• 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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The above video is a recreation of a talk rendered by Matt Cutts at PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009. The talk titled “State of the Index” dwells with Google’s efforts in the passing year in helping users, web developers, and webmasters to perform better. Matt starts off by talking about the commitment Google showed last year to make itself more user-friendly. The launch of web browser Chrome, Mobile OS Android and Collaboration Platform Wave with each having large open-source components have made web surfing more exciting and enjoyable.

The introduction of Music OneBox, which allows using an artist’s name and a song name for searching, is definitely going to bring cheer to music enthusiasts. Music OneBox enables users to easily buy MP3 of songs in addition to playing the songs. Music OneBox also comes with a brand-new feature, which gives users the power to search for songs using the song lyrics. The recently launched Google Squared has the capabilities to redefine web searching as it permits users to get relevant results for almost anything they type in.

With Google Social Search, you can use keywords to retrieve related content posted online by fellow web surfers who belong to your social circle. Having a Google profile makes it easy to use Google Social Search. The Show Options feature of Google allows users to customize their search in virtually any way they want. Google’s Wonder Wheel feature presents users with a variety of data related with a keyword search. Now, Matt Cutts turns his attention to Google’s efforts in the passing year aimed at making things easier for web developers.

In 2010, Google could make loading speed of websites one of the factors considered while assigning page ranks to them as a fast-loading site definitely improves the user-friendliness. Visiting Page Speed on Google Code will enable web developers to access all the tools Google has created for them to make their sites fast-loading. Matt advices to visit webpagetest.org as this site helps developers to know about the loading times of each individual component of their websites. Although this site is not a part of Google, it gives developers information on all the changes that will make their sites fast-loading.

Closure, as assortment of tools introduced by Google recently empowers web developers to perform more efficiently. Closure acts as a compiler, library and templating system. Library, with 180 UI elements among other things helps developers to save java script creating time and compiler helps developers to make their java script more compact. Some of the UI elements like DatePicker are the same as those used by Google.

2009 saw Google coming out with more products and services from its kitty. Courtesy efan78.com

Google Web Toolkit (again a project from Google Code), used by Google Wave and Google AdWords, which comes with many reusable components, enables users to compile Java codes easier and more effectively. AJAX Libraries API tool from Google provides latest Ajax versions, which will allow developers to set up highly secure websites. Finally, Matt shifts his focus to things that show Google’s concern for providing webmasters with tools and resources that will make them better equipped and more powerful. rel=canonical, introduced by Google in February 2009, embraced by all major search engines, permits a webmaster to inform search engines that two websites are the same and links to them should be added up. The Ignore url parameters feature of Google allows webmasters to eliminate unnecessary parameters. With Fetch as Googlebot tool, webmasters can ask Google to show them what Googlebot saw when it traversed their sites or a page in their sites. This tool will help webmasters spot and remove hacked content. The Better Malware Warnings tool informs webmasters exactly what is giving rise to malware in their sites so that they will be able to get rid of the malware cause more easily.

The Message Forwarding feature forwards, in the form of emails, the messages received by a webmaster in the Webmaster Counsel. Google’s Keyword details feature gives webmasters the opportunity to know the top sites that are acting as competitors to them for a particular keyword. The four things that Google did that are intended for Better Communication are Google Webmaster Blog, SEO Beginner’s Guide, We don’t use key word meta tags, which helps webmaster to escape lawsuits and Webmaster console: 40 languages. Webmasters can get Google’s latest helpful stuff by visiting Google Webmaster Central on YouTube.

Matt Cutts ends the video by briefing about Google Caffiene and doing a bit of prediction for the future. Google Caffiene is constituted by a new indexing architecture and it is more flexible and faster. Hacking and malware are going to rise and Google will take steps to minimize their influence as much as possible. He also lists the four things that must be given attention to among the things that have been described in this video. They are doing social search, making site fast-loading, utilizing webmaster console and subscribing to official blog and video channel.

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!

KPMRS has now started monitoring search engine rankings for Australian data centers of Google, Bing & Yahoo as well! You can now check and monitor your SERP (search engine result position) for Google Australia, Bing Australia & Yahoo Australia.

It is absolutely free to use. Sign up/Sign in now to add your website URL and targeted keywords and let our automatic rank checker tool do the rest!

Stay tuned to the KPMRS blog for more updates and search engine news!

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.

In last few weeks, KPMRS has started monitoring search engine rankings for following countries’ data centers as well -

• Australia
• Brazil
• France
• India
• Italy

These are the countries from where we have maximum members and requests. You can drop a mail to us if you want to see the data center of your country added to our service. Once we reach the minimum threshold of requests, we will add it as well.

Enough for this update. Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed.

If your site pages have good content, submit them to buzz and digg. Both have a high chance of getting your page indexed.

Now, ideally this does make sense because both Yahoo Buzz and Digg are popular source of latest content for search engines but why would ANY search engine share this kind of information explicitly with the SEO community and webmasters?

Whatever the reason is, I am pretty sure we will see a spike of traffic going up for both Digg & Yahoo in coming weeks!

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.

As published in Financial Times on November 22, 2009, Microsoft is in talks with various news publishing companies like News Corp who owns The Wall Street Journal (in US), The Times (in UK), Daily Telegraph (in Australia) etc to have them de-index or remove their content from Google. In return, these media companies will get paid!

If that happens, we all would be really interested to see how will Google react. Will they pay more than what Microsoft offered? And if they do, we will see a new money making opportunity for the media companies to pull back their sinking ship. If search engines starts fighting for the exclusive rights of the content, we will be in a new era of web search.

Microsoft is in talks with News Corp to De-index its pages from Google

We may even hit the era where more players join the search engine war. Every warrior shows the unique content. So if I want to read health news, I will go to, say, healthyengine.com (a fictitious search engine which publishes exclusive news about health industry) instead of Google because Google does not have the rights to publish those news!