Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Red Alert Mistakes Committed While Link Building

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Link building is one of the most important Search Engine Optimization activities but this certainly doesn’t mean that you should build links at any price – literally and figuratively. Before we plunge headlong into the myriad that is link building mistakes, we shall first query ‘Why does anyone try to increase the backlinks?’; obviously to increase SERP of site, which consequently work your website towards the top ten rankings and to improve SEO and page rank. What if same process acts in the other way? Wrong link building strategy can really hamper your site in search engine rankings and can be seen as a hallmark of quality wise cheap SEO services. So while increasing backlinks try to avoid these basic mistakes:

  • Check for that “No Follow” attribute before purchasing backlinks

The internet is replete with scams and the most common one among backlinks is when you spend those extra few bucks on purchasing some backlinks which seem to vanish after some time leaving a ‘no follow’ in its/their wake. That is why you should check from time to time if the link is still there and if it doesn’t have the “no follow” attribute.

  • Good quality links but useless anchor text

It is great when PR of the site you are getting links from is high but when the anchor text is “Click here!” or something like that; such a link is barely useful. Keywords in the anchor text are vital, so if the backlink doesn’t have them, it isn’t a valuable one. Search engines algorithms are much refined and smarter now. It would signal that they are not the natural links; rather they are manipulated for improving search engine ranking for a specific keyword. So use a set of anchor texts instead of using single anchor text.

  • A Chunk of links from a single site

Your links should be well distributed over different WebPages. The in links can both make as well as mar your Google page rankings. The more varied a selection they come from, the better will be the site’s chances at a good page rank.

  • Exchanging links excessively

Excessive link change is not advised as it does not look natural. If you have a Google directory which happens to be lake an open directory with pagerank, and the Yahoo directory, you will be able to observe that both these search engines link to each other at a level. You can definitely exchange the link but it should be done only at an optimum rate and not at a maniacal one; something that is bound to strike as cheap online marketing by view of standards.

5 Rules to Abide by When Dealing Social Media Optimization

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

It has been many years since the advent of the SEO services for website rankings and the website development companies have honed the art, exhausting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings and giving it a healthy boost on Search Engine Rankings. But rubbing shoulders and almost head to head is another dimension of online marketing, shelved as Social Media Optimization Services.

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

Let us now consider some guidelines along which one could successfully conduct SMO services:

  • Increase your linkability: The foremost priority of a website that does not wish to be tagged as a “static” website; one that are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.  Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
  • Make tagging and bookmarking easy: Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but one can go beyond this by making sure that pages showcase relevant tags, suggested notes for a link etc.
  • Reward inbound links: The numbers of inbound links is usually employed to gauge the success of a blog and play a decisive role in increasing the rank in search results.  From using Permalinks to recreating, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.
  • Help your content travel: In SEO, one is made to focus more on the sites up gradation to influence its search engine rankings. However, SMO is not just about making changes to a site.  When you have content that can be portable submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.

Encourage the Mash Up: Do not blindly shun the idea of co creation, because in a world of co existence it will pay you more to be open about content sharing, though within some defined limits. The idea first found origin in YouTube, which provided embedded codes to cut and paste to allow imbedding of video content. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mash up which can successfully drive the traffic or the argument to your site.

SMO is SEO’s Smarter New Cousin

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

We know from constant references to ‘SEO’ and ‘top ten rankings, there was a phase in online marketing when Search Engine Optimization Services were the order of the day. It started as one of the many parts of online marketing, under search engine marketing, and grew into a goliath venture; every website owner was inclined to take. It kept becoming more common by the day until social networking caught the marketer’s eyes.  Social Media Optimization is the methodization of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content.

It is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.

One might as well question why many a web promotion company are selling SMO with great fan fare? You see the technicalities involved with wiring SEO are not the same processes required to boost visibility in social networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. And it’s in social networks like these where people are increasingly spending time communicating, finding relevant and interesting content, and sharing it with their connections. So now, in addition to SEO, we have to implement and manage a Social Media Optimization (SMO) program around our content to increase visibility in these new environments.

To understand why SMO is the smarter cousin, and relatively new and popular on the block, one must understand that it has the ability to direct crowds while SEO specifically deals with search engines only. At the center of any successful SMO services are social objects. Social objects represent the content we create in social media, including images, videos, blog posts, comments, status updates, wall posts, and all other social activity that sparks the potential for online conversations. As such, the goal of SMO is to boost the visibility of social objects as a means to connecting with individuals who are proactively seeking additional information and direction.

These social objects d not struggle with individuality, instead they become the catalysts for conversations and occurrences and they affect the behavior of crowds irrespective of their backgrounds. This is the way how your YouTube profile offers you suggestions on relative links. Search results in social media are defined by the elements ingrained in each social object, which is commonly referred to as Metadata. Essentially, metadata is the data that defines other data.