SEO - Myths Revealed
Masoom Tulsianis discovers the latest trend which deals with Search Engine Optimization for Web 2.0. Search Engines are regularly updating their algorithms that are used to rank content from the web. It is important to keep abreast of these changes and ensure that your website meets their crawling criteria and gets indexed.
The latest support of the 'no-follow' tag in blog comments by the major search engines has closed yet another loophole. Webmasters that used to plant and stuff links in the blog comment fields provided by sites like Blogger and Myspace now find them in a state of jeopardy as those links are not credited by the search engines.
There was a time when the metatags of HTML were used by spammers, and was enough to improve your page rankings. The preferred keywords were stuffed hundred of times. But nowdays, the search engines do not give preference to meta name and contents and penalize sites that use such techniques.
SEO can be a hard task to articulate, but one has to keep trying to expertise the tricks.
They say “ Make hay while the sun shines” . It is important to take advantage of the loopholes and the pitfalls in the search engine algorithms until they are blocked.
SEO is a fickle game, and does not happen overnight. There have been so many websites that have been doomed because they could not understand the basic norms of SEO.
A few simple tweaks and a little bit of creativity in your writing process could see your site ranking considerably higher.
Though, there are plenty of areas to look upon before getting the trick of SEO. The niches that need to be exploded and utilized are:-
Quality Content
Start with quality content on a specific topic and in course of time, you will see the results. Search Engines always give preference to original contents. Avoid Duplicate contents and repeated sentences. The art of writing, needs to be developed. Keep it simple and sassy, and you will see the spiders flowing.
Keyword Rich Content - Identify a few keywords for your article that you think the users would search on.
Keywords in heading tags Keywords in image alt tags Keywords in post and page titles Keywords in URL of page
You can also try tweaking it to include the words you are targeting a couple of extra times.
Keyword Research
Keywords play a very important role in bringing traffic to your website. They shouldn’t be stuffed all into one place and a proper ratio and density should be maintained while tagging them. It is advisable to tag 5-10% of your content with the main keywords. Each page can have its own keywords. There are numerous keyword research software available, but the one that really stands out is the freeware demo version of The Dowser. Sites like Wordtracker.com, count and predict keywords by taking all Dogpile & Metacrawler queries over the last 90 days. There are also some websites like http://inventory.overture.com which give suggestions for keywords and return the estimated number of times that term was searched last month. Target the wrong keywords and you're doomed from the start.
Submission to Article Directories
Writing articles and posting them to site directories is another way of generating interest in your products and services. There are many free site directories which let users to post their Web Links. These directories often serve as a portal to help users find their way on the net. Article submission sites like ezinearticles.com , articlesarea.com, and articlescube.com list your links for free.
There are many blog companies like instablogs.com which allow you to create your own blogs and earn some money. Expert writers monitor these blogs and then the best blogs are displayed in the homepage quoted as the “best blog of the week”.
Yahoo Answers
This can be termed as the latest buzz in the online SEO world. Yahoo has a service called Yahoo Answers, where one can ask a question and users can reply. Submitting your web links and by using anchor texts in the Resources referred field of “Yahoo Answers”, one can expect a higher ranking. Though the chances are sometimes bleak.
Site Design �"
The most important part of SEO is the site design which should be kept user friendly and have a pleasant template.
An Old for a rich SEO site is to reduce the loading time of the pages and you will see a miraculous improvement in rankings. This is because most search engines hate sites that are slow. You should stick to CSS design for your website. CSS ensures your webpage is light and also offers easy coding. Because the style properties are kept in an external css file, you can maintain your site properly and efficiently.
Search Engines are attracted to well laid out, well coded and easily to navigate sites. Make sure your pages validate and that they are viewable on all major browsers. Search Engines should not have much Flash and Shockwave, Frames or Java Script contents. Keep it simple and clean and their robots will index your site rapidly.
Update regularly �" Try to keep your blog free from dead links by updating regularly. The more you update your blog the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This will mean your new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. Keep Blogging , and you will see your page accurately indexed
InBound Links The best way to achieve high rankings today is by getting a significant amount of inbound links from quality pages related to your site's topic, with your keywords in the anchor text.
Link Baiting is an efficient SEO technique too. The new buzz in the SEO world is 'Link Baiting.' So the problem for many web owners or bloggers is how to get traffic and links. Link baiting solves this problem. It requires tremendous skill to learn the art of link baiting.
Forums Forums are a good place to become popular. Just like blogs, forums are also search engine friendly and can help you a to populate search engine results with results related to your website. Most of the forums forbid spamming or blatant advertising but you can always have your website linked to your signature image. One should join forums related to the theme of their website. This helps building a network of regular visitors to your website.
Blog and RSS Once the blog is complete, one can submit it to blog and RSS directories. These directories allow free submission. One should try to submit to as many directories as possible. Many free auto-submission tools are available for this purpose.
Social Bookmarking Some of the top social bookmarking websites are Delicious, Technorati, Furl, Sphinn, Digg, Yahoo Bookmarking. All of them allow free bookmarking.
Pay Per Click & Google Adsense
Google, is often referred as the genie of the modern world. So 75% of the people use google as their desired search engine. Google PPC attracts more people than any other PPC.
Yahoo displays ads on several areas on Messenger, while Google’s gtalk is ad free. Google’s most famous referall program is the Google Adsense program which gives you an opportunity to earn whenever you get an unique click of the day.
Google owns the most popular Social Networking website “Orkut” and displays advertisements on almost every page related to the profile. While Orkut is one of the most busiest websites, Google PPC users surely get benefited by this traffic. Microsoft displays their advertisements on Facebook. Yahoo’s social networking website “Yahoo Mash” has proved to be a disaster, so Yahoo PPC users suffer because of this.
Cloaking
Another trend is to use techniques like Cloaking. Although it does not abide to the terms and conditions but it is still practiced. But you should be sure that you don’t get caught or else you can land yourself into serious trouble. So Be careful where you use these spam techniques. Examples of their activities include content "cloaking," pay per click fraud, and hidden links and texts.
Social media blogs
Search Engines give more preference to sites hosted on different servers rather than a single sever. It is generally agreed that the links that point to a website are one of the most powerful way of climbing Search Engines results pages. Inter-link your Blogs - Increasingly different bloggers are working on the same blogs and also joining different networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. One of the advantages of networks of sites is that they usually link to one another. In doing so you have complete control over how your sites are linked to from multiple domains.
Swap Links
Many bloggers swap links with other bloggers and add them as their favorites in their mini feed. But many SEO analyst believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the links.
Online Forums & Threads in Social Networking Sites
Another trend is to attract Online community sites likes Orkut, Facebook, Hi5 and Zorpia which have millions of registered users. You can convince the people to visit your links by posting threads in the forums. Also you can attract more unique visitors per day by making your posting more interesting.
Add your URL to Google
This is generally outdated, but still users are invited to add their URL to the Google Search Engine. Google adds and update new sites to their index each time they crawl the web.
Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page. Google’s crawler, Googlebot, will be able to find the rest. Google updates its index on a regular basis, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. Dead links will 'fade out' of our index on our next crawl when it updates the entire index.
You will find that some techniques are same, such as choosing keywords and abiding the terms and conditions. For each project there are different guidelines, and each SEO consultant will prescribe different set of SEO rules.
About the authorI am 19 and a Computer Engineering Student. A SEO writer by profession I optimize web sites improving their search rankings and think of innovative out of box ideas to generate Internet Traffic. Having freelanced for TOI(Times of India) & V Rebel Magazine, I also have professional content writing experience. For any SEO related projects drop me an email at masoom-seowriter@gmail.com
Other SEO articles
