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5 Steps Off Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO Consultant — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:47:26 +0000

In my previous article, 6 Easy Tips for Onpage Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I talked about basic On-Page Search engine techniques. Today, I’ll try to talk about again the basic techniques for off-page SEO. Please keep in mind – it’s only the basic techniques and result of my personal experience. So if you have different views, please feel free to post comments. After All – “To Err Is Human”.

For those, who are not aware about Off-Page SEO, I would like to talk a little – Off-Page SEO helps your pages to have a good position in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) from outside of your website. Suppose you are searching for “Business Promotion” in Google. You will receive 26,100,00 pages as result. But some pages are coming in 1st page, some are in last page. So what’s making this difference? In simple words, both On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO are all about Search Engine result positioning. You are confident about your pages, are highly optimized, you may now concentrate in Off-Page SEO.

Mostly Off-Page SEO techniques are all about link building methods. According to Google searching algorithm, “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’”. So link building is very important targeting Google as major Search Engine.

Some people always try to promote others or their own services while writing article, or suggesting different services. As I do everything my own, and I’ve no other services, I’m not providing any links in SEO techniques. Please search services, directories in Google … you will find thousands of them.

Here is some popular link building techniques:
Directory Submission
On doubt, this is the most popular and well practiced ways to have quality backlinks. There are thousands of web directories over internet. These web directories offer free links or paid links. If you have a good amount of money for Directory Submission, you may choose high traffic directories, they start charging you from $15 to $100 for a certain period. Search engine bots frequently visit well known directories, so you will have good change to have quality backlinks within a short time. Please keep in mind to place your link in right category / niche of directories. Search engines always prefer links from related category.

There are lots of companies, people are charging a small amount of money to submit your website in different forums. But please before paying them money, check their previous records, provide them your website title, keywords, description etc.

Article / Blog Submission
This is a very useful but highly appreciated technique. Suppose you have a website about “Cricket Accessories”, so you may write article about cricket accessories and place your product links in appropriate positions. You may talk about what good about your products, what benefits your customers will have if they buy accessories from your etc. Again you may create a new section in your website – blog section. You can write daily, weekly or monthly about your services, products and place your links. This will help your pages to be indexed soon and come up in SERP.

You may search for freelance article writer in Google, paying them a generous money, they will write articles of your own chosen topic.

Signature Posting
Internet is an amazing place. There is always someone there for you to help. And this concept has created forums. Forums are off different kinds of – computer forums, fashion forums, doctors’ forums etc. If you became a member of forums related to your website’s niche, most of the forums will allow you to place your website links after a certain amount of postings. This is a very good way to have backlinks too from related topics. Even you have not enough time to post, you may find members in forums selling place in their signature – it may start from $10/month with 1000+ post count. That means, if you are paying $10 / month, you getting potentially 1000 links. Though not always works like that.

Link Exchange
After last year, Google changed it’s algorithm, most popular ways of SEO, Link Exchange has lost it’s popularity. Usually people used to request similar website’s owners to exchange links between their websites. That means Site A will place Site B link in it’s website and Site B will place Site A link it’s website. Now a days, new means of Link exchange is taking place – 3 ways Link exchange, so that Google and other search engine have little idea of link exchange. According to that Site A will place Site B link, Site B will place site C link, Site C will place Site A link!

Social Bookmarking
This is gaining popularity, as it not only a means of backlinks but also generates huge number of potential web traffic. Recently I’ve wrote an article on Do Follow Social Bookmarking sites, you may find it interesting. Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Del.icio.us are very well-known bookmarking sites, but except Digg, all of them do not allow dofollow links. So you may try other dofollow bookmarking sites if you are looking for backings; link Spurl, Mister Wong, Backflip, Bibsonomy etc. Otherwise you should use previously mensioned bookmarking sites for traffic.

Most important factors in achieving backlinks are links from related topic and anchor text. You should always research about your keywords and place keywords, of course in meaning full way in anchor links.

Hopefully, this article will help you to start your SEO journey. SEO is a long process, so please have patience and try all the techniques, ultimately you will have success.

Source: 5 Steps Off Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

6 Easy Tips for Onpage Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO Consultant — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:34:30 +0000

Primarily On-Page SEO is the most important than any other means of optimization. The processes are very simple but important while designing and content to pages. From my personal experience I have managed to come up 6 ways to optimize web pages easily.

1. Keywords positioning
I always try to use Google’s Keyword Tool, Google Trend, Overture Keyword Tool to search what other people are searching related to my content. Then write my content using those keywords. Some people just try to over populate keywords. I believe 6%-10% keywords in content in enough for search engines to find your website from thousands of website around the world.

2. Title Tags
Title tag is very important. Title should not be too long. For Google, 70 characters are enough for SERP. Keywords should be place in a natural way. Repetitions look is odd to see when web pages come on SERP. Descriptive titles have maximum clickthoughs.

3. Internal Linking
Internal linking is very important. The more links are spread, the more Page Rank is distributed between the pages. Spiders are very frequents to different pages and can dig very deep.

4. Meta Description Tags
Meta description is another important for on-page SEO. Google only consider 155 characters from Meta description. So it’s important to write a unique Meta description within 155 characters using keywords.

5. Use Images and ALT tags
Images make articles and pages attractive to visitors. More over images are also indexed different search engines. Using relevant keywords in the image alt tags help in SERP.

6. Sitemap submission
Sitemap help visitors to navigate between pages and also helps search engine bot to index very easily. I personally submit sitemap to Google Sitemap, Live Webmaster and Yahoo! Site Explorer regularly. To generate XML sitemap, I use XML Sitemaps or VIGOS Gsitemap. For WordPress websites, I use Google XML Sitemaps plugin

Source: 6 Easy Tips for Onpage Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

How to protect WordPress blog?

SEO Consultant — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:36:09 +0000

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform all over the world. As you become popular in search engine and getting traffic, you may be inviting hackers to test your protection system against them. Hacking can be happened any moment, so you should not wait it to happen and then take action.

When I was checking my Wassup traffic details this morning, I found that 3 suspicious records trying to get access using SQL Injection. Thankfully nothing happened and they got tired trying. However, I searched online for WordPress protection and got some tips for it. I compiled all the tips and came with the following:

Always Update

Updating WordPress became very easy now. From WordPress 2.7+, you can now update your blog with just a click. So don’t feel lazy upgrading your blog – as soon as they release any updated version, try to upgrade your blog. If you are using older version, you can use WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugins and update to the latest version.

Update Your Plugins Too

As plugins are developed by third-party programmers, they may be more vulnerable than WordPress itself. I would suggest you to check plugins profile to read the comments and stats before using any. Update your plugins regularly as well.

Protecting Your Admin Profile

Create a new user and give it full administrative privileges. Once you have done that delete your old “admin” user’s profile. As a result hacker has to crack both your user name and password.

Stop Creating Guest Account

If your blog is not Multi User blog, there is no need to allow visitors to create Guest account. Uncheck Settings > General > Membership > Anyone can register option.

Use Strong Password

Don’t use any obvious words sequence, numbers sequence, your name, town, date of birth etc as password. Try to use a combination of small letter, capital letter and numbers in your password. You can use Strong Password Generator for create your password. This website also give you easy way to remember your password.

Protect Your wp-admin Folder

You can add a .htaccess file in your wp-admin folder and block all IP addresses except the IP address you use, may be your home IP, office IP etc.

Backup Regularly

Even though most of the Hosting providers offer regular backup, still you should not rely on them. Couple of months ago, I found my website was unavailable and I contacted GoDaddy support. They informed they are resolving the problem and they took 5 days to fix. Horribly on 3rd day they informed me that all my records has be wiped out, so I may not get my database and files back. Fortunately, I had my website backup in my pc, and they fix my problem, I already transferred my website to Hostgator and kept my website running.

Use Login Lockdown Plugins

Login Lockdown Plugins records each failed login attempts and lock a particular IP for a while for a number of failed login attempts.

Delete WordPress Version

Hackers may find out your WordPress version and exploit its vulnerabilities. You may want to delete the WordPress version from your website source. Go to Appearance > Editor and choose the Header.php file and delete ” /> from the source code to hide your WordPress version.

Move the wp-config.php file

Also since version 2.6, WordPress allows you to move the wp-config.php file to a higher level. Because this system file contains by far more sensitive information than any other, and because it is difficult to access the parent file server level, it certainly makes sense to store it outside of the actual installation. WordPress automatically looks at the highest underlying index for the configuration settings file. Any attempt by users to adjust the path is thus useless.

Use Security Plugins

If you found that you are being targeted frequently, you can use security plugins to ensure more security for your blog. You can find some useful security plugins for wordpress here

Source: How to protect WordPress blog?

What is Twitter?

SEO Consultant — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:12:51 +0000

I guess today it’s almost a dumb question ‘What is Twitter?’. Twitter has become a internet phenomenon. It has become so popular that even Facebook, Google are tempted to acquire it. Just for record, Wiki says – Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).

Can you imagine the time I’m composing this blog Ashton Kutcher has 1,185,751 followers in his Twitter account. So if you still don’t have idea about Twitter or you want to join discussion about Twitter with your friends, Twitter in Plain English would be a nice start. As always CommonCraft has produced another excellent video on Twitter.

English Blog: What is Twitter?
Bengali Blog: টুইটার কি?

SEOBook SEO Toolbar for Firefox

SEO Consultant — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:10:40 +0000

Whether you are a SEO Consultant or a blogger or even you are a SEO enthusiast, you should be looking for SEO tools that may make your life easier. SEO Toolbar for firefox from SEOBook may be one of them. I’ve been using this toolbar for last couple of months and to be honest with you I’m satisfied with the SEO information it’s providing me.

Unlike other toolbars, it does not take long to load – that’s the best part of it’s feature. However, it provides both basic and advanced SEO information. In basic information – you will get data for links, backlinks, pagerank, directory info, archive.org screenshots, compete.com details, semrush info etc. For advanced SEO data – Site background information, Site links, Page links, Directory listings, Traffic estimates, Social media information from popular social bookmarking and social news sites. You can even export these details to csv format. However, addition to that it has a built-in feed reader, SEO XRay, Search Engine Ranking Checker, Keyword Suggestion Tools etc.

All in all, SEOBook Toolbar is a nice handy SEO tool that I would recommend everyone to give it a try. You can learn more about the toolbar from it’s homepage. However, while you are taking your decision, you can watch this video about the basics of the toolbar.

Source: SEOBook SEO Toolbar for Firefox

Free UK Classified Ads Website Lists

SEO Consultant — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:18:04 +0000

Classified ads websites are good source of targetted website traffic. If you are targetting a specific geographic area, suppose UK – you need to find out classifed ads websites from UK. As a result, when Google indexes those websites, autometically it will drive UK visitors to those websites.

Today, I was searching for free classified ads websites to promote a product and our target market is mainly UK visitors. So I performed few searches and make a list of 20 top free classified ads websites. Now we are going to use those.

I thought it will be helpful for those who are targetting UK visitors. You may be living in USA, but you are developing a website for UK citizen – then you need to promote your website specially in these websites. There is no harm promoting other websites as well.

Localized promotion will give you better targetted traffic. However, here is my list:

Hopefully it will help you – thanks.

Source: Free UK Classified Ads Website Lists

Search Engine Optimization tips for websites

SEO Consultant — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:57:45 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods for dynamic websites; like – ecommerce, blogs, forums etc

Few weeks ago, one of my client asked me how he should advice his web designer to optimize his dynamic (ecommerce) website as his designer was about to start designing a new website. As usual I created and shared a Google document and wrote the basic SEO methods – that’s it. He was happy!

Now, the question is what’s the difference between static website search engine optimization and dynamic website search engine optimization?

Literally, there is no difference. Just our thoughts for dynamic website makes the difference. OK – how? For some people think dynamic website is this, dynamic website is that – but every day we are creating, using thousands of dynamic websites without having this in our mind. I believe – almost 100% webmasters have their own blogs – may be they are using WordPress or Blogspot or something else. Don’t you think these applications are dynamic websites? Of course they are! So if you know SEO methods about WordPress, blogspot, typepad etc – that means you are already aware of search engine optimization!

Still I’m going to publish the methods I sent to my client with some modifications, hope this will help you:

All the pages should have separate TITLE, Meta Keywords and Meta Description. So database should have corresponding data fields. So that while we are uploading new products or items, we can upload those details.
Hierarchy of Heading tags(h1, h2, h3, h4 …) should be maintained as follows:
- H1 – Category Names
- H2 – Product Name
- H3 – Special Features of the product
Contents in a IFRAME or a FRAME is indexed under a separate URL than an on-page content, so IFRAME or FRAME should not be used.
All the IMAGE should have separate ALT tags.
CSS websites are more SEO friendly that TABLE websites – no scientific explanation. My own SEO tips.
Social bookmarking shortcuts – so that visitors can bookmark easily
Keep the onpage HTML clean and tidy. Javascript and CSS should be placed in external Javascript and CSS files.
Use XHTML and CSS as much as possible –validate XHTML from here Markup Validation Service and validate CSS from CSS Validation Service
No page should not be 3-clicks depth away from homepage, pages more deep than that are not frequently indexed by search engine bots.
- Wrong way: Homepage > Category > Subcategory > Subcategory2 > Subcategory3> Subcategory4 > Product
- Right Way: Homepage > Category > Subcategory > Product
2 forms of sitemap is recommended, one in html – for the visitors, and other one in XML format – for the search engine bots.
Avoid flash navigations, less graphics etc. A picture may worth a thousand words, but graphics means nothing to search engine. If you really want to better SERP easily, then avoid graphics.
Add more and more unique, fresh contents – don’t depend on cut-copy-paste content.
Always try to use search engine friendly urls.
- Not Recommended: product.php?product=1
- Recommended: product/1
- Highly Recommended: product/search-engine-friendly-url
No session id in URL.
Maintain a RSS feed for latest products, and submit to RSS directories.

I gave some of my previous published articles on both on-page search engine methods and offpage search engine methods as well for his recap.

Finally, there is no new methods as far my knowledge – SEO is all about practice and perfection. I’ve tried to make a list of SEO methods, so that he (or you) can use while building websites.

Hope you all have enjoyed the article.

Source: How to optimize a dynamic (or brand new) website?