier to just copy from someone else, why do you have to create a new one? If you don’t do that, you will not know why it looks like, you cannot feel the way it feels like and you will not be able to read the way it should be read. The final outcome will be an artificial one.

Content Duplication and its impacts on SEO

1. Duplication of content will be considered a spam by all the search engines. There are so many websites with similar products, so the copywriter must be very careful in creating content. Search Engines likes fresh and unique content. It ranks websites depending primarily on the content used in web pages. 

2. Changing the phrase of an existing content and rewriting is also considered as content duplication. Search Engines have ways to find out and it is supposed to be spam. This will certainly affect the ranking of a website.

3. When a website is reported to have duplicate content issues, the total number of pages ranked by the search engine will automatically come down. Fewer pages to rank will lessen the rankings and might lead to lower traffic.

4. It is important to make your content unique; otherwise there is absolutely no point in doing all these. The search engines will not bother to feature your website in its result pages.

5. There is a difference between content duplication “penalties” and “filtering”. When we refer to penalty in search engine rankings, we actually talk of points being reduced from your overall score, but the truth is, the pages are just filtered like you filter unwanted particles from a can of liquid. Accidently, this filtering can sometimes filter out your good particles.

Tips to avoid Content Duplication

1. While preparing content, make sure you don’t copy it from somewhere and try to replace the words with exact meanings. The search engines have already come up with a solution to deal with this issue.

2. Before you sit down to write, ask yourself what exactly will create value for your users.

3. Try to get various perspectives, take the good points from them and fill the rest with your own thoughts and creativity. After all, you have to make it happen and move forward.

4. You can be influenced by many, but make sure you don’t copy anything.

So while preparing content, watch out for duplication from search engine’s point of view and as well as loyal customer’s point of view. At the end of the day, it is the search engine and ultimately the customer who are going to “look” at your content, so make sure it is liked by both, otherwise all the efforts you put in for your business to grow will go wasted.

To start, here is the list

1. Google Webmaster Tools are free and easy to set up through site owner verification process by adding a Google code Meta tag to the page or by creating and uploading a file with Google code. Once you are verified you can access the tools dashboard.
2. Sitemap tool allows you to submit XML Sitemap with details on pages to index and priority to crawl pages. If you don’t have a site map create one and submit to site configuration sitemap section.
3. Crawler access tool helps to generate and test robots.txt to specify how search engines should crawl and index site content.
4. When you Google for information you can see Sitelinks. Sitelinks displays inner links generated by Google algorithm depends on how related and useful for users queries. You have no control to add but you can block / remove the link from displaying the site links if you don’t want to list.
5. Change of address is a special tool to tell Google about your new domain and helps to move your old site users to you new domain easily. This process has 4 simple steps to follow like content link verification, 301 redirect from old to new domain, adding and verifying new site to Google webmaster tool and submitting the change of address
6. Geographic target tool helps to target users in specific location. You can select the country based on the users you target and it would help for .com, .org and other top-level domains. Country specific domains like .in, co.uk and so are already associated with Country based listing.
7. Preferred domain allows you to select the domain format you like to display. You have options to select http://www.yourdomain.com and http://yourdomain.com. If you have selected http://www.yourdomain.com and the site inner page links with http://yourdomain.com then search results display URL’s takes as http://www.yourdomain.com
8. Crawl rate can be changed depending on the site root level depth and default crawl rate is recommended to avoid increase server’s bandwidth. This Crawl rate has no connection with how often Googlebot crawls your site.
9. Top search queries tool has information on your site search keywords impressions and clickthrogh ratio along with keywords position.
10. Links to your site tool provides information on inbound links with anchor text for your site pages.
11. Keywords and internal links tool shows the common keywords Googlebot sees when it crawl’s the site and internal links shows the total number of pages linked by other pages in your site.
12. Crawl errors is another special tool that lists issues Google encountered when crawling your site. The list includes HTTP, error in sitemaps, not followed pages, not found pages, pages restricted by robots.txt, timed out / unreachable pages for Web, Mobile CHTML and Mobile WML / XHTML?
13. Crawl stats tool shows statistics on Googlebot activity on pages crawled per day, kilobytes downloaded per day, time spent downloading a page and PageRank distribution.
14. HTML suggestions are provided when Googlebot crawls your site and find issues with your site content. Working on these issues will help your site in better listing and users experience. Here you can find details on Meta description, Title tag and Non-indexable content in your site.

Now ask a question yourself why don’t I use Google Webmaster tools, if I have as many tools and information from Google for free. Sign in to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google account today!

Here some top Google tools to increase your sales conversion and ROI

1. Google Search suggest

When you type your business services or products words, Google suggest estimate what you type forth and the words listed are most searched terms. By this you can find the users search terms and compare with your site theme and go on with on page optimization. As well it do help for off page optimization by getting down the suggestion of most searched directory keywords.

2. Google alerts

Make use of Alerts to keep track on you competitor activities or industry or getting latest stories on specified key phrases through an email

3. Google Trends

Compare two or more terms to find out the search volume on a daily bases that are typed into Google’s search-box. The search popularity will be shown in charts and it is easy to find the difference on term search volume

4. Google Adwords keywords

The tool helps to get new keyword ideas and as well you can type your website URL so that Google lists out the search keywords related to your business services or products

5. Google Analytics

This is a web analytics solution offered by Google for free. It give you an insight on you site traffic and goal conversions. There are several options to track down your daily site visits / page views, keywords search visits, Geo, top contents visited, Goal tracking and many more

6. Google Web master tools

This tool helps you to find how Google see your WebPages. You can configure your sitemap about the page to be indexed and all about robots.txt. As well you can track total number of internal and external links, query traffic and diagnose problems if any

7. Search-based Keyword Tool

Using this tool you can get keyword ideas based on specific pages of your site and the keywords listed are from Google search queries

8. Google Insights for Search

This tool helps to compare search volume across categories, geographic distribution and Properties

9. Google Traffic Estimator Tools

Get quick traffic estimates for search keywords related to target location and bid amount without logging into adwords account

10. Google Website Optimizer Tool

This tool helps you to improve your existing web pages and traffic by testing your site content and design in relation with users performance.

These free tools are more of a pack from Google and hope you should have got an idea of these tools and how the tools can be used for your business growth exercise

(1) Title tag – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(2) Keyword prominence – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(3) Keyword density – Bing looks for lesser keyword density compared to Google
(4) Link density – Google gives more priority than Bing
(5) H tag – Bing gives more priority than Google
(6) Clean code – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(7) Meta tags – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(8) Anchor texts – Bing gives more priority than Google
(9) Super relevant content for optimized keywords – Equal importance for Both Google and Bing
(10) Domain age – Bing gives more priority than Google
(11) Site popularity – Google gives more priority than Bing
(12) Social sites in links – Google gives more priority than Bing

BTW, if you are new to Bing and not listed in Bing search results you may submit your site to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

In addition, to list better in Bing you need to implement some additional tasks along with above on page and off page factors.

Configure your site to Bing Webmaster tool http://www.bing.com/webmaster by adding your sitemap.xml file and with an XML file verification code for your site ownership .

And you may also validate your Robots.txt file using the Robots.txt validator tool in the Bing Webmaster section and robots.txt would look like

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /media/

Sitemap: http://www.xyz.com/sitemap.xml

These would help Bing bot to crawl your site pages and lists in search results efficiently

Hope the post helps and more research has to done as the Bing algorithm changes. I will be positing than and then, so keep watching

Then you need to think of populating your website to your online customers and getting traffic to your website. Well to reach your customers you need to get help from an efficient SEO consultant. Why?

Search Engine Optimization is a do process and can’t be said done

SEO is a continuous process. Webmaster, small business owners, designers and developers learn online resources and go with the process. But do they know which resources are niche to the specific business website. Many may be theoretical than practical. SEO is a practice, which can be attained only by real time knowledge. SEO practices do change according to industries and targeted customers and as told SEO needs to be worked in long term. On other side many do not have time to carry out the process and update their knowledge on current search engine industry. There comes an SEO consultant role who can tell you “What to do and what not” and “Where to spend time and where not”.

Website Designers and Developers are not SEO Consultant

Website designers and developers are professionals who tend to have knowledge about SEO and say they offer SEO services by adding H tag, Breadcrumb, sitemap and few come up with website SEF navigation but they are not complete SEO. Why?

It takes years of experience in design to become a professional designer and the same for developer for efficient website development. They focus on one area related to the profession to find do and don’t and to find what client prefers and their customer and do you think they have time for below SEO essentials?

SEO consultant measures and balance on-page and off-page optimization

An SEO consultant reviews your website, provides advice to the success of your online business and performs the following SEO factors below

• Site competitor analysis
• Keyword analysis and research
• Right keywords identification according to targeted audience both locals and global
• Improvement in the HTML structure of each web page
• Improving home page and inner pages user friendliness for conversion
• Keyword density measurement
• Keyword effectiveness index
• Right Meta tag optimization
• Content optimization
• Website internal links structure
• External link juice creation through local and regional directories, news, press release, feeds and video submissions
• Analysis and improvement on the existing traffic
• Added: Social sites conversions and blogging benefits
• Search engine marketing report
• SEO Return on Investment

And many more SEO factors related to specific industry.

Do you think a designer, developer or a Webmaster without in-depth knowledge and experiance can provide these above factors in a professional manner? I would say big No; they are professionals in their own field but not in SEO. All these needs continues practice in the SEO field that can be achieved only through understanding business, handing various industry related projects and by all possible SEO examines

Now you would have known the real need of an SEO consultant to make your online business success. Start looking for one, the best!

Related links:

• Search Engine Optimization Service
• Search Engine Promotion plans and packages
• SEO for Ektron, CubeCart, Drupal, Joomla, Magento eCommerce, Modx, osCommerce, WordPress, Typo3

In earlier 2005 I used to add sites in Dmoz and it gets listed within few weeks but not from 2006. In mid 2006 their Service was Unavailable, as most of the regular dmoz submitters should know. It was told that the editor server that had the problem and, was recovered only by the end of 2006.

From 2007 there had been huge delays and flaws in approving links. Many tried to have their sites listed following Dmoz guidelines. But they fail. These episodes made many webmasters to research Dmoz performance and many discussions, blog posts and forums has been raised claming Dmoz dead?

Here are few examines

(1) Most of the links are broken and do editors check old sites included in their categories and they maintain?
(2) Many site are listed with promotional words and this is against DMOZ guidelines. Any corruption?

Besides I have read a thread that states few dmoz editor’s sends mail for paid inclusion and charge $. Checkout the mail posted in the thread. Mail content is really funny, may be true or fake :)

Suppose if you get any such mails do not hesitate to post your query in Open Directory Public Abuse Report System. Lets make Dmoz as genuine as it was before and active