Facts about SEO those are surprising:

1. Time taking The overnight growing rankings are not true for SEO strategies. Even if you invest great deal of finances, the process will take time. Slow and steady wins the race, so wait for your chance patiently. Continuing the optimization work will benefit you in the long run.
2. Trickery is not effectiveYou may think of innovative ideas to bring your online asset to the top of the result pages, but beware. This may even lead to a penalized website. Black hat SEO techniques create rankings that may be attractive at one moment, but they have their own cons.
3. It is visibleYou may not get direct signs to find out if your plans of optimization are working or not. There are certainly small hints to see the rank improvements on a gradual level. There is no secret to search engine marketing process. Evident changes in ranking will be suggestive of positive approaches to optimization.
4. Link purchase is awfulSearch engines have shown their dislikes for link purchase every now and then. Many website owners consider the link purchase is a course of regular optimization technique. It may be unavoidable at times, but considering your options is the best way out. Avoid text brokers for link building or purchase.
5. Google doesn’t have partnersThere are many claimants to partnership with Google. These are mere tricks to lure you into using their services. Be careful about such offers and company, as Google doesn’t have direct contacts with anyone.
6. PPC and ranking are unrelatedOrganic SERPs and PPC advertising are not related. Are you are investing in PPC assuming it will lead to improved page rankings, stop. When you are unable to promote your business the regular way, you can certainly use the pros of PPC with help of Google Adwords.
7. Millions of links are requiredIt is untrue. You need good links that are naturally created to direct the crawlers towards your website. You will enjoy the fruits of your hard work while optimizing your website with healthy links in time.
8. Page rank is all that mattersThis is incorrect fact. Web page rankings do not imply that your website is flourishing or unsuccessful. It only directs that you have large number in your toolbar for a certain page. It is not indicative of anything to everyone.
9. SEO is ongoingSEO is never a done deal. You have to strive for the high rankings with every small step to maintain the level. Marketing in the real world is very similar to optimization of trade online. There are many beliefs about the Search Engine Optimization and easy ways to reach the top. Research and knowledge about the way internet campaigning works is mandatory for all individuals working in e-commerce.
10. Too much info from Google analyticsDoes it really matter to others how many people click on your site? Search engines do not bother about it. This information is only to improve the search tool. Do not fret about it as an attempt to spy on your website. Just do what you are required to provide – optimize.
11. Your keywords position in top is not foreverYou should not quit SEO services once the ranking top the charts. Keyword based SERPs are temporary. Every day there are updates and with competition your ranking is bound to vary. In SEO the rule ‘for once and for all’, is not applicable.
12. PR and ranking are not relatedYou need not worry about PR and your optimized page rankings.  Low PR does not reflect on the SERPs of your website. You should have quality backlinks and focus on optimization and even more optimization.

Search engines are after all manmade and the complete process is controlled by humans. Nothing lasts forever in the internet world. Keep yourself well informed about the changes occurring and continue to strive for the best. Results will show as hard work always pays, in form of clicks, sales and finances.

Find out how things work in the optimized way. Use SEO to get your online properties affluent with traffic and ROI.

Businesses and small local market companies are now seen pushing themselves towards the online marketing world for its gamut of attractions. But, amongst all this, the only question that arises is whether the businessmen should manage their requirements in-house or simply outsource to other professional service providers.

Outsourcing your work to other expert firms has its own series of pros and cons. However, avoiding the disadvantages, it is always better to take the help of experts rather than experiment with in-house methods. Hence, it’s always better to outsource the projects. Here are basic 5 reasons that highlight the importance and benefits of outsourcing.

1. Affordability
   • Cost of outsourcing and its result, are two main factors that greatly affect your decision to outsource your project or not. The cost of outsourcing may initially seem to be higher than getting the task performed by your employers themselves. However, SEM is not a day’s work and needs to be performed regularly. Hence, in the long run, outsourcing your work is not just a smart move but also an affordable one.
   • Diverting your employees from their regular work or performing the SEM methods will also affect your company’s other important tasks. As a result, the company faces other difficulties which may hamper its repute in the local market as well.
   • Another option that instantly clicks into our minds is that of hiring professional SEM and SEO experts for performing these online search marketing tasks. However, these professionals come with a huge price tag and also need assistants who can help them perform their tasks. Comparatively, it is a lot easier and better to outsource your work to SEO and SEM companies having great expertise and experience in their respective fields.
2. Opportunity costs
   • Search engine marketing is a very trick activity that requires special skills. You cannot teach these skills and tricks to your employees within a few days. These skills improve with time and experience. Hence, if your employees focus more on these SEM techniques, then they will have less time for their daily schedules which will greatly affect the company’s revenues.
   • Grasping these new techniques is not an easy task for most employees. Hence, you cannot actually predict the total time that all your employees will take to learn the basic Search engine marketing strategies.
   • Well, once your staff has actually learnt the basics, the outcome of their SEM efforts will vary from person to person. This can greatly affect your SEM campaign, thus making certain parts of the campaign stronger than the rest.
   • And the most important question is how you will train your staff with these SEM strategies?
3. Outside viewpoint for your company
   • A search engine marketing company belongs to a completely different business horizon from yours. Hence, when they ask for details about your company, its services, strategies, projects, etc. they actually invent marketing methods that you had never thought earlier.
   • This will further help you boost your business revenues to a greater height.
4. An on-going process
   • Search engine marketing is not a small project or system that can be managed within a few hours. It is an on-going process that needs to be managed and closely followed regularly.
   • You need to post new content daily, follow the basic link building tasks, keep a check on the recent SEO industry changes, etc. You also need to learn methods like PPC advertising, keyword selection, submissions and much more.  Without these, it can be extremely difficult to reach the top page of SERPs for your business niche.
   • However, if you outsource your project to a professional SEO company, it can become extremely easy to take your online business property to the top of the SERPs. Moreover, this can also save a lot of time of your employees.
5. Expert tools and ideas
   • Apart from the basic SEO techniques and strategies, the SEO and SEM experts also use a wide range of SEO tools that help them achieve their goal. Learning the use of these tools is easy, but implementing them as a part of your strategy is a difficult task which is only performed easily by a true SEM expert.

Hence, it is surely a better option to outsource your SEM project to the best professional SEM companies on the web. Moreover, due to the increasing competition, they also offer you added discounts and Free services that can make you save some more money on your project.

In reality, a simple content without any optimization fails to attract the deserving conversion rate or back links. As a result, it gets essential that you promote your content on the web by implementing the various SEO strategies. However, not everyone prefers to spend money on promoting link baits. Hence, here is a list of 10 Easy and Free strategies that you can follow for boosting your link bait conversion.

1. Challenging Title: Title of the content is the most essential part. It is the title which will attract the readers on the social network and will also comprise a link on the communities such as, Facebook and Twitter. Hence, the title should be challenging and interesting for the readers to click in and read.
2. Link with Others: A good textual content that succeeds in internal linking consequently also succeeds in attracting traffic and a richer anchor text. As a result, the people to whom you link, will later link back again to your website, while also spreading the news about your website to its network.
3. Take help of Experts: Internet is by itself a huge community that unites people from different places for a particular reason. As a result, you can now easily connect yourself with online experts and bloggers by asking them intellectual questions about any hot topic. This will further help the bloggers and experts to come and visit your website, thus optimizing your repute in the internet world.
4. Emphasize in your Network: Creating link bait using uncommon methods is quite natural.  However, apart from just posting your updates on the common social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can also tweet or write individual messages to your friends or groups of people who may perhaps be interested in your content. Moreover, you can also modify your email signature and add a hyperlink to it for informing your colleagues and friends about your content. This will hence add an extra push to your link bait conversion.
5. Target all bloggers: Bloggers are the best people who can provide back links to your website or blogs. Hence, if your article already targets the best bloggers on the web, it’s great! But if it does not, then you should take the help of reputed bloggers who have already blogged about the topic in the previous.
6. Select the best Social communities: People in the social networking world, usually prefer different networking sites based on their interests. As a result, it is usually not quite enough to submit your content to only the main social networks. Instead look for submissions in as many networking places possible, including the niche specific social networking sites.
7. intext:yourdomain.com -url:yourdomain.com: Users on the web are many a times seen to mention your web page or link on their pages without adding a hyperlink. For instance, yourdomain.com. Searching for such text mentions on the web is also quite fruitful, especially when you are interested in boosting your link bait conversion. Hence, in case you find such mentions, you can always request them to add a quick link to the text for boosting your online presence.
8. Link building for the page: link baits, usually, are not always successful, unless your site is already very popular and receives huge visitors every day. However, in order to make your website popular, make sure that you add some on-page SEO strategies, such as making links yourself for your site’ specific pages. Hence, when you submit your links, you can simultaneously market your article and press releases which provide great back links to your link bait, thus also giving it a decent organic traffic.
9. Make the content embeddable: Setting aside all types of SEO strategies, the most important factor that actually attracts visitors to your website is the content you have written. Hence, the content should be such that people not just link to the content but also embed it to their blogs, profiles, etc.

Topical conversations: once you publish link bait for your content on the web, you should then be ready for any possible conversation regarding the content topic. In such cases, you can take the help of Google Alert for all your targeted keywords to stay on the top. Participating in these conversions will help you attract more people with your ideas, thoughts and knowledge. This will hence help you to further attract more genuine readers to your website or page.

Most webmasters and other online system developers, usually have the belief that these classified ads are generally used for marketing or promoting only the marketable products of a company which may include events, products and services. However, apart from this basic usage, these classified ads can also be used as one of the best media for advertising any new business venture or service. It is believed that classified ads are as good as article marketing, particularly if their back-linking option is enabled in the promoter website. However, not all classified ad websites permit a user to post content with backlinks. Hence, before you start with classified ads promotion, you need to check the terms and conditions of all websites and list down the few that allow backlinks. Once you have the list of such classified ad websites, you should then try making the maximum use of these sites for promoting your business, blogs and websites.

These classified ads websites are highly optimized with SEO strategies and hence instantly index your ads and content on the search engines. These websites are highly reliable for your SEO and classified ad posting. However, when posting the SEO, a user needs to consider a number of things, such as the text, its quality and marketable content, each of which can help draw attention of the search engine users. It is during this point that you should make the optimum use of backlinks, not just in the content but also as the html content or any other relevant area of the content. However, you should particularly take care that you don’t use the typical marketing words that may shadow the real effect of these classified ads. Overall, the content should be informative and posted particularly to all free or paid websites.

For optimum results, follow the below mentioned steps when using the classified ads for optimizing your results.

1. Carefully select and list the classified websites that permit backlinks, business promotion and direct marketing of your website or business.
2. Properly frame the classified ad that needs to be posted.
3. Not daily, but occasionally post your business classified ads describing your profession or services on these paid or free classified ad websites.
4. And finally, never forget to post the information which you want people to know about. For instance, your recent upcoming events, exhibitions, expos, gatherings, business meets, etc.

With these classified ads techniques, Search Engine Optimizing your business or website can now become an extremely easy task.

Well, the answer lies in the presence of certain loopholes in the basic SEO strategy. Hence, if you are looking forward to enhancing your website’s ranking, here is a well described basic SEO strategy that you should keep in mind when optimizing your website on the web.

Step 1- Select Your Product Niche Carefully

Your online business and its niche are your identity on the web. Hence, it is essential that you select interesting niches for your website.

• The first and the foremost requirement before you create your online identity is to decide the niche or the product for which you want your brand to be recognized for in the market. You can select the niche based on your interests and skills. For instance, if you are obsessed by cars and car accessories, you can design and create your website for all types of car information.
• Once you have successfully selected your business niche and have your domain name registered and website designed, it is time that you select the suitable keywords and keyword phrases for your website. Take help of the keyword tools such as Google Adwords to analyze the keywords and their value in the search engines.
• Before selecting the keywords and the phrases, check their competition in the business market. Select the keywords that have higher CPC value and less competition. However, you should also consider the keywords that have higher search results related to your niche.
• Understand the current search traffic for your keywords. Then, have a better look at the paid competition of the keywords for your PPC and CPC campaign. Also, check your keyword in Google trends which will provide information about the search growth of your keywords.
• Once everything is researched and analyzed properly, you should then list down the most appropriate keywords for your website.

Step 2- Get the Basics Right

For a stronger and more successful SEO strategy, it is essential that you get all the basics right. Hence, make sure that you design the SEO structure perfectly.

• Optimize your meta tags with your targeted keywords. This will help you boost your website in the SERPs.
• Content is a very important part of a website which is used to analyze the quality of your website by the users visiting your site. Hence, make sure that you use your targeted keywords appropriately and in a uniform pattern, all through the content.
• Properly structure the internal linking system of your website. Also, map the anchor text of your website. You can optimize your anchor text with the target keywords which will hence help you link your website to a more relevant website.
• Internal linking is a very essential part of defining your website’s structure. Henceforth, you should link your content with each other after a proper understanding. Link product and non-product articles having the same categories or having similar titles.
• Another important basic point that you should remember is the content of your website. The content should be unique, informative and also interesting to attract the eyes of all users.

Step 3- Ensure that the Search Engines get a glimpse of your web content

Once you have created the basic structure of your website strongly, you should then optimize it to attract the search engine spiders to your website. The spiders creep into your website, analyze it and then index it on the web.

• Check the html code base of you website and make sure that they are selected as, “Do Follow” and “Allow index”. Also make sure that you are using the title and alt tags in your website.
• Your website should include the HTML and XML sitemaps in your website. This will help your website users and the search engines to analyze your site’s pages.
• Also include the needed SEO codes into your site which will track your website’s traffic and the success of your link building strategies. Hence, set up the Webmaster tool and Google analytics into your website.
• Once you have created the XML sitemap of your website, submit it into the webmaster tool. This will help your well structured website to be indexed website faster, while also informing you about link breakages and loading time.
• Lastly, you should optimize your webpages appropriately for a faster loading time. Optimize the page size with restricted image sizes, flash animations, videos, etc.

Step 4- Gradually add the bells and whistles

Well, now that the entire website has been created, you should then focus on using the SEO tactics which will help boost your website on the search engines.

• Start the link building process in your website. However, you should make sure that you focus on only one particular linking strategy and not on a list of things.
• Directory submission is another very essential part of boosting your website on the web. Submit your website information in most directories.
• Submit articles in the best article submission directories. This will help you attract regular readers to your website, thus boosting its traffic.
• Blogs are an integrated part of websites today, especially because most people in today’s time prefer blogs as a good source of communication.
• You can also use RSS feeds and social bookmarking as a successful method of attracting the attention of users.

Step 5- Encourage community buzz

Promotion of your website for its services is extremely essential for attracting huge traffic to your website. This has however become extremely easy with the social media websites.

• Enter the social media world and create your company or website’s account. This will be your identity in the social media world. Hence, you should be careful when creating your account.
• Once your profile has been created, make sure that you add fresh content to your profile regularly. This will make your readers eagerly wait for your daily submissions, thus attracting them to your websites successfully. However, make sure that all your content is related to your website’s services.
• Social media sites are a great source of communication, especially when you want to create a successful bondage with your followers and clients. Hence, make sure that you respond well to your clients and users on these sites.
• You can also take the help of online press release websites to promote your new released products, services, etc. This is a successful method, especially when you want to market your website across the business world.
• However, apart from just promoting your website on the web, it is also essential to boost the confidence of the users on your services. As a result, you should add client and customer testimonials about your website and its services in your site.

Once you follow these basic SEO methods for your website, you can be rest assured about the triumph of your website in the online business market.

• In the ecommerce websites for product descriptions

Any newly launched product has several distributors on the web. As a result, these websites offer the same text about the products and their features which thus makes them duplicate content on the web.

• Alternate print pages

Several websites on the web offer a specific printing format with the same content on them. If the owner of the website doesn’t make use of the robots.txt disallow command, then the search engines don’t index these web pages.

• Canonical issues

Search engines usually index the URLs as compared to the webpages and so, there are chances that they index the same website displayed in different forms. The content of the same website is hence showed as a copy of itself and hence the search engines don’t index these webpages.

Apart from these three reasons, there are several other situations such as session IDs for search engines, syndicated RSS feeds, etc. where in the search engines identifies duplicate content. We will post more details about those in near future. Keep following the KPMRS blog for these tips!

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.

• 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!