Resources on Web, Mobile, SEO, Outsourcing and more.

SEO is one of the marketing strategies used for increasing site visibility in search engines. Different people follow different SEO techniques for organic promotion in search engines; some may be ethical, some non-ethical and others intermediate. These practices are colored according to techniques used, compared with the search engines recommendations and guidelines. 

Here is the list of SEO colors and definitions determined by various SEO communities 

White hat SEO – Called as ethical SEO, it follows search engines’ guidelines. In this a content page that the search engine indexes and subsequently ranks, would contain the same content that a visitor would see. White hat advice is explained as a procedure of creating content for users, not for search engines, thereby making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than finding out a method to trick the algorithm from its designated intention. 

Black hat SEO – known as Un-ethical SEO, is a procedure that tries to achieve high rankings in short time by using various SEO techniques that don’t follow search engine guidelines, or treated as means of deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another black hat method is creating different pages for the search engines and the users, depending upon who is accessing the website. This method is referred to as cloaking. 

Gray Hat SEO – These are SEO tactics that cannot be termed either as ethical or unethical, but can be termed as something in between the two. It is unlikely that a site gets banned or can have negative affects on it, due to following Gray Hat SEO tactics. 

Green Hat SEO – It is just a matter of putting all unnecessary procedures and SEO actions to an end and focusing on what all is essential to get in website visitors. When focus is given more on the importance and prominence to the people who visit your website, your site will create more brand awareness, thereby becoming more trustworthy, rather than targeting keywords that provide more traffic, even though it means that you do not have any relevant pages suitable for them. It is to be understood that a happy customer is someone who is more important to your business to get in more profit to you, rather than getting more of inward links.  

Blue Hat SEO – Some say its related to advanced SEO techniques used for web promotion but the same has not yet been declared by any top SEO communities or SEO groups. Originally Blue Hat SEO is a name of a weblog so many misunderstand

And please do note that these SEO colors are not standard ones, they are marketing types distinguished between SEOs who adopt their SEO techniques from ethical to unethical or a mix of both. Probably in the near future we might even come up with more colors of SEO as seen in rainbow!!!

Here are the few (might look silly sometimes) we ask our SEO clients before we do anything, means even before we study their website.

1. Describe the type of customers/audiences/visitors that you are targeting with your website.
2.What are the products or services that you provide?
3.What are your target specific keywords? Do you know what your customers to be will type in the search engine to find you?
4.Who are your major competitors online? Do you know them how they perform online?
5.What is the geographic scope of your market- International /National/ Regional/Local?
6.Do you have web stats (statistics) for your current site and monitoring the visitor status regularly?
7. Will you be interested in site restructuring, minor redesigns and content change if we strongly recommend?Promoting a client’s website is promoting their business. So, understanding their business is more important, and getting an insight about what they do, should be the first step you should do. Keep this in mind if you want to help them and retain them, since SEO clients are long term clients, and they rely on your marketing abilities.

Our SEO team likes Google analytics, But they still generate some reports manually and simplify some of the reports generate by Google to make it readable to clients. Not all the clients will understand the detailed reports from Google Analytics. They need facts and figures, easily understandable. So, always our SEO enthusiasts are looking for some tools to make their life easy, no surprise they wanted some tools as an alternate to Google analytics.

1. Piwik Open source web analyticsa>: A web-analytics software which is free(opensource), is a real good way of calculating website ROI. It gives perfect reports on the keyword phrases and search engines, popular web pages etc.  It also has its own plug-in that are built-in for increased efficiency, with the facility of getting the reports in various formats like XML, PHP, CSV and the likes. .
 
2. Engine Ready Conversion Analyst: Another powerful analytics tool, the Engine Ready conversion Analyst is a alternate to Google analytics. You can generate reports on web site ROI, from keywords used in search engines, emails, banners or absolutely any other online campaigns that you perform. Engine ready is not a free service, but believe the services are definitely worth a shot. You also have a demo option, and only if you are happy, you would need to proceed with the purchase option, which I feel is quite decent enough.

Comments are welcome, if you have even better tools, post them. !  

If you are an SEO analyst or specialist here are few techniques which are used widely these days. I am not going to explain the boredom basics, which could turn off you  However, if you need to refresh basic and regular tips / techniques you can go to these below topics:

(1) Search Engine Optimization for Beginners
(2) Increasing Link Popularity
(3) Practical SEO Techniques (Free E book)
(4) SEO for Ecommerce sites
(5) Understanding site visitors
(6) Developing SEO friendly URLs
(7) SEO for Flash sites

Now comes the few important SEO tips that might be useful for the year 2009. Some are bit simple but I am sure the post will certainly a good list to use.

(1) First and foremost is regular update of content. Absolutely unique and fresh content with target business and resource keywords
(2) Video Content with product or service link and adding to You Tube videos and related sites
(3) Regular update on website page in RRS Feed and submit to feed directories
(4) Audio content for Pod casting, a new target of Google
(5) Optimizing photos and images with alternative (ALT) attributes and image name with related keywords or theme
(6) Add tags to your site or blog
(7) Add and set your site maps to authenticate your feeds in Google, Yahoo, and MSN
(8) Get high-quality Backlinks on a local and regional directories, yellow pages, classified apart from general directories so that you can get high priority in local search engines too like Google.co.uk, Google.in so on
(9) Get listed in Google Local Business Center
(10) Get socially informed listing in Twitter and related sites
(11) Press release and News submission so that you wont miss chance betting listed in Google news
(12) Regular update of you blog minimum one post a week and submitting to blog directories
(13) Work on measures to reduce your website bounce rate
(14) Modify and update your existing website comparing with SEO checklist and also update your checklist frequently to current SEO industry
(15) Keep checking your competitor’s progress. Learn what they do to target your customers.

So work on these tips apart from your regular SEO practices and techniques and become an SEO ruler of 2009

Flash does wonders to sites, making them more visually appealing and interesting. But have you thought how appealing it is for the search engines? The fact that not many of us know is that sites that are completely made using Flash, would be treated as a single page by search engines, thereby reducing the crawling time.  

One of the best things to do is to create a visually pleasing and attractive website, using normal HTML pages, with Flash put in the intro section or banner of the website. I have observed that this proves to be much more effective in terms of SEO, than having a complete website with only Flash content. This calls for double benefiting – One, allowing the search engines to crawl through your website, with the general optimization content, and Two, showcasing your prowess in Flash, making the site more interactive and attractive for your site visitors. Now isn’t that something that you would love your site to own?!

Something that I have also learned and observed is that using Macromedia products in Flash proves to be SEO friendly to a certain extent. The Macromedia Flash SDK is simply amazing you know, as it analyzes the Flash content and helps in indexing of the content into the database of search engines, by handling the content as normal HTML pages. Note that this also makes it important to optimize the flash content with respect to the search engines as well. Along with this, link building, when done effectively, can make the flash content SEO ready. 

Few strategies that I strongly recommend to optimize Flash sites would be using appropriate titles, Meta Tags, keywords and phrases and content inside the Flash piece, along with installing a sitemap and splitting of the flash content to various pages from a single page. Read our article  Search Engine Optimization for websites using Flash  wherein we have included a detailed article about how sites with Flash can be optimized and made search engine friendly.

Also feel free to download our Practical SEO Techniques EBook

Have you heard of the term “Bounce Rate” and thinking of what is it and how to reduce it? If you are using Google Analytics it is well and good, in Google Analytics you should have noticed “Bounce Rate” in Dashboard section and Top Content section. Bounce Rate is calculated using percentage of visitors who view the site page and exit your site without navigating other pages or closing the browser. Few sites generate high bounce rates and it should not be more than 40% for normal sites with pages related to only services and 60% to 70% for sites with pages related to services, resources, tutorials, promotional articles and downloads

If the site has more number of resources pages or products, once user gets information from specific page they will obliviously close the page thereby leading to increase in bounce ate.

So, to grab the attention of the visitor or to help or divert the visitor to similar useful content pages, we also need to focus on user-friendly site navigation and we need to highlight similar or related resources, products or services on the page where user lands from search engine or from a referral link. Below are some measures that may help to reduce bounce rate of a specific page

1. Work on site load speed
2. Improve Look and feel of the design
3. Avoid too many ads
4. Add breadcrumbs
5. Add Similar or related pages / articles / products
6. Add Popular pages / articles / products
7. Avoid auto play video
8. Using H tag in titles properly
9. Highlight important sections in content
10. Avoid popup
11. Surveys and polls to vote and users to be around the pages
12. Tag clouds

Try out these measures and let us know how your site performs

Twitter, one of the top free social messaging and micro-blogging site, which helps users send and read text-based posts, is also known as tweets. In twitter, text-based posts are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have registered themselves to receive them.

Not only can users obtain updates through the Twitter website, but they can also get information through RSS feeds, emails that are sent and replied by third party companies; through SMS for users from the US, Canada, the UK and India. The UK number caters to the international audience. Also, applications like TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook are also available to circulate the updates.

Am sure you would want to promote your business site or blog among 3 million users and more

Start registering at twitter.com and add a link to your profile page from your website or blog. Initially you need to perform some ground work like adding your twitter profile page to some top blog post giving some valuable comments, also follow users related to your field. Once users notice your twitter profile page, several users will automatically follow you.

Also the search engines easily index Twitter status pages, and we can see many of them have been getting good Google Page Ranks individually.

In addition, the user pages in Twitter are created as subdirectories, for example twitter.com/username. When seen from the SEO point of view, the sub domains are handled as separate sites altogether, but the subfolders are processed as a component of the original domains itself. This way we get SEO benefits of Twitter to its sub folders that also include the tweets and the user status pages!

Each time I post a link on my Twitter status page, all my followers’ and friends pages get to display that link too. Also statuses links can be found in blog were they use my tweets; by this I get thousands of new inbound links and clicks towards the link I just posted.

So start building natural links through twitter and drive traffic to your website without straining too much

Also feel free to follow us @Macronimous through the TwitterCounter click

Search engine optimization is very important with respect to any online business sites, to get it search engine visible. At the same time it is an ever-updating industry. When done in a proper and standard procedure, by experienced professionals, it is sure to give top long-term results.

So we thought an ebook on SEO techniques, to boost your website’s ranking amongst the search engines, is something you will really be looking for. While you can find a lot of techniques online, this Book gives a list of  reliable approachs. Hear it from our SEO experts, who have been in the industry since the incepton of Search Engines and grab these good practical knowledge about the various SEO techniques!

 

Follow this link “Practical SEO Techniques Ebook”, where we offer this free SEO e-book.

You have a well designed website with perfect usage of flash banners and graphic designs, with proper site navigation and easy accessibility. Still do you feel that you are not getting the desired visitors and sales to your site? I suggest you probably need to work on the content in the site. I believe it is essential to have effective web content in a website, to attract the search engines.  

So how can one write effective content for their websites? Read it as “effective writing” and not “lengthy writing”. Out of my experience as an SEO consultant and professional content writer, the more crisp and easy to understand the content is, the greater are the chances for it to become a hit among the readers. Also I am of the opinion that regularly updating your website with data that is useful for the visitors would divert more traffic to your site. When do you think one needs to consider re-writing their website content? I have come across the following observations that I have mentioned below: 

• Traffic inflow is good, but the conversion is not as expected, because the visitors are probably not getting what they expected out of the contents.
• When the content is very less and the site is filled with only graphics and Flash designs
• The content in the website is not explaining more about your business and gives irrelevant information to your visitors.  

I have found the following tips highly helpful in maintaining effective SEO web copy for websites: 

• Know your audience: Understand who are your audience and write keeping them in mind. Also write stuff that they can relate themselves to and what is realistic.
• Give a clear picture of your business: The content in your website should give exact details of your business. This helps in your audience getting a better idea of your business, thereby encouraging an inflow of website-relevant traffic.
• Make the content heading more appealing: Now that you know your audience well, next try writing stuff that will appeal to them. For example, if your visitors are going to be more of careful and budget-conscious family ladies, then you could write articles like “Top 8 ways to organize your household budget effectively”(Gosh! Am sure I myself would be interested to read it as well, and am not even married!) The heading has a striking impact to attract readers and wins a main part of the battle of bringing in traffic.
• Give them some useful information: Well you have clearly understood who your visitors are going to be and you have catchy headings as well. But what if the content inside is of no use to the audience. Write stuff that contains utilitarian information to your clients.
• Choose apt keywords: You have got to think from a normal layman’s point of view, who is searching for products. Choose probable keywords that your audience would search in the search engines.
• Use Keyword phrases: Bank on phrases and not single words as keywords, because the probability of searchers using phrases of words is more.
• Keyword phrases in Meta tags, links and headings: Now that you have frozen on the keyword phrases, use them in Meta tags, link them with text links, so that the pages get related to one another. This increases the probability of search engines spotting them out. Also use these phrases in headings as well
• Check and re-check! And more importantly, check and recheck whatever you have written, to overrule any spelling or grammatical errors.  

According to me, these are certain ideal steps that you can follow from the SEO point of view, to optimize your site. I am sure, if written smartly and relevantly, web contents would help give a boost to your website, thereby increasing relevant traffic and sales conversion.

Also feel free to download our Practical SEO Techniques EBook

This Simple SEO checklist will help you to follow steps to rank your site in major search engines

You just need to spend 10 minutes to review your site with below SEO checklist. If you can mark “yes” to most of the SEO considerations then your site will be having a reasonable traffic which can be developed further by consulting an SEO professional or by going through some good practical SEO techniques

And in addition above simple SEO checklist will be very much helpful for designers who tries to follow best SEO design practices Cheers