Where to Get Links for Social Interaction

• Directories may link to sites you submit.

• You can exchange links with similar web sites. If you can afford to, it is better to create legitimate business partnerships and friendships rather than just link exchange with whoever is willing.

• Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other web sites can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites, you may want to create unique content just for the article submission sites or have a longer or slightly different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.

• Writing press releases can give you inbound links.

• You can participate in forums which provide signature links. If you participate in communities and leave relevant, useful comments then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you.

• Buy links or rent advertising space.

• Donate to charities for links.

• People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking. Generally, this is where SEO battles are either won or lost in competitive markets.

Generally, the easier and cheaper the link is to get, the less a search engine will want to trust it. Getting other people to want to talk about you or your business (and link to you) is the golden egg of SEO.

Search engines want to count legitimate editorial citations. They would prefer not to count other types of links as votes. Some engines, such as Google, have advanced algorithms to find and discount some artificial links.

Read more...

Why Buying Links is NOT a Good SEO Practice

Link building is not an easy task for SEO’s that its sounds easy to hear. But one truth is that so many SEO’s give promise that they will get thousands of link in several days; but this link mostly they buy from other sites. Of course buying links will get you number of good amount of links faster than natural link building. But in reality this is not a good idea because Google considers buying links in order to pass/get page rank to be a link scheme. According to Google “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

This is also true that Google wouldn’t penalize your site if it does not find out that you have been buying links to get your page rank up. Eric Enge, who explained why he doesn’t buy links, wrote a good entry on how Google can find out that you have been buying/selling links.

For those who do buy/sell links but for only for advertising purposes you shouldn’t really worry since Google considers this as a valid reason. You should make sure that the links are properly designated as links for advertising only  by…

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute; or
  
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
  

If you have been buying links as part of your link building campaign or has been doing so for your clients this is a good time to rethink your strategy.

Read more...

How does google calculate the Page Rank??

Google calculate the page rank of your website by counting each incoming link to your site as a vote. For example, if www.site3.com has an outgoing link to www.site4.com; Google considers the link as a vote for www.site4.com. It’s like if you were commending a reputable company to ur friend- your recommendation strengthens his confidence in that company. 

But Google doesn't rely on the pure count of the links coming to the site in order to calculate the pagerank. The search engine robots analyze the page linking to your site as well. The more relevant the linking page is to the keywords entered, the higher the importance that Google gives to your pages. So, keep this in mind when you are thinking about getting one way links to your site, or organize reciprocal links. 

When analyzing the linking page, Google takes into account the following on-page and off page factors:

• The Page Rank of the link page.
  
• Whether the linking page is on-focus or off-focus. If you have a medical website, an on focus link would be a link from another medical website. A link from a site about Pictures would be considered off-focus. 
  
• The number of outgoing links on the outgoing link page. A page with 500 outgoing links will not be considered as relevant as a page with only 20 outgoing links.
  
• The quality of the incoming links directed at the website of the outgoing link.
  

So, the quantity and quality of links pointing back to your website are the major part of the Google algorithm to calculate the page rank. 

Read more...

Strategies of Link Building

Without using certain website promotion techniques, a alone website cannot achieve the desired marketing success. The effective way of promoting and publishing a website in World Wide Web is Link Building. To getting higher rank in the search engine rankings, Link Building techniques and strategies are very helpful. Proper selection and their usage help in extended web traffic. Let's have a look at different types of link building techniques:

1. One-way Link Building

Here, not for business purpose but due to quality and good usability one site gets a link on other website. The website whose link is posted need not provide exchange link of the site on which it is posted.

2.  Reciprocal link building

'Reciprocal link building' is another widely used strategy of link building. On one to one basis here link exchange is done between two websites. But in choosing the reciprocal partners, one has to be careful. Before finalizing it is advisable to look out for quality partners and review their request for link exchange.

3. Article submission 

To build effective link building of your website Article submission is a sure shot method.

You can write one article per day or as much as you want and do directory submission of articles. Submission can be done in many directories altogether, where one-way links are given to your site from the articles. Other sites that use your articles also provide one-way link to your site from other websites.

4. Press release submission 

The best way to get natural back links from your press release articles is Press release submission in various press release directory and leading news site. About your new product launches or news releases in your industry you need to write press release article.

5. Three way link exchange 

There is one-way link exchange between three websites. For example- site X gives link to site Y, site Y to site Z and site Z to site X. Thus all three sites have one-way links.

6. Social bookmarking and Social networking 

One of the best ways to get back links and more visitors to your website is social bookmarking and social networking.

There are many more link building techniques which are useful to increase link popularity of your website. Quality link building is far better than quantity link building, so keep working on quality link building and achieve better search engine rankings.

Read more...

Robots.txt

What Is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file used to tell search engine bots that which pages you would like them not to visit.  For search engines Robots.txt is not mandatory but generally SEs follows what they asked not to do. It is important to elucidate that Robots.txt is not a way from keeping SEs to crawling your site. Robots.txt is exploited something like arrange a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door.

It is very important, where we put robots.txt in our site. It must be in the main directory otherwise user agent can not to find it- they don’t search whole website. Instead they first look in the main directory (i.e. http://domainname.com/robots.txt ) and if they don’t find robots.txt there, they simply assume that this site does not have this file and they index everything they find along the way.  If search engines index your whole site then do not surprised because you don't put robots.txt in the right place.

Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is quite simple and flexible – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows: 

User-agent:

Disallow: 

“User-agent” is search engines' crawlers and 

“Disallow”: lists the files and directories to be excluded from indexing.

In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at the beginning of the line: 

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory. 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

The Traps of a Robots.txt File 

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to find but in some cases validation tools help. 

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance: 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except the /temp directory. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user agents are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ - including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. 

Read more...

About life

# Act in the valley so that you need not fear those who stand on the hill.
Danish proverb

# The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

# Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
Sir James Dewar, Scientist (1877-1925)

# Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

# Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

# Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

# If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.W. Edwards Deming

# It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.W. Edwards Deming

# All my life I've wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific.
Jane Wagner/Lily Tomlin (1939- )

# Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

# We think in generalities, but we live in details.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

# Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

# In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love.
Diego Marchi

Read more...

'Top Ten' Famous Quotations

Famous Quotations #1

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

-- Albert Einstein

Famous Quotations #2

If music be the food of love, play on.

-- Shakespeare

Famous Quotations #3

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

-- Walt Disney

Famous Quotations #4

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

-- Henry Ford

Famous Quotations #5

I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

-- Wayne Gretzky

Famous Quotations #6

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

-- Yogi Berra

Famous Quotations #7

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

-- Hegel

Famous Quotations #8

The life which is unexamined is not worth living.

-- Socrates

Famous Quotations #9

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

-- M.K. Gandhi

Famous Quotations #10

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

-- Zig Ziglar

Read more...

Article Submission - Do they work at all?

One of the oldest methods of link building is article submission. In article submission, an article based on a particular category/topic with a rich collection of words and format including links is posted to the channels which expose the article.

Now, question is what to right in article and where is it submitted to…

Basically, article should be original, well written and unique with purposeful, contextual links and references. And the channel which receives the article is ideally one that is again exclusive, and original

If you full fill above two factors then article submission can really work. But now a day’s both of them are heavily skewed.

-How article submission is right?

Article submission has to be seen as method to increase the scope and length of your “outgrowths” and not as back link source. When it is seen only as a back-link source, it is quite natural that it gets spammed.

- Write lot of articles and make them unique.

Not to add multiple sources, but submit only one source to each…

Try to ensure that in multiple sites does not appear the same article, and avoid duplicate content.

- Rotate the anchor texts.

Always use unique keyword as anchor text, use different variation of keywords and add them in each article…

- Do no submit to automated sources.

Yea, they’ll promise you a thousand back-links in a week, but I can guarantee that all of them would be scrap. Because, all the articles on all those sites would probably is the same as they all got it automated?

- Submit only to authentic sources.

So essentially, article submission works or not, they’ll collect some back-links for sure. To make the best out of them, don’t automate things, handpick sites and channels and spent some time writing stuff. 

Read more...

Choosing a Domain Name

Before you pick a domain name, it helps to know your target audience, what you intend to sell to them, and what makes your site unique or different than everything else that is already on the market.
Using your keywords in your domain name can increase click-through rates on search engine
listings and paid ads as well as make it easier to get keyword-rich inbound links.
You want to consider the effect on brand and your long-term goals before deciding what name to
use.

A Horrible Domain Name

• Some people think it is super important to have keywords in a domain. People purchase domains like look-4-buy-cheap-discount-viagra-online-pharmacy.com. This is a horrible domain name!
• Keywords in the domain name may help some, but if I were going to create a long-term business I would put brand above keyword-rich.
• If you are creative you usually can get keywords in the domain while keeping it short, memorable, fairly brandable, and free of hyphens.

Dashed Domain Names

• Search engines do not read the words in your URL if they run together. Many webmasters separate the words in their domain names using dashes. In the past the domain name itself was a significant ranking factor. As search engines have advanced, it is not as significant in most cases.
• If the option between having the dash in the domain and not having a dash exists, you are probably better off going without the dash as it looks more professional and would most likely be more memorable.
• If you are just using quick-buck-lead-generation type web sites then you may want to use a keyword-rich dashed domain for the small benefit it may offer, but in most cases, I do not recommend a dashed domain name for long-term web sites.

Long versus Short URLs
People will forget the words in a domain which is exceptionally long. Another problem with exceptionally long URLs is that they get cut off in e-mails and some other data transmission types. If you make the idea hard to spread, then your site will most likely limit its potential income.

Branding versus Naming

• Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.
• The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their domain name for more than just branding.

Generic Names versus Unique Names

• Some businesses will require brand development to become successful. Being a branded SEO makes it far easier to charge a fair rate for my services than if I was unbranded.
• There is more than one way to skin a cat, and the same idea can be said for picking a domain name.
• If you aim to extract long-term profits and want to make the site you are working on become your career, then you want to pick a name that is not overly generic.
• If you are going to make a generic travel site and are just looking to extract shortterm profits then an extremely generic, keyword-rich domain name is the way to go.
• I like the idea of creating things that I think add long-term value to the web, so I usually opt for branded names over generic names, but either way it is a big help in SEO to get your keywords in your domain name.

Before you pick a name or start building sites, you should decide what your goals are with the site. If you are unsure what type of site you want to make or why you want to make it, you may want to participate in web communities to find problems that need solutions and create a personal site until you find what you want to do.

Read more...

Google Tips on Submission & Ranking

Submit your Site to Google
In Google Search engine the process of submitting site is very easy and absolutely free. After submitting the home page URL into Google; Google will index your whole site.

Getting Listed in Google
Google use GoogleBot (crawler or spider)- robots that automatically index pages on the web. For newly submitted site Google usually takes an average of 6 to 8 weeks to index the site. When you submit your site URL to Google, GoogleBot picks up and goes through each link on each page.

Googlebot reads through all your site pages to pick up keywords, then saves and indexes the pages in its catalog cache. Google spiders have easy access to all your relevant pages, your site’s pages linking to each other. And make a site map and submit it in to google is the another way to make sure that your all pages indexed.

Very Important: Getting indexed by GoogleBot is just the first step to getting ranked in Google, so don't expect immediate results for your pages to show up in searches. Give it some time and work on optimizing your web pages.

Tips on Google Search Engine Optimization for your web site
• Build quality links to your site pages.
• Make sure you provide quality content that have something unique & fresh; that have keywords or key phrases people might search to find your site in Google.
• Optimize your web site pages in this way that your top keywords appear in title, meta tag and content.
• If you sell products, give something away free (The word "free" is one of the top most searched words on the internet).
• Keep a track of your listings/ranking in Google and analyze it periodically.

Read more...

Keywords

What are Keywords? Keywords are phrases which you want your web site to be found under in search engines. Keywords are typically two-to-five-word phrases you expect people to search for to find your web site.

Focusing a Keyword

• Single word keywords are usually not well-targeted and are hard to rank for.
• Longer keywords are easier to rank well for and typically have better conversion rates.

Keyword Phrases
Keywords are typically two-to-five-word phrases you expect people to search for to find your web site. What would you expect people to type in the browser to find your site?

Keyword Length
A longer search phrase is typically associated with better targeting and increased consumer desire. Some people say shorter keyword searchers are shoppers and longer keyword searchers are buyers.

As you add various relevant descriptive copy to pages, you are more likely to appear in search results similar to your keywords which do not exactly match your more generic root-term keywords. Most good keyword phrases are generally two to five words.

Keyword Density
One of the simplest ways to improve your site's placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on your page.

I will refer to a "keyword" as a word that the user searches for when using the search engine. Generally speaking, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword occurs only (say) once in a page of one thousand words, it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length.

If a particular keyword has a higher density on your web page, then the likelihood of your page obtaining a better search engine ranking increase. Note that not all search engines bother with keyword density and indeed even those that do have their own algorithm for computing the density of a keyword. However, the principles described in this article are general enough to help your page improve its ranking in the engines that take keyword density into account.

Read more...

How to Increase your site's Traffic

To make your site visible to search engines is the main purpose of SEO, thus getting higher rankings in the Search Result Pages, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. So ultimately the goal in sites promotion is to having more visitors.SEO is only one alternative to promote your site and increase traffic – there are many other online and offline ways to do accomplish the goal of getting high traffic and reaching your target audience.

1.Submitting Your Site to Search Directories, forums and special sites
When you finished the on page optimization of the new site, time comes to submit the site to search Engines. Generally, with search engines you don't have to do anything special in order to get your site included in their indices – they will come and find you. Well, it cannot be said exactly when they will visit your site for the first time and at what intervals they will visit it later but there is hardly anything that you can to do invite them. So you can go to their Submit a Site pages in submit the URL of your new site but by doing this do not expect that they will hop to you right away. Here if you submit your URL, but most of the search engines have right to judge that whether they crawl your site or not. So you can submit your site in these three major seach engines: Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

In addition to search engines, you may also want to have your site included in search directories as well. First, usually Humans maintained search directories and the check relevancy of your site after they have been submitted. Second, search directories do not use crawlers to get URLs, so you need to go to them and submit your site. But once you submit your site in directory, you can stay there forever. Some of the most popular search directories are DMOZ and Yahoo!

Some times it can be a miracles’ in terms of traffic that you posting a link to your site in the right forums or special sites. So you should find the forums and sites that are leading in high ranking in the field of interest to you. . Then you need to check the sites one by one because some of them might not allow posting links to commercial sites. Posting into forums is more time-consuming than submitting to search engines but it could also give nice results to you.

2.Specialized Search Engines
Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are not the only search engines on Earth, or even the only general-purpose ones. There are many other general-purpose and specialized search engines and some of them can be really helpful for reaching your target audience. You just can't imagine for how many niches specialized search engines exist! Some of them are actually huge sites that gather Web wide resources on a particular topic but almost all of them have sections for submitting links to external sites of interest. So, after you find the specialized search engines in your niche go to their site and submit your URL – this could prove more traffic worthy than striving to get to the top of Google.

3.Paid Ads and Submissions
If you need to be sure that your site will be noticed, you can always use paid ads and submissions. Paid listings are a fast and guaranteed way to appear in search results and most of the major search engines accept payment to put your URL in the Paid Links section for keywords of interest to you but you also must have in mind that users generally do not trust paid links as much as they do with the normal ones. So think twice about the pros and cons of paying to get listed.

Read more...

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites, such as blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advertisement to visit the advertisers' website.

PPC is essentially a method of advertising your website on search engine results where advertisers bid against each other to be the top search result on particular keywords or keyword phrases. Cost per click is the bidding amount you have agreed to pay whenever there is a click on your result.

What is the most important metric for pay per click advertisers? ROI. The Return on Investment is the most critical metric to consider when tweaking PPC campaigns. But not only do too many people give an in proportionate amount of time focusing on their CTRs, many of those same people are doing so without a clue as to what their ROI is! They are simply working off the assumption that higher CTR must mean higher ROI, without having the data and stats to backup their beliefs. This thinking is so flawed when ROI isn’t be tracked.

Why Use Large Pay-Per-Click Search Engines?

• The results will be scalable.
• The feedback will be quicker.
• They offer many great tracking and targeting features free.
• Larger pay-per-click search engines generally present higher quality traffic and are less susceptible to fraud.
• It is less complex managing two or three accounts versus 100 accounts.
• It’s easier to track the ROI on two accounts than on 100 accounts.

Read more...

Link Building

• Link building is the single most important part of achieving a high ranking web site in modern search algorithms.
• Create something that legit webmasters interested in your topic would be interested in linking to.
• When possible, try to get your keywords in many of the links pointing to your pages.
• Register with, participate in, or trade links with topical hubs and related sites. Be in the discussion or at least be near the discussion.
• Look for free links from related sites and directories.
• If you have some good internal content, try to get direct links to your inner pages.
• Write articles and get them syndicated at other sites.
• Participate in forums to learn about what your potential consumers think is important. What frequent questions do they have? How do you solve those problems?
• Issue press releases with links to your site.
• Leave super glowing testimonials for people and products you really like. Oftentimes when the product owner or person posts the testimonials, they will include a link back to your site.
• Leave relevant comments in blogs that do not send their comments through redirects.
• Sponsor charities, blogs, or web sites related to your site.
• Consider renting links if you are in an extremely competitive industry.
• Mix your link text up. Adding words like buy or store to the keywords in your some of your link text can make it look like more natural linkage data and help you rank well for many targeted secondary phrases.
• If you need help determining how competitive your industry, is feel free to send me an e-mail, and I will give you my opinion.
• Survey your vertical and related verticals. What ideas/tools/articles have become industry standard tools or well-cited information? What ideas are missing from the current market space that could also fill that niche?
• If you have a large site, make sure you create legitimate reasons for people to want to reference more than just your home page.

Read more...

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site.

Methods of Optimization

• On Page Optimization
• Off Page Optimization

Read more...

Off-Page optimization

Defined: Off-page optimization (off-page SEO) is what can be done off the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content and keywords in off-page direct-links.

Off-page optimization are strategies for search engine optimization that are done off the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the page content.Examples of off-page optimization include linking, and placing keywords within link anchor text.

Methods of obtaining links can also be considered off-page optimization. These include:

• Public relations
• Article distribution
• Social networking via sites like Digg and Slashdot
• Link campaigns, such as asking complementary businesses to provide links
• Directory listings
• Link exchanges
• Three-way linking
• One-way linking
• Blogging
• Forum posting
• Multiway linking

Read more...

On page Optimization

Defined:On-page optimization (on-page SEO) is what can be done on the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content.
On page optimization is the major part of SEO. On page factors include all types of improvements of any website which will give you a better keyword ranking in search engine results.
First, make a list of major keywords; you want for your search terms. Use can use tool for choose right keywords.
Keywords in URL: If possible, target your main keyword in url, If your website related to web design company. Then the best domain name will be "web-design-company.com" or webdesigncompany.com. But don't use too many hyphens in your domain name. Target your main keywords in the names of directories and files too.
Keywords in titles: Try to include your main keywords in the title tag. Keywords in title are extremely important. Title of every page should be unique, depending on the page topic. Google shows about 60 first letters of the title in SERPs, Yahoo! and MSN a little more. So if you will write longer titles, the main information about the page should be included in the first 60 letters.
Keywords in Description: According to your page content target your main keyword in description tag also. Every page of your web should have its own unique description. Because same description of every pages, probably will not fit good the page content. Keep in mind that content of the description tag is usually used by search engines as a part of website's listing. Meta tag description should contain keywords related to particular page. Always include the keywords used in title (the most important keywords) and add some more specific keywords.
Keywords in meta keywords tag: Meta tag keywords should contain a few most important keywords related to particular page. Don't try to repeat single keyword, it can be considered spam.
Keywords in alt tags: Alt tags can be useful for better images description and as an alternative text which is used in case that the image is not loaded.
Header Tags: Try to Use your target keywords in H1, H2..... tags. The most important keywords should appear in the H1 tag, H2 (H3, H4... if applicable) tags should contain more specific keywords related to the paragraph below these headings.
Use your target keywords in anchor text. Anchor texts are the words in links.
Use your keywords naturally in the body content. You can also highlight those keywords by color, bold, italic etc. Don't use over keyword stuffing. It can be harmful for your website. Always try to update your page content. Search Engines (Google) like fresh content. Keep your site up to date.
Always use Quality content.
Always use relevant keywords in your website content.
Target your most important keyword in home page, secondary keywords in other pages.

Read more...