You mentioned that if you receive the minimum threshold of requests that you might look at adding additional countries to your list. Well…here goes a long shot… How about South Africa? That would be lovely if this can be added to your database. But again, it was a long shot! Thanks for the support service you offer!! Keep up the good work.

Louis van Wyk

Spain, please.

Vicente

So, we decided to do a little poll about which new countries would our users – you – like us to monitor your rankings for? Well, here’s your chance to have your say and make it count!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

These are the list of the countries for which we already got some votes. If you don’t see your country in the list, please contact us.

I should mention, however, that the feasibility of including new data centers may not be completely dependent on these poll results. Of course, we’ll be analyzing demographic data to ensure that the service reaches as early as possible to those who would really be facilitated by it. So, if your country is a little low on votes, you might want to consider giving a shout out to SEO professionals of your region to give you a hand . By the way, the social populararity buttons are right below this post.

Looking forward to more such opportunities to serve you better. Stay tuned to The KPMRS Blog by subscribing to our feed!

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.

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!

Google says that it disregards the meta keyword tags in SE Rankings. Image Courtesy: wipeout44.com

So, is there a need to keep the “meta keywords” tag or should we start removing them? Einstein had famously said “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot!”

Lets see what bing has to say about “meta” tag on their webmaster blog? Rick DeJarnette from the Bing Webmaster Center Team writes

The <meta> tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

• Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the <title> and <meta> description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure.
• Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters.
• Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the listl

That leaves us in a fix. Google Vs Bing. Who should we go with?

Google, which has more than 65% of market share in the search industry.

OR

Bing, which was  recently reported as fastest growing search engine.

My personal opinion would be that you should keep meta keywords tag and populate a couple of your most targeted keywords while making sure that you DO NOT overstuff it. This means you are adding not more than 100 bytes of data in your web page which  will take less than few milliseconds to load. Plus Google never said that this will have negative impact so there is no harm. And since they left it open that their policies may change in future which means, if they do, you do not have to start filling in again. You will be already prepared. And at the same time, you are following the guidelines by Bing and making sure that your web page is optimized for that as well.

What do you think about this particular paradox? Share your thoughts with us. If you liked reading this post, do bookmark us and subscribe to our feed!

Expectant surprise then mere disappointment – those are what one encounters when one uses the Yahoo Search Pad. Launched as a free service, with no content downloads, installations or other hassles required, this service generated a lot of hype and subsequently, a lot of expectations; especially after the marketing stalwarts at Yahoo unveiled a demo video earlier this year, portraying Yahoo Search Pad as the ultimate consumer-friendly search assistant. Yahoo Search Pad has been marketed as a search engine notepad that can assist you with your researches (searches on specific topics) on the Internet by automatically saving notes for you, so can leave the research midway and resume it later, organize your notes, and share all the research jottings you have taken down, with family and friends. Yes, it is that basic a product. Wondering why nobody thought of it earlier?

Well, people have. We have had some marginally successful attempts like Google Notebook, Jeteye, among others at creating search engine notepads. But, the innovation that gets Yahoo Search Pad at the top of the product chain is the linking of Search Pads with Social Networking websites. I mean, who wouldn’t want to research stuff when you can publish it and show-off your glorious findings on the Internet, to all those who care to see?

The Yahoo Search Pad helps you in your research by saving it for later reference. Image Courtsey: tothetech.com.

Features and Usage:

One of the major benefits of using the Yahoo Search Pad is its instinctive ease of use. Just log on to the Yahoo Search Engine, sign in to your Yahoo ID, click on the small ‘pen and pad’ icon you see below the header on the top right on  the search results page, create a new notebook and you’re all set to get down to researching! As you research, this wonder of a notepad will automatically detect the topics of your research and save addresses of URLs related to your research accompanied by snapshots of those webpages. You can also manually add text notes and organize your notes bulk in any fashion you see fit. The Search Pad will then try to search for the references of your text notes and will automatically label them with URLs, if the text comes from a popular page. And finally, when you are done editing and organizing your research, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, or Delicious, providing others the opportunity to browse through and gain from your research. Unfortunately, the wonderment ends here, and disappointment follows.

A Search Pad notebook: Organize your notes and share them with the world! Image Courtsey: venturebeat.com.

Criticism:

For all its intelligence in automatically finding out what you’re searching for, Yahoo! Search Pad seems to have a simple algorithm built into it: If the researcher is spending more than a minute at a particular URL, note it down! This will become more clear the from the following experiment I performed, which gave a result that can be recreated with ease:

I researched on a popular PC video game called Batman: Arkham Asylum. I visited a generous list of popular game reviewing websites like IGN, Gamespot, 1up, and others, and made manual text notes on the Search Pad by copy-pasting content from most of those websites, to test if the Search Pad could automatically find references for them. The Search Pad was mildly efficient at this, only finding correct URLs for some 30-40% of the manual notes taken down. This exercise continued for some 7-10 minutes and through it, I had thoroughly ‘trained‘ the Search Pad into knowing what I was researching on. Now, to test the Pad’s Artificial Intelligence, I opened YouTube in one of the open tabs and searched for ‘Funny Cats’. I sat through the 2:46 minutes of the amusing first video that appeared on the search results. I then looked in the Search Pad to check whether it was confused through the abrupt change of  research topics. To my mild surprise, the Search Pad had recorded the Video URL in a long list of URLs that had Batman written all over them and had nothing to do with humor or, well, cats. I again searched for Goobuntu, an unrelated topic, and took a minute reading the wiki page that was first to show up in the results. Needless to say, the Search Pad had again recorded the wiki URL in a notebook that was filled with references from an entirely disconnected topic.
It becomes clear from the above exercise that the Yahoo Search Pad can get confused as easily as it can help you with your research. Relying on the Search Pad to ‘artificially know’ what you want is a hope in vain. The Pad is simply a book keeping tool when you’re indulging in Extremely specific researches (also, the Yahoo website help section provides no information whatsoever on whether the Search Pad will work Search Engines other than Yahoo). And I would want echo what I said earlier, the prospect of sharing your researches on Social Networks remains the most powerful feature of this Pad.

Verdict:

The Yahoo Search Pad is definitely a inventive offering with ambitious thought behind it, but it fails to implement much of that ambitiousness. We also think that the Search Pad might not witness explosive popularity but will influence and force the software industry big wigs to think and re-think their ideas behind the Next Gen of Search Assistants.

If you liked reading this review, do subscribe to our feed!

Choosing the right keyword is the first and the most critical step of any SEO Campaign. Image courtesy yieldsoftware.com

1. In <title> tag – Search results always shows the title tag as your page title. The Title must be short and precise, say 6-12 words. The Keyword can be anywhere in the tag but preferably near the beginning.
2. In anchor text – Anchor text with keyword focus from external links is an important factor. Inbound links are considered positive not only for the site but for the keyword as well.
3. In headings – The Keywords placed on the heading in H1 is an important factor but the page should have actual text relevant to the keyword. Try to keep the heading precise (7-10 words). 
4. It is good to have the keyword as the first word of the heading.
5. In Domain Name – Domain names incorporating vital keywords is a very important factor.
6. In URL – Helps a lot to rank well but keyword should be in the other parts of the document. It should not be over optimized else you might be penalized.
7. Density – It is a measure to check the relevance of the web content. Keep less than 10% keyword density. Upto 7-8% for targeted 2-3 keywords and 1-2% for minor or secondary keywords on a page.
8. In the beginning of the document – It is a good practice to have the keyword in first 25-50 words of the document. Be it a table or a paragraph, try to keep it in the beginning of the document.
9. In Alt Tags – Label images on your page with <alt>/<title> tag filled with some keywords as spiders do read these tags.
10. In other Headlines – It is a good practice to have the keywords in other headlines (h2 – h6).
11. In Meta Tags – Yahoo and Bing still rely on them, Google does not. Having these tags properly filled will not harm, so just do it.
12. Proximity – It is the closeness between the 2 or more keywords. The closer the keywords the more likely it is to rank higher.
13. It is best to have the keywords one after the other i.e. with no words in between them.
    Eg : “discount perfume” is better than “discount on perfume”.
14. In Image names – Eg : Perfume.jpg – Good to have keywords in images names.
15. Secondary Keywords – Targeting and optimizing secondary keywords can be beneficial as they might have a lot less competition than the most popular keywords. Eg: discount Calvin Klien perfumes will have a lot less hits and a better targeted traffic.
16. Synonyms – Using synonyms on web pages is good as Search Engines have algorithms to take in to consideration synonyms for Keyword match and ranking especially for sites in English but it is not taken into account for many other languages. For instance, in the perfume site, “fragrance” is a synonym, Include synonyms on the page but do not rush to optimize every synonym.

Google ranks fifth for the keyword "Search Engine"

SEO in the earlier days
In earlier days people tried all means like keyword stuffing, doorway pages, hidden text, link farms etc, which are usually categorized as SEO’s Black Hat techniques. These techniques were widely popular among various internet marketing firms who used to implement them in order to push the site’s ranking on top of search engines. Now, search engine crawlers have not just become smarter, they’ve come a long way to become more intelligent that one can imagine. They are able to detect and block such websites which are being optimized using black hat techniques. You have to be very careful in choosing the right SEO company for your website for this particular reason.

Black Hat SEO is unpopular & heavily looked down upon by SE. Image by elliance.com

SEO in the present
It goes without saying that the time has changed. Now it is all about the content. Algorithms are used to rank the websites on search engines have changed dramatically. The smarter SEO firms have come to know the importance of natural content for the websites’ positions. So, instead of writing for the search engines, they are now writing for the real user which is what search engines like Google and Bing want. “Content is the king” has become the latest proverb in our English dictionaries.

In the coming days, we will talk in depth about the techniques are being employed by various internet marketing and SEO companies to optimize their site’s rankings on search engines. Stay tuned to our blog and don’t forget to check your own website’s ranks before you leave

Ciao!