Web Analytics Wednesday Ahmedabad (WAW)

Hello Friends,

As you all know, I am here to share with you all my research and new facts that I come across related to SEO, Web Analytics, SEO Tips And Techniques, Internet Marketing Industry Updates and such others. So, in this post I would like to draw your attention towards a Grand Event that is going to be organized especially for Web Analytics Lovers. Many of you might be knowing that, there is an International Event called WAW (Web Analytics Wednesday) which has been started by a very well known Web Analytcis Practitioner “Eric T. Peterson”. Normally, these kind of events used to be held at US, UK & Canada, but since last 2 years, We were fortunate enough to get this Event at India. Last year, the same kind of events were organized at Banglore, Chennai & Hyderabad.

And, NOW, With Lot Of Cheers, I am happy to announce that, We got got an opportunity to get this event to our own “Ahmedabad”. This event is hosted and managed by IMJ-Internet Marketing Journal which is usually maintained and handled by the combined efforts of industry experts. Credits goes to my industry friends(Dipali, Kaushal & Jaydip). It will be for the first time in North-West India where such kind of events are going to be held. The agenda of this event is to share and discussion about the Role of Web Analytics Insights in the Business.

Yup, WAW- Ahmedabad sounds so good isn't it...

I would like to invite all of you people to attend this event. We will have a great presentations during this event (Might be few speakers who have presented their knowledge in Google India seminars last year will going to speak in this event)

Please visit the below URL to send your RSVP

http://www.internetmarketingjournal.org/web-analytics-wednesday-ahmedabad/

Finaly Team of Internet Marketing Journal brings Web Analytics Wednesday Day to Ahmedabad. Internet Marketing Journal (IMJ) was founded by Jaydip Parikh, Kaushal Shah and Dipali Thakkar. They really work hard and now we are going to enjoy Web Analytics Wednesday to our own Ahmedabad.

Lead Speaker

Ravi Pathak,

Founder & Business Head, Tatvic (Bangalore)

Tatvic is official Google Analytics Authorized Consultant in India and having clients like Make My Trip, Cardekho and other leading portal and some prestigious International clients too.

Venue - Date & Time
14th. April, 2010, 7.00 PM Onwards
Gloria Banquet Hall
1st. Floor, Regency Tower,
Nr. Rahul Tower,Anand Nagar – Prahlad Nagar 100 ft. Road,
Satellite, Ahmadabad.

Sponsors for this Event

Lead Sponsor :

YASH Infotech (Business Partner TATA Communications Ltd.)

Diamond Partners :

InvestPlus : InvestPlus is Personal Finance Software specially Design for Individuals needs.
Datatech Media : Web Development, Design & Internet Marketing Solutions Provider
Byte Technosys Pvt. Ltd. : RIMS, On Site Support, Microsoft Solutions, Web Solutions Provider

Merchandiser Partner :

Infibeam.com : Infibeam.com is a premier online shopping portal of India portal carrying 50 Lac products including Books, DVDs, Cars, Bikes, Mobiles, Cameras, Gifts and many more

Global Supporter : Eric Peterson Founder of webanalyticsdemystified.com

Feel free to get updates of Web Analytics Wednesday Ahmedabad event on LinkedIn & Facebook.

Hoping to meet you at Web Analytics Wednesday – Ahmedabad...

Why Use BlackHat SEO Techniques?

Disclaimer* These are my personal views on Blackhat Search Engine Optimization Techniques. If you disagree please feel free to express yourself in the comment section bellow.

Blackhat SEO exploits weaknesses in the search engine algorithm by breaking rules and manipulating search results. Blackhat SEO is also about misrepresenting content to search engines through cloaking and other dirty techniques.

Blackhat SEO is mainly focused on fully automatic processes like comment spamming and they also take advantage of automatic directory submitters or they will slightly change/steal peoples content to submit to article directories with links to their own pages.

Blackhat SEO focuses on earning money without even trying to provide any value to the visitors! Often times you will see websites that are covered with affiliate advertisements and/or Adsence ads that will be listed high in the SERPs “Search Engine Results Pages” for keywords they are not related to in anyway.

Blackhat = Fast but short lived search engine love and Whitehat or Greyhat= A long-term process that will have great benefits over a longer stretch of time and the benefits will normally last for years as long as you never stop creating content, building links, and offering your visitors something to remember!

But not everything that Google says should be considered the law! There is a difference between flat out Blackhat manipulations and Greyhat SEO.

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Top 3 ways to SEO Flash

In spite of the fact that Flash websites is less SEO and browser friendly than usual HTML sites, more and more people want to use Flash elements for their websites. Why? The main reason is that flash animation, menus and buttons are visually appealing and help to attract visitors' attention.

Your visitors and customers want not only good content, they also want it to be in a nice "wrapper". And flash is exactly this wrapper. Developers like Flash because it allows to place more content in a less space without spoiling page structure, it's perfect for presenting multimedia content and can be easily combined with such technologies as MySQL, XML, PHP, etc. Besides, flash is not so unSEOable as it's often believed to be. Here are the top 3 ways to make flash content seo-friendly.

1. Using CSS element DIV with the content which can be accessed and indexed by search engines along with using JavaScript SWFObject to detect user's (or browser's) ability to handle Flash. It allows both search engine bots and users without Flash plug-in to view non-flash content, while users with Flash player installed will see enhanced Flash content. This method let you kill two birds with one stone. You'll have no problem both with search engines, and with users who can't (or just don't want to) see flash content – they'll still get full accessibility and functionality. Non-flash content within DIV can contain everything you're able to add to usual HTML page, including links, text, images, etc.

2. Creating an alternative HTML version of the pure Flash sites. Maybe, this'll add you work, but this also will give you better rankings and visibility. As well as with DIV element, creating an alternative HTML content will ensure that your site will be indexed by search engine spiders and viewed even by people without Flash player plug-in, while other visitors will see its Flash version. The best way is still to create each page as HTML with installed Flash movie, even though this won't have a smoothness of all-Flash sites.

3. Using SWFAddress for deep linking. This smart developer tool creates virtual URLs for Flash websites that enables visitors to bookmark certain pages, send links via e-mail or IM, use browser history and back/forward/reload buttons. Also, this helps you with search engines as they can find specific content on a website. To learn details, read SWFAddress blog.

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SEO Tips - 10 Don'ts Of SEO

Here is a list of 10 of the worst mistakes you could make, that at worst could get your website banned, and if you are lucky, their implementation would just impede your success in achieving higher organic search engine positions.

1. Keyword stuffing. Needlessly stuffing your keywords on your web pages will sound nonsense not only to your human visitors but also the search engines. This tactic could actually harm your rankings.

2. Don't move or remove a popular page. By keeping a regular eye on your website statistics you should be aware of your current popular pages. If you need to reorganise your site structure then remember to 301 redirect via .htaccess from the old location to the new one.

3. Do not use images in navigation. For the moment at least images mean nothing to search engines. It is therefore preferable to use text links in your navigation web designer use CSS for styling. If there is no getting away from from using images then do not forget to use the ALT attribute and put relevant (keywords) text in there.

4. Do not use an incorrect robot.txt file. An incorrect robot.txt file can totally stop search engine traffic. A single incorrect command in this file can block an entire folder. If you need to use a robot.txt file ensure that you do not block the search engines when you do not mean to.

5. Do not procrastinate. SEO begins at the initial website structure planning stage and never ends. There may be lots of work involved but the sooner you start the sooner you will reap the rewards.

6. Do not exchange links with everyone. Outgoing links to bad neighborhood, unrelated or banned sites will certainly not help your SERPs.

7. It can be easy to foret the human visitors, make sure you do not. Do not neglect your human visitors, remember that eventually it's the human web designer who are going to do business with you, so keep them first. Reputed SEO consultants believe that websites that are human-friendly are search-engine-friendly automatically.

8. Using analytical tools will help. Analytics tools like Google Analytics and others help you know how much traffic you are getting from various sources including search engines. They also tell you which are your popular pages and for what keywords you attract maximum number of visitors.

9. Do not focus on too few keywords. My last point discussed longtail keywords. Your main keywords may get you lots of traffic from few sources, but your long tail keywords can get you small chunks of traffic from many sources

10. Do not be impatient. It can take a while to see good results, so be patient. For instance it may take more than 5 months for your website to even start appearing in the search results. That's why it is a good idea to start sooner rather than later.

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SEO Tips For Web Design

Web designers can do so much for themselves, their clients and their businesses by incorporating the following seo tips...

1) Make sure your URL's are as SEO friendly as possible. Avoid all those "=" and "?" marks. Use mod re-write to re-create these URL's to a more seo friendly format. Also, if the URL includes the keyword phrase for that page, that's extra bonuses!

2) Keyword research should be the absolute basis of any website design project. It should be the very first thing that you do with your client. You'll be surprised how many more pages and information you'll be able to get from your client if you can show them what their target audience is looking for.

3) Use semantic tags on every website page. If you're not familiar with these tags, read this list of semantic tags outlining all the semantic tags. These are not tags that are used in the section, instead, these are tags used within the body of text. They're very helpful with search engines and how they understand the content of your website pages.

4) Avoid using flash for your navigation, if possible. I know, I know, you want to show your client your flash design, beautiful menus, etc, but the truth is search engines still have trouble reading flash files and they simply will not follow the links from the navigation menu if it's written in flash.

5) Don't forget the alt tags on your images. They should be not only descriptive of the image but use the keyword phrase for the page as well.

6) If you use an image to replace text - know that the search engines will not count the text in that image towards the text of the page.

7) Optimize your graphics. You want the pages to load as quickly as possible. I can't tell you how many times I leave a website only because it's loading slowly.

8) Use anchor text links within the content of the site. In other words, if you have one page focused on the phrase "divorce attorney" - within the content of a website page (other than the one marketing the phrase "divorce attorney") you want to try and refer to the divorce attorney page by using the phrase "divorce attorney" and hyperlinking it to that page.

9) Make sure the hosting company has a 301 re-direct set up (usually they're 200 redirects). The issue is that with a 200 re-direct, the search engines actually index 2 websites instead of one. One version that's indexed is with the www and the second version that's indexed is without the www. So, www.abc.com and abc.com are indexed as 2 separate websites. The problem with this is that the search engines see duplicate content. Both websites are exactly the same. It's so simple to ensure a 301 re-direct, it just doesn't make sense NOT to use it.

10) Don't use or tags unless they're on the keyword phrases for the website page. These tags give the phrase that they're on some extra points (in the eyes of the search engines) so use the CSS styling instead.

So, for the web designers out there, do yourself a favor and give your business an edge by offering SEO services with your web design skills. Your clients will benefit greatly from it! If you can't find the time to learn or implement these techniques, then contact a reputable SEO firm that can work with you.

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7 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t as hard as it seems. SEO is just a matter of following simple tried and tested steps and applying them time and time again.

SEO isn’t just a one time job; if you want your site to be successful you need to schedule small SEO tasks each week. Just make it part of your weekly routine and it will soon seem effortless. These quick SEO tips will help get you started on your journey to the first page of Google.

Search Engine Optimization Quick Tips

Keyword research Make sure you are targeting the right keywords, this is vital, don’t guess at what your target market are searching for.

Keyword placement Make sure you put your keywords in the title and heading and everywhere else the search engines like to see them.

Fresh content Search engines like fresh content, that’s why blogs are SEO friendly. Create a schedule and add fresh content to your site every month

Directory listings Submit your site to relevant directories. This strategy won’t bring you much traffic but it will give you quality links to your site.

Get writing Write original content for your site, repurpose you content into articles and submit your articles to article directories for yet more exposure and links to your site. If you aren’t comfortable with writing your own content, hire a ghost writer, the rewards are worth it

Get Social Comment on blogs, answer questions in forums and join social networks like Twitter, this will create more links to your site and get the word out about your site and your products.

Be consistent If you want your site to climb in the search engine rankings you need to schedule regular SEO tasks and make them part of your routine.

If you want a successful website that has an endless stream of visitors, Search Engine Optimization is vital. Create a search engine optimisation strategy, decide what you will do and when you will do it, then take the first steps today.

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Three Steps for Search Engine Optimization

There are a number of ways to improve your website's popularity, page rank, and listing on major search engines. Here are three tips designed to improve your rankings.

Step #1: On Page Factor

The single most important “on page" factor affecting search engine rankings is the use of a title tag. A title tag is a snippet of code in the header section of a web page that is given great weight by the search engines.

One common mistake made when working with title tag is that a website is created from a template in which all of the title tag information is the same from page to page. This can not only get your pages thrown into supplemental results, but it's an example of extremely poor individual page optimization.

The title tag of each page should be individually optimized for the keyphrases that you are targeting for that page. Repetition should be avoided. For ecommerce websites, each product page should contain a unique title tag reflecting the specific product featured on that page.

Step #2: Publishing Rich Content

If you are not including keyword rich content on each page of your website, you again face a risk of having your pages receive a low quality score, or having your pages rank poorly for your target keywords. Be sure to include at least one instance of the keyword you are targeting for that page in the body text of the page.

A rule of thumb I use is to first go through and select the keyphrases you are targeting for each page. Then, optimize the title tags accordingly to reflect this. After that, write rich, unique content for each page, and be sure to include at least one instance of the title tag content in the body text.

Step #3: Create Link Bait

Generally speaking, the more links you have to rich content on your site, the better off you are going to be in the engines. The creation of a blog is a wonderful way to attract links. Other ideas for link bait include video, images, sound clips, press releases and the like. Contests, quizzes, product reviews, top 10 lists (or in the case of this article, a top 5 list), and how to articles fare very well. Also, the provision of useful tools can be a great way to attract links.

In the example of the real estate agency, a tool likely to attract links would be a free mortgage calculator. Offering such a tool on your website can attract the attention of other sites in the form of links, increasing your reputation and pagerank, which has a direct impact on higher search engine rankings.

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6 Steps to a Profitable Website

1. Find a money maker
You may be surprised by this, but: you need to know what you are going to be selling before you do anything else. The only exception to this rule may be if you are planning to monetize your website using Adsense, in which case you can choose from many niches. But, in the case of an affiliate product, you don’t choose the niche and the product afterward. You choose the product first and the niche implicitly.

2. Decide the type of website you are going to build
Here, you have 2 basic options: you can build a small niche site centered around the particular product, or build a large website that is going to attract a lot of search engine traffic. In order to find about the advantages or disadvantages of each method, read the article “Small Niche Site vs Large Authority Site”

3. Keyword Research
This is where 90% of the people get it all wrong. They don’t realize the importance of keyword research. Keyword research is the foundation of all your future work. If you don’t get this right, you are doomed from the get go. You are not going to get targeted visitors and you are probably not going to get search engine traffic at all. And although there are a lot of people who quickly dismiss search engine traffic under the pretense that they don’t want to depend on Google, it is the best kind of traffic you could ever get. People who dismiss it do so simply because they have no idea how to get it. How to do keyword research can be the subject of a small book, I could write on and on about it. I consider the best tools for this task to be Google’s tool and Keyword Discovery.

4. Content creation
You should now start creating your content around the keywords that you have chosen. If you want to build a small niche site, content creation will not be very difficult. However, if you plan on building a large site, it may take a while. You can outsource it if you like, but make sure that you always have unique content on your website. For a website that’s going to make you money, unique content is always the best bet.

5. On page Search Engine Optimization
Of course, I will not include tasks like uploading the website to your server in this small guide, these are self implied. Proper on page search engine optimization includes the following tasks:
- proper use of title tags;
- proper use of meta description tags;
- use of H1 and H2 headers;
- bold the main keywords on a page, but not more than a few times;
- using alt tags for images;
- designing a proper internal website structure.

6. Link building
Without targeted links, your business will never be productive. Read that again and remember it. Getting the right links to your website and in the right way is almost an art. Some people have more complex classifications, but I only split the links in two categories: crappy links and quality links. I define crappy links as being the links you get from article directories or social bookmarking sites, while quality links for me are in context links, from medium quality sites and up, anchored with my keyword, and with the keyword in the title tag of the page that’s linking to me. Again, I could write a whole book on the subject of link building.

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SEO and Link Building Tips and Tactics

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process by which webmasters and online business owners get their websites to rank highly in SERPs (search engine results pages) for keyword phrases that are both heavily searched for and related to their industry or niche. Two of the biggest types of SEO work are keyword optimization and link-building (increasing the number of incoming links to a website or specific page)

Here are a few SEO tips to keep in mind when thinking about keyword optimization for a new website or online business:

1. Use keyword suggestion tools to research keyword phrases related to the website’s or online business’ industry or niche topic.

2. Don’t focus exclusively on very general (often one-word) keywords or keyword phrases that would be very difficult to earn a high search engine placement for. At the same time, don’t focus on keyword phrases that no one is searching for. It’s sometimes better to be a “big fish in a smaller pond” than a “little fish in big pond” where you can’t likely rise to the top.

3. Include keyword phrases throughout a page, with particular emphasis on titles, highlighted subheadings, and early in any text areas.

Building incoming links to a website or online business is also an important part of SEO and improving search engine rankings. This is because search engines look at incoming links almost like a “vote” where another website is saying the site, or some page within the site, is of high enough quality to recommend to its visitors. Obviously, link-building can be manipulated in many ways that don’t equate to “votes” (such as by purchasing banner ads or text links on another website). For this reason, some incoming links are considered more valuable than others. Here are a few link-building tips to keep in mind, to build higher quality incoming links:

1. Try to achieve incoming links that are one-way, rather than reciprocal (a one-way link looks more like an honest “vote” than a trade does).

2. Build incoming links from relevant websites (of a similar topic or niche), rather than from generic link farms.

3. Get incoming links from “authority websites” (high quality and popular websites) whenever possible.

4. Look for one-page content-based text links if purchasing links, rather than site-wide banner advertisements (makes the link seem more natural).

5. To get a specific article or internal Web page to rank well in SERPs, build links to that page rather than only the site’s homepage.

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Google SEO Tips

If you’ve ever worked on a website, you’ve probably stumbled across the term SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the “science” (some might say art form) of writing the text and metadata tags of a website so that search engines like Google will see the site as an authority on whatever subject it covers. It is then listed higher in the list of search results for the subject. There are various ways people use to make their websites as SEO friendly as possible, and some work better than others. Below are some tips for making your website more Google SEO friendly so that it ends up listed on page one rather than page one hundred.

Practical Google SEO Tips That Work
- Don’t forget the meta tags! Many people forget to include keywords in their meta data because it’s not an obvious thing. When webpage’s were constructed in text editors, all the tags and behind the scenes information had to be entered. Now, however, people can make web pages in programs like Expression or Dreamweaver without ever seeing the code and it’s very easy to forget to enter keyword tags since you don’t ever see them on the actual webpage itself.

- Likewise, make certain to give each webpage a title (the text that appears on the top blue bar in Internet Explorer). Titles, like meta tags, may not contribute to the content on the page but are vital to search engine results.

- Another thing not to forget is to fill in those ALT tags on images. ALT tags contain the text that will appear on a page if your image doesn’t load for some reason, and they are yet another place you can stick in important keywords that describe your website and your content.

- Make sure your site is error-free. Sometimes, errors in XHTML, Flash, or other plug-ins can cause a search engine to misinterpret what your website is about.

- Write more content. A page with only a few sentences won’t be seen as informative by Google’s search software. These pages will be ranked lower than pages with a higher word count. What is considered the optimal word count varies from person to person. Some say you need only around 500 words of text on a page while others claim it’s better to have upwards of 3,000 or so. The more words you have, the likelier you’ll perfectly match a Google query. However, if you find yourself adding in filler content just to make longer pages, you may want to consider how a real person will react to the text. People rarely want to read redundant information.

- Be aware of how many times you use your keywords in the text. Ideally, you want each of your keywords to appear four or five times on a page, but it depends on how long your pages are. If you have 500 words of text, you may not be able to work in all of your keywords five times. On the other hand, if you have 3,000 words, you can probably use keywords eight to ten times and still have natural sounding sentences. Be careful here: if your keyword density is too low, Google won’t pick up on the word as a keyword, but if it’s too high, Google may decide your page is full of SEO spam and penalize it accordingly.

- Use your keywords at least once in the first few sentences of your page. The closer a keyword is to the top of a webpage, the more significant Google sees it.
Google SEO robots like to see bigger websites. Generally, they believe that a site with more pages has more information and should be ranked higher. Likewise, sites that grow and expand are more favorably ranked over those that never add new pages or content.

- Focus on your main page(homepage) first. This is the page that search engines look at the most, so you want it to contain all of your keywords.

- Google’s search programs can’t read images. This means if you use keywords in buttons or on banners at the top of your page, they will have no effect on the page’s rank. If you use images for your navigation, try to add in actual text links on your page as well. At the very least, make certain you add image ALT text to the buttons and banners.

- Avoid the word “click“. Many spam pages, especially ones that are trying to sell products or get people to join pyramid schemes, use the word “click” excessively. Google tends to rank pages that include this word lower since they are more often than not spam.

- Include descriptive text in your links. If you’re linking to a site, use the site title or a description of it in the anchor link text instead of saying “click here” (plus, this helps you avoid that dirty C-word!).

- Google ranks words in italics, bold, or that are underlined as being more important. Be sure to bold a few keywords here and there on your site. Don’t do this to every keyword, though. Besides looking very odd to humans on your site, search engines will see too much of this as suspicious.

- When it comes to keyword phrases, Google does not notice punctuation. This means that “dog beds” and “dog: beds” are actually seen as the same. Taking advantage of this lets you work in keyword phrases in ways that don’t seem as repetitive.

- Avoid frames if possible. Pages that appear inside frames don’t contain their own title, and often they don’t have links to the other pages on your site since the links are on the frame. Google likes to see links and titles on each page.

- If your page isn’t going to be updated often, consider adding a blog to it. As stated earlier, Google ranks pages that add new content higher than pages that haven’t changed for three years. If your website isn’t going to need new content on a regular basis, add a blog. You can then blog about business specials, conferences you’ve attended recently, review new products related to your site, and more.

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Top 10 Keyword Practices To Kill Your Business

Keywords are an essential part of Search Engine Optimization and PPC Advertising. But all marketing efforts, and money, can go to waste if they are not properly utilized. Here are the most common keyword pitfalls websites and advertisers often dive into.

1. Hiding and Shrinking of keywords.
Using your keywords for your website's content will highly optimize your site. But try going to a website and finding small words just below the copyright or press ctrl-A to highlight all the text. Hiding or shrinking keywords within a website have terrible consequences. Not only will your website not be shown for those keywords, you can actually be banned from search engines.

2. Keyword Overstuffing.
When you are finished with your website's content, read it aloud at least twice to measure how it sounds. When you repeat the same keyword phrase twice in the same sentence or three times in a single paragraph, you have gone overboard. Select the best keywords to use in your content and stick to them. If there are too much to talk about, break them down in sections or use them in other pages of your site.

3. Having your content or keywords as an image.
Search engines have yet to develop a way to index text within an image, so until then, avoid having your content and keywords within images and pictures in your website.

4. Over tagging.
Inputting your search phrases in the meta title, description and keywords of your site is advisable. But do not just insert them for the sake of indexing, there is no point repeating your keywords over and over again in your metatags.

5. Generic Keywords.
This is practically a major mistake. Not only do using generic one-word keywords generate too much competition, they are expensive and oftentimes not as effective as people would think.

Let’s try the consumer perspective. If we are looking to buy a specific product, we would not just search for a general term. We would look for a specific brand, model, and when necessary if it’s affordable. So, people searching for "cheap ipods nano-chromatic" are more likely looking to purchase than people keying in just "mp3 players" or even "ipod".

6. Choosing Competitive Keywords.
Choosing popular keywords often has an immediate consequence of having too many websites using them or advertisers bidding on them.

For SEO, it is hard to compete with other websites, especially older more established ones, for a great position. For PPC, bidding on popular keywords with too much competition is a money losing scheme.

7. Choosing Keywords with NO competition.
Keywords with 0 competition can mean that no one is using them. There is no point ranking number one for a keyword no one looks for. Enough said.

8. Bidding on unrelated keywords.
For PPC advertisers, this is a common mistake. Even if there is low competition and high popularity for this keyword, it would not matter. Imagine bidding on a keyword that will not generate money for your website because that was not what the searcher was looking for in the first place.

9. Not knowing your competition.
If you are an up and coming website, this is a common mistake. Bidding or taking on long tail keywords hoping that alone will be enough. There are billions of websites out there employing the use of keywords to sell. You can’t ignore competition.

There are advanced keyword research tools that provide you with information on competitors’ keywords as well as statistics on how these terms fair in the market. You find out what other advertisers or websites are doing either to improve on their strategies or to avoid them all together, just the same, you cannot avoid not knowing who your competitors are.

10. Not monitoring your keywords.
Some keywords will work for your ad campaign or website for a particular month but come the next season hit an all time low in search or click through rates. It pays to monitor what works and what doesn’t.

It is true that keyword research and application is not an exact science and takes a lot of work. But taking time in properly analyzing, choosing and utilizing your keywords will bring more good in your business in the long run.

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How to Optimize Video Content for SEO: 7 Tactics to Improve Your Rankings

Web users love online video. A summer report from comScore shows that U.S. residents watched more than 11 billion online videos in May 2008. And 52% of those viewers reported taking some action after watching, such as looking for more information or making a direct purchase, according to our 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide.

Derek Fulford, Manager, Search Marketing, Weather.com, achieved an impressive 275% increase in daily views when his team optimized for search a series of archived online videos for one division of their organization.

If your site employs online video, you can borrow Fulford’s tactics to ensure that your content is indexed by search engines and shows up when users enter relevant keywords.

“For us especially, being a publisher site with revenue dependent on ad sales, video is something advertisers are familiar with,” says Fulford. “Our sales team is effective at selling video ads, so the more video we can generate and the more views we achieve, the more ads we can sell.”

Based on the success of that first campaign, Fulford’s team is now working to create a standard video SEO protocol for all of Weather.com’s video content. Flash-based players can make search-engine indexing more difficult. But Fulford found that many techniques used to optimize text-based content can be adapted to the video environment.

Fulford’s top seven tactics for improving search visibility for video content, include educating video production teams on front-end SEO, employing keyword targeting strategies, surrounding online video with tags, user comments, and other text-based content.

Tactic #1. Educate your video production team on SEO basics

Many critical steps in optimizing videos happen when files are created and placed onto Web pages. So, marketers must work closely with their video production team to ensure they understand the basics of SEO. In larger organizations, video production may be handled by a separate division.

To avoid confusion, Fulford recommends engaging in a formal SEO training process with any video production team. Key elements should include:

- Hosting an “SEO 101” training session with the video team. This session can introduce video producers to key concepts, such as:

o Identifying keywords for video titles and file names
o Tagging options
o Creating keyword-rich text descriptions of video content

- Planning a follow-up “SEO refresher” course or a more advanced training session several months after the team has begun employing SEO basics.

- Meeting with individual team members who’ve shown interest or requested deeper training on SEO topics.

- Writing a one-page, SEO-basics document that the team can take away from sessions to use as a resource during their day-to-day production duties.

Fulford stresses that even after conducting such training marketers should double-check new video files to ensure proper SEO techniques are being used.

“You can’t expect the video team to do everything, so you have to review their work.”

Tactic #2. Conduct research to ID relevant keywords for searches

As with all SEO campaigns, optimizing video content begins with identifying relevant keywords. Here are a few essentials:

- Identify a specific theme for video keywords.
Web pages may contain multiple content sections and navigation links that you can target for search engines. But video content tends to be shorter and more tightly focused.

For example, Weather.com features dozens of videos on hurricanes. Rather than choosing a generic search term such as “Hurricane,” the team identifies storms by a specific name or location, such as “Hurricane Ike” or “Hurricane Ike Houston.”

- Use keyword research tools to supplement your keyword list.
Once you’ve identified a major theme, keyword research tools, such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, can identify popular terms, highly competitive terms, and useful synonyms that Web users are likely to type into a search engine.

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Avoid Being THAT SEO Jerk

There are as many ways to be a jerk as there are jerks in the world, but there are just enough ways to be an SEO jerk to fill a blog post. In case you needed a clarification on behaviors that make others in the SEO industry think you’re a toolbag, here are examples (inspired by real-life recent events) of why your peers might get pissed at you:

Not Knowing When and Why to STFU

SEO bloggers desperate for material particularly like to reveal “tricks” such as, for example, a trusted domain that lets you add URLs that pass link juice. So they blog about it, promote their post all over the place, then newbies who don’t know any better thank them for showing them a new way to spam the crap out of their Cialis sites, it draws the attention of the spam cops who close that hole, and the trick immediately loses all value.

In all likelihood, if you were the one who blogged this no-longer-secret trick, your intent was never to make the technique/site/links/whatever worthless. You just thought you were sharing something cool, and maybe hoping to draw some attention to your mad SEO skillz.

Other SEOs who have been using that piece of intel for months (and knew enough just to keep their mouths shut), however, tend to get pissed off when you do that though. Since they’ve known about that particular resource long before you got around to blogging it, they don’t think you’re clever for discovering “a brand new trick”; they just think you’re a jerk who ruined it for other people.

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6 Powerful Truths About SEO That You Don’t Know

Truth 1: The Page Title of The Website Linking To You Matters

Yep, this one matters a lot. If the title of the links page includes one or more of your keywords, it will give the link to your site more weight. So check into your prospective link partners, and look at the title of the page your link will be on.

You can usually find this pretty easily by using the backlink listing from above, as most page titles will be listed in the search engine results.

Truth 2: The Number of Outbound Links On The Website That Is Linking To You

One page can only have so much “importance” (Page Rank) to give away, so the more links on the page, the less the link to your site counts. Therefore, if your site is the only outbound link on the page, it’s going to carry much more weight than a “links page” with 100 outbound links on it. I suggest a maximum of 25 links per page - many more than that devalues your link too much.

This one will require the quite a bit of work if your link is on a lot of typical links pages. You’ll have to visit the page and manually count how many links on the page are outbound links.

Truth 3: The Content of The Page Linking To You

If you can get a link on a content page (as opposed to a links page) it will definitely be to your benefit. This is because 1) there probably won’t be many other outbound links on that page, and 2) the content on the page will most likely be related to the keywords in your anchor text, so the search engines will give your link more weight. You’ll also enjoy the bonus of the targeted traffic coming directly from that page. It can be tedious to find out which sites have your link on a content page. You may be able to find this out by checking the referrers’ section of your stats package - if you’re getting quite a few clicks from a certain site, your link is probably on a page with some content.

Truth 4: The Number And Type Of Links Linking To The Page That’s Linking To You

Wow, that was a mouthful. In a nutshell, the more the owner(s) of the site linking to you concentrated on offpage optimization while they were considering their linking partners, the more it will increase your link’s weight.

This is pretty much worthless to try to figure out on your own, unless you have dedicated staff people who you can pay, or a program to automate this process and report back to you. You’ll have to find out the offpage optimization for each site linking to you, and that will take time you don’t have.

Truth 5: The IP Addresses Of The Pages Linking To You

Search engines look up the IP address of the pages linking to you, and links from the same IP are devalued accordingly. This is to keep webmasters from pointing all of their sites at each other. It’s not a bad thing to have more than one link per IP, but it’s more valuable to have lots of links from different addresses.

To find the IPs of the pages linking to you, go to http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/class-c-checker.php and enter between 2 and 10 links to check their IP addresses. However, this will become very tedious if you have hundreds or thousands of backlinks to check.

Truth 6: Whether Or Not The Websites Linking To You Are Deemed By Google As An Authority Website

This is something most webmasters don’t even know exists - “authority websites.” Most government (.gov) sites are considered “authority” sites. Or, sites like About.com, Microsoft.com, and others have also reached the “authority” status. This status is usually granted only to “supersites” that include tons of content and information, and if you can get a link from one of these sites to your site, it can be a huge positive effect on your rank. It’s almost impossible to know if a site is considered an authority, but any site with PR 8-10 is probably in this category.


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Two Ways To Justify SEO In Uncertain Times

During uncertain economic times like these, our advice is to always stick with the fundamentals to maintain business efficiency and progress. No matter what your business model, performing the fundamentals will keep you on-track and in-line for leveraging future success.

If the C-level executives in your company are having any doubts about the value of SEO and are hesitating to release more funding, it’s time to perform a cost-benefit exercise. It’s your job as an in-house SEO manager to reestablish their confidence in the value of SEO as well as your value and the value of your team.

When funding gets in the way, having a narrow focus, putting it on the table, and describing company goals you are committed to are all very important.

1) Leverage Your Paid Search Data
To demonstrate implicit value for SEO, start with a baseline. Show where your key terms currently rank in organic and multiply by the cost-per-click value. Run the numbers for the value of direct clicks with high search intent.

One way to go about this is to calculate an Effective Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) for your organic listings:

1.Access the Keyword Tool within your Google AdWords account.
2.Type your best performing (for instance, 20) keywords.
3.Select descriptive words or phrases and synonyms.
4.Click Get Keyword Ideas.

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Facts about SEO and PPC

Mention the words SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) to most business owners and you’re sure to either see blank faces, or hear stories of frustration. Either they don’t utilize these marketing techniques at all, or they’ve handed their company’s Web site SEO and PPC activities over to an agency and have little idea what’s going on with either, or they’ve “done it themselves” and had lackluster results at best.

This is unfortunate, because SEO and PPC are the foundation of any good Web site marketing plan. SEO refers to manipulating Web site content in a way that improves your chances of appearing on top of the results page; whereas PPC allows you pay for an advertisement or sponsored link to show up on the top results page, and you are charged for each click. If you want to be successful in business, both of these techniques are imperative. Think of it like building a house. If you build the roof before you build the foundation, you really don’t have a house. Likewise, if you launch a Web site or engage in fad Web marketing techniques (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.) without solid SEO and PPC in place, you’re wasting both your time and money – two things that are precious in the business world.

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Seo Needed Adsense Techniques

1. Find a topic you can create a two part article on. Write part one of your articles and place it on a page on your website. Place Google Adsense ads next to your article. Next you will want to create part two of your article and make sure to make reference to your first article in your second article. Take part two of your article and submit it to ezine publishers, and article directories.

Using this technique, part two of your article will drive traffic to part one of your article. In this way you will profit when someone clicks on your Google Adsense ads when visiting the web page that you have part one of your article on.


2. Create a site that is related to your market that has nothing on it but good quality content about a popular topic in your market. Make sure that you place Google Adsense ads on the site also. You'll then offer ezine publishers and ad on one of the pages of your site if they'll mention your site to their subscribers. Make sure they know they'll benefit by other ezines publishers sending traffic to your site. Their subscribers will be exposed to those ads also. You'll profit from the earnings you earn by people clicking on your Google Adsense ads.

This technique is profitable for everyone involved. I haven't seen anyone using it so be a pioneer and watch this technique explode your Google Adsense income!

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