SEO and Internet Marketing Blog by Pradeep

Selecting the Right Keywords for your Business

If you are newly building a website you need to focus on selecting the right keywords for your web content because they will play key role for search engine benefits. As explained in the introduction part of this keyword ranking guide, I have made this first step into four subtopics.

Wrong Targets Webmasters Focusing

Most webmasters’ focus on the home keywords (ex: Furniture, Jewelry, Stock Market, SEO) which are normally higher in users’ search volume. This means competition for such keywords is normally very high. So targeting home words cannot reach your targeted customers. However, using these home keywords in the content of your webpage can help users get basic information about your business.

Webmasters tendency on Keyword Tools

Website owners sometimes depend up on tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, Word- tracker, to get information about keywords search-volume and web-ranking data etc. They believe that these tools can help them find the right keywords for their business. I would say that these tools can just give you general or popular keyword suggestions and information any person (including your competitors) can get! These are all robotic generated and not insightful to your business needs. I am not saying that they are not at all useful but as they are offered for free they don’t provide you any right keyword suggestions based on your customer’s experiences.

Solution to Find Right Keywords

The actual solution to find out the right keywords is to collect information about the keywords that are browsed by your ‘Customers’. Yes, it’s true and actually simple if you really start business with a passion to reach your customers’ needs. Also note that it is not the same work as how you do in a traditional market. When doing business online you will need to plan on various internet marketing strategies but as I said in the introduction part the priority of search engine ranking as the most beneficial area to get business to your website, let me explain you how to find the right keywords.

For example: if your website is about ‘furniture’ that provides services to offices and homes, a buyer looking to purchase your product (office furniture) might search for: ‘best price office furniture for sale’ or ‘best and lowest price office furniture’ or something highly related with a combination of such keywords only. The intent of these searches clearly suggests that he/she is actually looking to purchase your product and not to get any basic information about your website. So, you need to select the keywords that are intended to reach your products/services and make a list of such words which will form into some good set of right keywords. Not satisfied? Doesn’t worry, below I have some important tips to get them.

Direct Tips to get Right Keywords:

Any customer who intends to buy a product/service will have these words in their searches: buy, cheap, best, price, find, testimonials, top, reviews, sell, certified, trusted, affordable, reliable, discount, coupon, new, compare, low cost etc. So prepare a list of keywords with a combination of your product/service name along with the above suggestions. Note that I said ‘combination’ because combining them will actually results in low competition and right keywords list. Another example for a right business keyword would be like this: ‘find best discounts on office furniture’.

In case you want to target local audience, you can just add your area/city/region name along with the above suggestions in your keywords list. More information on local targeting will be discussed in my future blog posts. So, as now you have got an idea on how to find the right keywords for your website,  the next step of this Keyword Ranking Guide will be on how and where to use these right keywords on your website. Meanwhile get ready with the list of the right keywords.

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All the Best! Happy Weekend!

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Keywords Ranking – To understand it in a simple way, keyword ranking is where your site is displayed in search engines for a keyword. It is not an easy task as some of you may think and also not a complicated process. All that you need is a detailed guidance on how to achieve it.

Many web surveys have proved that most online activities on the World Wide Web starts from ‘search’. This means majority of online users use search engines for their online activities. So, if a website is ranked for a keyword on search engines results page, it can reach this vast audience and thus can generate huge traffic, leads and leads into Conversions. Hence if your business requires a website, then keyword ranking will play major role in generating all these benefits!

As this is a lengthy subject, I have divided it into three comprehensive steps with definitive points in it.

They are:

1). Selecting the right keywords for your business.

2). How and Where to use these keywords on your site.

3). How to Rank for Right Business Keywords.

#1 Step Consists:

• Wrong targets webmasters focusing
• Webmasters tendency on Keyword Tools
• Solution to find Right Keywords
• Direct Tips to get Right Keywords

#2 Step Consists:

• The Role of Content
• Priority of Keyword Optimized Content
• How and Where to Use Right Keywords
• Benefits of Right Keywords at Right Place

#3 Step Consists:

• Importance of Backlinks
• What Major Search Engines Suggests
• How to Gain Relevance and Popularity
• Conclusion of the Topic

Now I think you can understand the importance of dividing this topic into three specific steps.  So I will schedule to post these three steps consequently.  However, I won’t make any late moving forward. Within next 24hrs, I will publish the Keyword Ranking Guide – ‘Step 1’.

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Have a Great Day!

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Obviously I have no reasons to explain you why this blog has not been updated for almost a year other than saying, I didn’t find time for blogging or I have been busy engaged in providing SEO services to my SEO Outsourcers’  or I was just concerned towards my team management, or I am just happy with what I have been earning$$$$ !

Now as I have realized the importance of blogging and whatever I had missed in this time without blogging, I would like to share with you.

No Search Engine Benefits aka No Search Traffic

We all know if business requires website then it has to rank in search engines for target keywords because search engines are the major platforms to reach maximum audience. Also, updating blog with keywords optimized content will make an excellent positive impact in search engine rankings. As I have kept quiet for a long time no blogging, the crawler status of search engine bots increased from 30days to 60days and it has the recent status as 90days longer! Crawling is actually the initial function assigned to any search engine bot. If the crawling stage itself is this slow, no question on text matching and ranking benefits which are actually the next stages assigned to a SE bots’ as part of ranking algorithms. To say it simple, as I have no search engine rankings for not blogging regularly, I have eventually lost most traffic = most Business!

No Real Benefits from Social Sites = No Potential Customers !

In the present world wide marketing, what is the next big platform to get maximum exposure to your business? Or what are the other online activities you do other than search? Yes, you are right I am talking about networking on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. But before I explain you the loss I have achieved, I want to clear you what social networks are meant for me: They offer wonderful opportunity to connect globally. Highly useful to create and develop a network (specially niche related) for me and for my business which is nothing but building Personal and Business brand. Share valuable, fun information and sometimes sell my services without creating any mess.

So, as said that I look forward connecting with my niche related people doing the stuff explained above, I often feel guilty answering to this question whenever I communicate with Internet Marketers who wish to do business with me: You have only 8 blog posts in the past 10 months, why? Fortunate is that I need not explain them big reasons as they are already in my field (SEO) and all that they require are the results I have achieved during my work. But I realized that is not enough if I have to make strong presence on social networks. Because when we have the opportunity to reach global audience via social network sites it is actually not that easy to grab their attention especially to my business. To say it simple, what is my goal when I am not reaching the people’s interests who are connected with me in my network? Of course I know that not everybody who is in my network is actually looking for my business. Still, if I cannot reach up to those who are looking for my business, I cannot satisfy myself being on social networks.

Also during my presence on social networks I realized that social media relations can only become LIVE if you keep offering something valuable and useful. I am somehow glad that I am up to this mark as I keep updating some tips, something newsworthy and sometimes about personal experiences in my business topics. However, these cannot help me build my Business Brand! Now some of you might get this question: Is this guy worrying that he couldn’t earn income from social networks? Absolutely Yes and Partially No. The reason is simple; I am not doing it for charity.

Though these are certain effects you will face for not blogging, remember that blog itself doesn’t gain all the benefits.  A long-term SEO campaign that ensures established link-building strategies will help you reach all Search Engine benefits. Cannot agree? Read what Google and Bing suggests on this:

Bing : Successful link-building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution. You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time. Good things come to those who wait and work smartly!

Google :  If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it.

Conclusion:  In order to gain Search Engine Traffic, maintain Business Brand across social networks, gain prospective customers, Blogging will help you a lot!

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Today I received a report(blog update) from Rapleaf.com about their Part 2 Analysis on AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail. From their report I have noticed that Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected to various areas on web. Then I suppose, Google to facilitate something more than its “Google Accounts Page” to access all its products/web services. Not less than an hour I read it, I had noticed the new “Dashboard” feature available in my Google accounts page when I tried to access it to edit some info.

So here I would like to share about Google’s newly launched Dashboard technically called Google Dashboard.

What is Google Dashboard ?

It is a tool that helps Google’s account holders to give an overview of data associated with their accounts. That means it gives instant access to look and control all Google products that are associated with your Google Account!

Where is it located?

Sign into your Google account and click on the ‘Settings’ link at the top right hand corner of Google.com page then click on ‘Google account settings’. When you land on your accounts page, under Personal Settings you can see the Dashboard feature to which a phrase “View data stored with this account” is hyperlinked. Just click on that and you will be taken to Google Dashboard and can have a glance to all your Google profiles! Or simply follow this link.

Click on this  Google Dashboard – video from Google.

What is Difference between Google Account page and Dashboard?

While Google’s account page give you a list of services you use from Google, Dashboard gives you specific info on each service you have stored and amazingly with edit options!

When you land on Dashboard Page you will find Google Web Services listed on the left side and Edit options towards right side. What not, there are many services and products collected at one place. At my first view I was a bit confused when I couldn’t found few of my most accessed Google features Analytics, Webmaster Tools and Maps but they are listed under ‘Other products’ which is placed at bottom of the page.

Also I noticed, Dashboard is missing ‘Google Video’ and ‘Groups’ which I am accustomed to visit.

Is it much secured?

See what Google experts say

“Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data. In the past, we’ve taken numerous steps in this area, investing in educating our users with our Privacy Center, making it easier to move data in and out of Google with our Data Liberation Front, and allowing you to control the ads you see with interest-based advertising. Transparency, choice and control have become a key part of Google’s philosophy, and today, we’re happy to announce that we’re doing even more.In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard.“

So there shouldn’t be any bother from security reasons, that’s because its Google!

Finally, my dear friends enjoy accessing all your Google Products at One place and share with me what you are missing, I guess you might not see few of your interesting profiles but don’t worry Google will sooner fix them all!

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Google’s search share domination continued even in the last month. New reports revealed by Compete shows Google to gain steady dominance. While Bing and Ask.com has a slight increase with 1% in their share, Yahoo decline from 15.8% to 14.7%.

Web Search Market share volume by Compete

Hard Time to Yahoo!

Yes it is really a hard time. Yahoo’s recession was already a buzz and this latest drop is another blow on them. Yahoo lost a total of 5 % market share when compare to last year September 2008 and its search volume was down by 8%  (which means Yahoo served 100 MM less queries in September than August) according to Compete.

web search market share trends by Compete

Bing has the prospect!

According to Compete’s research Bing’s search volume and sponsored referrals has a distinctive record. It adds, only 6% sponsored referral share as the current record for a new search engine. Google and Yahoo’s sponsored referral share had fluctuated at 6% target all year but Bing was on 6.4% search clicks. But now Bing has reached 6.4% of search clicks on sponsored links!

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To say in simple terms a website that has great content is considered as an important site and such a website will attract many links, finally leading to the link popularity. Search engine ranking factors have been tailored every now and then but constantly from many years the most influential factors in ranking a web page in the search engine indices are based on its link structure and popularity. Websites’ link structure is analyzed in two ways: Internal Links and Inbound Links. These two factors potentially increase Link Popularity.

Internal Links :  A hyperlink that points to another page in the same domain is called as Internal link. That means links that originate from the same domain. Let’s say a visitor reached one of your internal pages/links from an external source and is also browsing many other links that he find interesting but if the user wishes to reach the home page at any time, there should be an easy way to find out the homepage link. This will let them understand that they aren’t puzzled.

But how does Internal Linking helps in getting Link Popularity?

A user can only get satisfied when he is provided with compatible link structure. Make your website’s content optimized well with various internal links of the same domain. Optimizing your content with hypertext links is nothing but placing relevant information pointing to those internal links/pages. So when users find desired information from those hypertext links placed in the content, it automatically passes the link weight, which eventually gains link popularity. Also a good and relevant content will get repeated traffic/visitors because such pages easily get indexed and place in the SERP’s(search engine results page).

Inbound Links: Links pointing your website from other domains are called as inbound links, incoming links, inlinks or backlinks. Various link building techniques are used to obtain inbound links (Read the priority of link building explained in my last post). Many webmasters know that quality and relevant inbound links increases a web page’s Traffic and PageRank but all these methods have to be natural. Google’s ranking algorithms can easily identify whether the link pointing your site is valuable or not. So when you are looking to gain new visitors/customers by applying link building strategies, be sure you place the relevant hypertext link in them. Building quality backlinks is a complicated process so it is always suggestive to hire an expert who can generate these results naturally.

Conclusion: Links play vital role in crawling, indexing and ranking a web page. So be sure to optimize your websites’ link structure to gain Link popularity!

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You can have your website displayed in search engines even without having any links pointing your site if your hosting server has Trust authority with search engines. The priority of link building is to make a website rank well for targeted keywords in search engines. It also important because the anchor-text of external links worth more as part of Google algorithms.

Link building in simple words to understand “having links pointing to your site from other domains”. This doesn’t seem to be too hard, does it? In fact the process of building links to your site is lengthy and a complicated task.

Search engines monitor the links pointing to a website in order to place it in their indices. Number of links referring a site will show a positive impact to a website. But remember only quality of the link that is pointing to your site matters. Quality of the link is measured by the Relevancy. Hence while link building we submit only to the most relevant sites. There are many ways to easily get indexed in search engines by using dishonest black hat methods but they disappears in search results in a very less time when compare to the website following ethical link building methods.

Your site may have good brand but still link building helps you gain more visitors as you get good traffic from referring sites. It is everybody’s wish to have their website displayed by search engines for their targeted keywords forever but how? A high PR does not guarantee high Search engine rankings. Only a constant link building strategy certainly helps you reach this goal. Real Web Market helps you find the right kind of Links to your site. Our link building strategies with tailored techniques benefits your site both PageRank and Search Engine rankings.

Just a note: Link building is not a rule but links are valuable sources when it comes to getting your site ranked.

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Though Search Engines have invented many algorithms on parsing a website, URL structure still has the necessity to be optimized as per certain standards.  Basics of URLs Optimization are explained below to gain Search Engines and Users benefits. A web page can be either Dynamic or Static; it can rank well in Search Engines if it follows these  standards.

Basics of URL Optimization:

1) Domain name :  Select the best domain name that fits to your niche. Domain name with fewer characters gives better branding. The general suggestion of domain length is to be less than 35 characters (in compliance with Adwords).

2) Keywords :  Domain name should consist one of your targeted keywords. Use hyphens if there is a domain name already existing with your targeted keywords. Keywords in URL helps search engines compare the quality of a page. Matt Cutts of Google wrote at his blog as “Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.”

Just note that Google Page- Rank algorithm follows the same between static and dynamic URLs. See this video from Google Engineer Matt Cutts where he explains this very issue.

3) Also it is important not to have too many subdirectories in a URL even with mod_rewrite. Having 2 to 3 subdirectories works better. This is explained in the above video link.

4) Using words instead of ID’s in URL, would appeal better to search engine users. For ex: http://www.realwebmarket.com/seo-services.html is more relevant to the services offered by Realwebmarket.com than an ID number like: “www.realwebmarket.com/details/149597/”.

If you are looking for organic results then avoid session tags and variables because these might appeal as “stop signs” for search engine bots. Refer Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs for more information on this issue.

So finally if you make it easier to remember the name of a URL with descriptive words that can make the URL both Users and Search Engines compliance.

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I think this is not going to be as usually as you know the basics of SEO. These principles in optimizing a web page will increase the chances to be listed in the Search Engines indices. I will try my best to give you something known but disregarded and something more useful than you see mostly routine. I feel everybody needs to exercise (is that weird!) some principles before and after you publish a website.

Here are the things listed out:

1)  You should have to declare the Document Type Definition of a page if your site is new or re-designing the old from the scratch. This is for Web Standards Compliance.

2)   Take care of your HTML <head> content. Search Engine bots mostly use the content provided in the header section to display results in their results page. Google itself says that the content used in meta description tag might be used as the snippet of a website in their results page.

3)   If your website is over weighed with images, Javascripts and stylesheets, you will get negative feedback from your Users. So minimize the load time for fast User experiences. Try with Yahoo developer network that has best practices for making your web page faster.

4)   Content of the page should have the keywords used by your targeted customers. Don’t overuse keywords. In this aspect I like to suggest webmasters to concentrate more on Users than Search Engines.

5)   A website’s link structure has crucial role in optimizing a website. This includes both internal and external links. The most important pages should have links from as many pages as possible. Also do not forget to include external links where necessary.

6)   When you are ready with your site, submit them to the three major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. This doesn’t need to hire an SEO.

7)   Keep updating your website on a regular basis. This can be done by writing articles, blogs and news related to your website and build natural links to your web page to maintain good results in Search Engines.

Search engine optimization is not a one time job. You keep getting good results as long as you do ethical optimization and always remember to feed Users better than Search Engines.

Hope you all like the article and just note that all your feedbacks are valuable to me.

Want to drive results optimizing your site with our website optimizers ? Then contact us and tell about your optimization needs.

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Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website both internally and externally to increase the traffic, visibility and rank of a website in search engines. SEO is the most important factor in your success online. This is because approximately 80% of Internet users get information from the major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN. If your website is not available in these Search Engines indices, you will have to miss maximum number of visitors/targeted visitors to your website. Search Engine Optimization is the best choice that helps you make your website visible in the search engines.

For a website to rank well in search engines, it has to be optimized as per the Search Engine standards regularly. Note that I say ‘regularly’ because of immense websites on WWW, Search Engines updates their ranking factors regularly. Though search engines follows hundreds of algorithms to display the results, there are specific factors combined for the output of those results. Relevancy and Popularity are the two major algorithms measured as part of ranking a website.

Relevancy:  If a webpage has matching information the user looking for, Search Engines display them in their results page. This can be done when the content of the page is optimized as per standards. The more relevance a page is, higher the chances to appear in SERP.

Popularity:  It is measured based on reference given from one document to another. As much references as a document receives it gains that much popularity.

It’s all in the optimization process. But you need to realize that this is not a one time service. Hence, website optimization is crucial if we like to have our website sustain long-lasting results.

In the next post I will share the information on some fundamental principles to follow optimizing a Webpage.

Note: No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

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