You can entice your customers and clients once with the perfect website design, most soothing color schemes, graphics, navigation patterns, layout and other classy features. But, in order to attract them to your website again, you need to have a much stronger reason. Good web content is your choice especially if you want huge traffic to your website and wish to enhance your web identity. Web directories usually approve your website only because of its quality content. As a result, website content is considered as the King. Moreover, the Search engine crawlers always love unique web content and index them soon on their search engines. This hence makes your website appear on the initial pages of their search result pages which thus provides your website a greater exposure.

Good quality unique web content always lures the visitors and brings them back to the website time and again. Although, you should make sure that your web content is of keen interest for the readers and provides them with the best information. This will make the readers share your website with their friends and families, thus indirectly promoting your website and business. Another possibility of adding good quality content to your website is that your readers or competitors may possibly want to add the content to their websites or give a back links to your website. This will easily help you to indirectly promote your website and business. As a result, good website content can be called as the linchpin for the SEO Success of your business.

• Determine the keyword for which you want your site to rank high for. Often there is a tough competition for keywords/phrase that can be termed as “common”. So you have to choose the phrase which is in demand but with less competition. It is always better to select specific words as keywords in place of general words. For example, if you are talking about parenting be specific like “parenting teenagers” or “parental infants”.
• Get effective back links: Write a few articles which are related to your site and submit them to different article directories and leave a link to your site in the block available at the bottom. When your article is accepted by those directories, you get an effective back link to your site. The articles which you write must be related to the keywords which you want your site to rank in the top list.
• Active participation in forums: Actively participate in the forums which are related to your keywords and the site. Along with giving comments and leads in those forums you can leave a link to your site.The more active the forum is ,the more possibility of your site to reach the top list.
• Social bookmarking: Social bookmark sites are all the rage and while with most of them the links do not count because they are a no-follow, there are several sites that a link from does count. Some of the sites which are good enough are Linkedin, facebook, Digg, delicious, reditt and stumbleupon.
  

  Social Bookmarking websites increase your chances of ranking high on search engines

• Exchange links with a website with a PageRank of 7 or more: Find a website which is related to your site or keyword and try to exchange links with the site. This will help you get to the top list of search engines.
• Avoid using the Google Submission form: Even though the google says you can submit your website or the page you want to be indexed to their site directly, never do this as it will often take more time before your site is indexed. The same is the case with other search engines submission forms. So avoid using this process.

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become such a broad term today that whichever activity drives any traffic on your website is considered as an SEO Activity! In earlier days, we – as SEO Consultants -  used to focus specifically on the structure and content of websites only, which we called “On-page SEO”. We tried hard to make sure that our clients’ websites have been set up right with proper page titles, meta text, content placement, image names etc. But today, the definition of SEO has changed expanded drastically. Now-a-days, SEO as a service is divided into 2 categories :-

1. On-Page SEO - optimize content, internal links, meta tags etc
2. Off-page SEO - backlinks, social media, forum posting, press release etc.

Honestly, I don’t agree with the concept of Off-page SEO. You may call it ‘Off-page promotions’ or ‘Off-page optimization’ but ‘Off-page SEO’ definitely does not make sense to me. Wikipedia defines SEO as

the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural or un-paid (organic or algorithmic) search results.

Then why is everyone writing so much about “Off-page SEO” when, ideally, the term even doesn’t exist at all? I leave this up to you all to help me find the answer in your comments below.

Just because it is such a popular term these days, I could not stop myself from using it as the title of my blog article even though I don’t agree with it This is also one of the problems with SEO Consultants & business owners like us – that we have to keep our readers/customers happy with giving them what they want to take!

Image Courtesy - www.topspotoptimisation.co.uk

Coming back to the topic of today’s discussion, which is about the best “Off-page SEO” tactics or “Off-page Promotion” (for my own sake) that can help you drive consistent traffic on to your website for a long run. These techniques are just the ones which I have tried myself and achieved reasonable success for my clients. You may have tried something else which worked for you so don’t hesitate to share that with our readers.

1.  Participate in Forums & discussion boards: 5-6 responses or 2-3 new questions a day (with your website’s URL in the signature) in 5 different popular forums a day is all that it will take to get a decent traffic on to your website. It will hardly take you more than 2 minutes to write a response or come up with a question to ask the community.  Spending 20 minutes a day religiously on forums for 2 weeks will start generating traffic on your website that you won’t even imagine.  Of course, you need to make sure that your responses and questions are intelligent & look like real contribution. Do not post for the sake of posting. It will give wrong impression and other forum members will look down upon you with contempt! Some will even mark you as spam leading to deletion of your account and your hopes as well.

Many SEO companies offer this service really cheap, say 1¢ per post. DO NOT fall for that. They will do more harm than any good. My advice would be that you should hire someone who (1) understands your business’s objectives and can (2) write decent English. He should  really contribute in the forums to lure other readers in clicking on his signature URL.

Some of my favorite SEO Forums are :

• Digitalpoint
• Webmaster World
• V7n Community

2. Publish Blogs / News / Press Releases & submit them in bookmarking websites - Everyone in the web community knows the importance of blog and news updates on your company/ product website. Not only it attracts search engine crawlers to visit your website more often, it also helps you generate more back links by submitting these articles on press release and bookmarking websites. Tons of bookmarking websites have sprouted up recently. And believe it or not, most of them are a good source of traffic generation for your website.  The ones that I use most frequently for my clients are :

• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Mixx
• Propeller
• Kaboodle (for online stores)
• Yahoo Buzz
• Technorati
• Clipmarks

There are still more than 200 bookmarking websites which you should definitely consider for this task.

3. Create your social profile & share your news update with the community – The first names that lighten up in our minds are Facebook, Twitter & Myspace. Make sure you create a public social profile for the company that you are promoting. You ought to have your Facebook Fan page, Twitter profile, Youtube profile, LinkedIn profile (of yourself and/or your clients). All the websites I just mentioned require you to sign up and they provide you a unique URL of your profile. This is your social profile. Following are must-do activities whenever you have a new blog or new story published on your website or blog -

• Tweet about it on Twitter
• Do a status update on Facebook & LinkedIn
• Update status on Ecademy as well. Ecademy (has a lot of junk but) is still a good source of traffic once you have a strong network.
• Share your blog article on discussion boards & forum of these social networks.
• Flickr – “A picture is worth a thousand words” is not exactly true in the world of SEO which relies heavily on content full of words. But still Flickr stands out and can become a good source of traffic for your website. Just make sure that whenever you write an article, you add an image in your post and submit that image on your Flickr profile with apt tags and description. If you have an online store and sell products, make sure all the images of your products are also submitted on to your Flickr profile. Picasa, Photobucket & Picli are some other photo sharing networks.

Once your profile has been set up, you should start building a community by adding/inviting friends to join your network.

• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Dailymotion
• Slideshare (See a sample below)

5. Yahoo Answers & similar question/answer websites – I love Yahoo Answers and On Startup Answers community where you can post any question you want and community members will respond within hours. SEO companies are using similar sites to drive traffic by maneuvering questions in such a manner that makes other members click on their URLs. It may not be the best way to get the type of traffic you want but still it is one of the widely used method these days. Again, you have to be very cautious with your language so that it does not appear as spam.

6. Article re-writing and distribution – Haven’t we covered this in point (2) above? Not really. This is about article re-writing. Numerous SEO companies are hiring writers to re-write the same articles many times in different versions and keep distributing them on hundreds of press release & bookmarking websites.  It works quite often since your content is not copied and the crawlers will see it as original stuff.

7. Local business listings on search engines & yellow pages- All major search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo offer business owners to submit their business with full details of name, address, phone number etc. This helps in getting local traffic for your website. Optimizing for local search listings is the discussion of a different topic that I will publish sometime in near future. For now, you should just make sure that your business has been listed on all local listings websites. A few examples of such sites are -

• Hotfrog,
• Business.com
• Superpages.com

These are some of the widely used “Off-page promotion” techniques by SEO Companies across the globe. Please feel free to keep your opinions on this post in the comment box below.

As always, don’t forget to subscribe to our feed.

But what exactly is Blended Search?

As the name suggests, Blended search is the process of blending or mixing content from multiple sources and displaying them together on one page. When the idea was launched around two and a half years ago, the main sources of the content were – news websites, videos, images, local and books which are still independent vertical search engines. But today, we have started seeing more results from social networks like facebook & twitter and press release website which are updated more frequently than any other online media.

Universal Search is also known as Blended Search. Click on image to expand

And how is it changing the SEO industry?

Earlier, website owners used to optimize their website with only focus on relevant content so that search engines can rank their websites on top of search results. It doesn’t work the same these days now since search engines do not only rely on your website content. Instead, they have started looking for varied sources of information where they can find more relevant and updated content.  News websites like CNN & Reuters; Social networking sites like Facebook & twitter; and Press release website like prweb.com etc are some of the sources that search engines rely heavily on for their content.

Please note that this doesn’t mean you should stop optimizing your website content. On the contrary, you need to start updating your website content more frequently now since search engines love new, updated & relevant content. This is probably why many company blogs and press releases have become so popular these days.

But is it really changing the SEO industry?

Yes, it is. Because people have really started publishing their content on all the types of online media which has slight chance of being crawled by search engines and get ranked on first page. Here are the few examples -

1. Image results – All the search engines already have image search as an independent search engine which drives more than 10% of traffic for website owners. People have been focusing on optiming their images by using alt tags and more proper image names for quite some time now.
2. Videos & Slideshows- YouTube, owned by Google has the highest number of videos uploaded on the web. People have started publishing a video presentation of their company or products demo. They, then promote it on YouTube by writing comments, adding ratings and sharing with more people so that it gets enough popularity to get ranked on first page of search results. Then these videos or presentations are pushed on to other popular aggregator sites like Vimeo, Slideshare etc.
3. News Results – Press & news websites are the most hit upon source by website owners. There has been an evident surge in press releases published in last few years by website owners. The only reason being the importance given to such sites by Google.
4. Local business listings – Google, Bing and Yahoo show their respective maps to show local business listings. Hence, every website owner makes it a point that their business is submitted in local business listing directory. They strive hard to promote it by adding more ratings, comments and sharing with friends & existing clients.
5. Three blogs a week has become a reality. Website owners do not miss a single news however trivial it is, just to have something new up on their company blog. [Don't worry this post is not one of those ]
6. Social media marketing (SMM) – SEO Companies have started offering a new service called ‘Social media marketing’ wherein they promote their brand on social networking websites like – Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Myspace etc. They do it by submitting their brand name, linking it to their website, building network of friends and by commenting on other blogs.
7. Google Product search – Online shop owners are utilizing this feature to promote their products on increase sales from Google organic search result.  Google offers merchants a separate place to submit their products individually with prices and description. Google then shows their products on top of search results for the relevant query.

Clearly, the focus on just your website’s content is the thing of the past. In order to maximize your chances to be on the top of the search engine rankings and drive more traffic, you have to be on your toes all the time and exploit every source of data that major search engines scour today for their search results.

Let us know what you think of today’s post. We look forward to your comments on the latest trends being used in the SEO world. If you liked reading this post on The KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed now!

This is an important piece of information for all members of KPMRS who are using our service to monitor their website rankings on Google because you may see a difference in the rankings shown on kpmrs.com from what you may see on your personal computer. Many members have already contacted us about this issue asking us the reason why we are showing wrong results. This post should make it clear that, our results are not wrong but they are just different because we do not take into effect your personal search history.

In order to see the global search results, you can simply turn off this feature from “Web History” which is shown on top right corner of Google.com. This will tell Google that you do not wish to customize the search results based on search activities performed on that computer. (See screenshot below)

What you search from your computer will not affect how you see results on Google

I hope you like this update. Please subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay informed on more similar stories.

• http://www.example.com (TYPE 1)
• http://example.com/(TYPE 2)
• http://www.example.com/index.html (TYPE 3)

These URLs may point to the same webpage and show same content but technically they all are different. Search engine crawlers consider them as all different URLs which means they all will compete with each other for their positions in SERP.

Think about a scenario where 100 websites have put your link on their home page. 30 of those sites are pointing to Type 1 URL. 25 are pointing to Type 2 URL. 45 are pointing to Type 3 URL.

Now they are all pointing to your home page but to different URLs. So you are losing a huge chunk of backlinks for 1 common page which you could have got if all 100 links were pointing to just one URL.

There is a very simple solution to fix this problem. Choose just one common URL (whichever you prefer) and forward all the other URLs to that one URL. Make sure you use 301 redirect to forward the URLs.

Using 301 redirects can greatly help in consolidating your website rankings

It is a very simple technique to make sure you do not loose any link juice in the SEO Campaign for your website. If you liked reading this article on the KPMRS Blog, make sure to subscribe to our feed!

A very good friend of mine recently came to me with a grief after sudden drop of her personal blog on Cricket. It made me realize that people still give so much importance to Google PageRank and know so little about it & its relation with search engine rankings. This is the story behind the topic of today’s post on the so called importance of PageRank where I would like to share my personal views on why you should or should not worry about it.

What exactly is Google PageRank?

In Google’s own words :

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, 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 PageRank is definitely not the rank where your website will appear on the search engines. Is is definitely not dependent on what content do you have on your web page. It is, IMHO,  just a yardstick by which one can gauge the popularity of their web pages on the web. To put it simply,

• The more people put your link on their web page, the higher you get your PageRank.
• The higher is the PageRank of the pages that have linked to your web page, the higher is the PageRank your web page receives.

Again, please keep in mind that Google PageRank DOES NOT determine how many visitors your website are getting or will get.

A funny animation about people's obsession with PageRank. Courtesy Blaugh.com

Are you one of those open your website in (say) firefox every day to just find your PageRank? If yes, stop doing that now because you won’t see it getting changed every day, not even weeks. But yes, thrice a year is acceptable. Because this is the approximate number of times that Google will update it. Here are the confirmed dates of when it was done in previous 2 years – just FYI

• 30 October 2009
• 28 May 2009
• 1 April 2009
• 31 December 2008
• 27 September 2008
• 29 April 2008
• 9 January 2008

Here is the official statement by one of the Google’s employee in their official discussion board

“We have been telling people for a long time that they shouldnt focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think its the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here.

In a nutshell, the toolbar PR is fun, it’s interesting to compare greenness with friends, but it’s of little practical value in the world of SEO. If you liked reading this article on  the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed now!

Let’s take the example of an online perfume store. The owner just started his business and the first thing he will do is set up a website. Then he starts wondering how can he get natural traffic from search engines? (Natural here means traffic for which you are not paying a dime). The answer is obvious – by getting his website to rank higher on search engines for the relevant terms that are most searched or most popular. But the catch here is – the more popular the term is, the more competition he will have! Finding the popularity of the search terms is very simple. I always use the Google Keyword  Tool to find out an estimated search volume of terms over last month.

For e.g., the keyword “perfume” was searched for a whopping 16.5 million times in the last month. And at the same time there are ~ 50 million search results for the same. So if our website owner targets the keyword “perfume”, he will be competing with as many websites for that coveted ranking. Now that doesn’t sound like a great choice for your target keyword. Its very likely that your SEO campaign will outlive your website if you follow targeting a keyword with such immense competition.

Its advisable to go for keywords that are long tailed and not highly competitive

Let’s assume that our website owner sells perfumes by Giorgio Armani as one of his products. After doing a quick lookup, we can find that “Giorgio armani men’s perfumes” was searched ~ 15,000 times which relatively less as compared to the term “perfume” but it has considerably lesser competition, just ~ 500,000 as compared to 51 million. Now this looks like a good keyword to target. We call it a ‘long tail keyword’ where instead of using 1-2 word phrases, you try to go for longer, 4-5 word keywords as the competition grows.

Oh, and yes, while we are talking about perfumes today, I would like to share a very nice & low priced perfume store I recently purchased my armani from – Spritzworld.com. Do check it out.

I hope you enjoyed today’s tip. Chip in your thoughts and comments. If you liked reading this post on the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed!

“Where and how do I start my SEO Campaign from?”

We thought it would be a very good topic for our blog post & should help all our readers.

A couple of points to note before we start -

• We are assuming that you already have the domain name because finding a good domain name would be a separate topic of blog.
• This list is far from complete because there are still several other factors that affect your website position.

So, here are some of the most important steps that you can yourself take care of before going to any SEO company to manage your search engine marketing campaign.

1. Find your targeted keyword

The first and most important step is to determine what are the most important keywords for which you want your website to appear on search engines? You know your business more than anyone else. You know your target audience. So find out 10 phrases which you think that your prospective customers will search for.

It is much more complicated than it sounds. We just wrote about a simple tip on keyword research that a beginner should always do.

2. Set the title of your website pages right

After you have decided on your keywords, the next step is to set them up properly. The title of your web page is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank your website. Your homepage’s title should contain your targeted keyword. All the other pages of your website should have title related to the content of that respective page. For e.g., the title of the registration page should be “Registration”. Keep in mind that you are not promoting your “registration” page. The idea is to “set things right”.

3. Set up meta keywords and description

Though Google has said they do not read meta tags content but we still advise to put your targeted keywords in <meta name=”keywords”/> field and one line description of your website in <meta name=”description”/> field in your header tags. Many other search engines will still read them and Google won’t give you negative marks for that.

4. Unique content for the home page

Your website’s homepage should have a unique content describing your business. This introductory text should have the phrases that are in the title of the page. Experts say that you should use your targeted keyword 2-3 times in every 200 words so as to not get caught up for keyword stuffing. If possible, put your local business address and phone number on home page & contact us page to get noticed on “local business results” on Google.

5. Business Blog

Google loves to blog and so does the other search engines around. Having a business blog pays – and this is something you should always remember. Whatever business you have, you must write 1-2 blogs every week about your business. The articles can be about an industry news, a website update, a new recruit in your company – anything that relates in some way or the other to your business. It would be an icing on the cake, if you put these blogs on the homepage, just like what we have on KPMRS.

We recommend using wordpress because they are easy to set up and the come up with various SEO Plugins that help in optimizing your blog for search engine rankings.

6. Install traffic analyzer

Once your website is up, you would definitely want to monitor your traffic. Any analytics software will show you how many visitors come to your website daily, where are they coming from and which keywords do they use on search engines to get on to your website. These are the most important metrics.

We suggest using Google Analytics for 2 reasons -

1. It is free & provides everything you would want.
2. Our website discovery tool works very well with Google analytics to help you find the new keywords that bring you traffic. Read more about it on our previous blog post here.

7. Monitor your website rankings

• Of course you are just starting your campaign. You might not be in top 100 on Google but sooner or later if you do the right things at the right time, you will find yourself in top 10 for that elite group of your targeted keywords. We, at KPMRS, offer this service for free. You can register your website with your targeted keywords and we will monitor your rankings on daily basis. You can be rest assure to get notified by email as soon as your rank has changed for Google, Yahoo or Bing. This will even help you track the work done by whichever SEO company you have chosen for your campaign.

8. Setup business profiles on social media websites

Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious are some of the buzz words today in social media industry. Setting up your business profile on these & similar websites are must for a starter. Maintaining & optimizing them is again a different topic of discussion about which we will soon post here.

We hope that you found this list as a good starting point to help you in setting up your SEO Campaign. We also advise our clients to educate themselves by spending 30 minutes daily in reading latest news in the SEO world. You may not be professionals but you sure don’t want to appear dumb when you talk to a SEO Company. Official blogs of Google, Bing, & Yahoo are good starting point but there are hundreds of freelance bloggers that can provide really valuable information as well. A few ones that we love

• http://www.dailyseoblog.com
• http://www.seo-theory.com
• http://www.seomoz.org
• http://www.webmasterworld.com (Highly Recommended)

Well, we have finished our part. Time for you now to add more points which you think would be useful for a beginner in the SEO world. If you like reading this post on the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed!