Share your Ideas in SEO

Has your site ever dropped suddenly from the index or disappeared mysteriously from search results?

• Have you ever received a notice that your site is using cloaking techniques?

Unfortunately, sometimes a malicious party "hacks" a website: they penetrate the security of a site and insert undesirable content. Sophisticated attackers can camouflage this spammy or dangerous content so that it doesn't appear for normal users, and appears only to Googlebot, which could negatively impact your site in Google's results.

In such cases it used to be very difficult to detect the problem, because the site would appear normal in the eyes of the user. It may be possible that only requests with a User-agent: of Googlebot and coming from Googlebot's IP could see the hidden content. But that's over: with Fetch as Googlebot, the new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools, you can see exactly what Googlebot is seeing, and avoid any kind of cloaking problems. We'll show you how:

• Let's imagine that Bob, the administrator of www.example.com, is searching for his site but he finds this instead:

• That's strange, because when he looks at the source code of www.example.com, it looks fine:

With much surprise Bob may receive a notice from Google warning him that his site is not complying with Google's quality guidelines. Fortunately he has his site registered with Webmaster Tools, let's see how he can check what Googlebot sees:

• First Bob logs into Webmaster Tools and selects www.example.com. The Fetch as Googlebot feature will be at the bottom of the navigation menu, in the Labs section:

• The page will contain a field where you can insert the URL to fetch. It can also be left blank to fetch the homepage.

• Bob can simply click Fetch and wait a few seconds. After refreshing the page, he can see the status of the fetch request. If it succeeds, he can click on the "Success" link...

• ...and that will show the details, with the content of the fetched page:

• Aha! There's the spammy content! Now Bob can be certain that www.example.com has been hacked.

Confirming that the website has been hacked (and perhaps is still hacked) is an important step. It is, however, only the beginning. For more information, we strongly suggest getting help from your server administrator or hoster and reading our previous blog posts on the subject of hacked sites:

• My site's been hacked - now what?


• A quick security checklist for webmasters


• Message center warnings for hackable sites


• Best practices against hacking

If you have any questions about how to use the Fetch as Googlebot feature, feel free to drop by the Webmaster Help Forum. If you feel that your website might be hacked but are having problems resolving it, you might want to ask the experts in our "Malware and Hacked sites" category.

Keyword research is one of the most awaited topic of discussions on this blog. Tons of techniques, articles & tools are already available to help you zero in on the keywords that would bring high rankings for your website on search engines. Now, we are not going to talk about all that crap stuff today because that is really not something that a person with little or no SEO knowledge can understand anyways. So we will just stick to our motto of “It can’t be explained simpler than that“.

• 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.

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.

How to Start a SEO Campaign?

Several small & mid size businesses contact us daily for SEO consultation and helping their websites rank well on search engines. One common question we always hear is:

• “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 field and one line description of your website in 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)

In a recent query session on Google’s Webmaster Central channel on youtube, a Google spokesperson was answering the question – “Why doesn’t Google validate according to the W3C (Markup Validation Service standards)”? Google had a simple, logical and a well rehearsed response -

• “While Validation may be good internally (for your website/organization), we have to make sure that the number of bytes returned to the users is as small as possible”, and added, that “Google does NOT provide any boost in ranking to pages that are validated”.

Now, those two sentences probably sum up the interview, and require some explaining, notwithstanding how casually they have been quoted. But first, a background check. The W3C validation is a service provided by the World Wide Web Consortium that prescribes a set of HTML coding standards for web pages. The service also allows coders to check for any markup errors in the pages authored by them. The objective of the HTML validation standards is similar to the objective behind traditional accounting practices or programming conventions – to produce Web pages that are:

1. Neat (user-friendly)
2. Accessible (from different devices)
3. Compatible (with different multimedia formats)
4. Manageable
5. Universally understood (similar displays on different browsers), and
6. Easy to update.

Despite all the apparent advantages, a majority of web pages on the internet are not validated. In fact, w3c and wikipedia confirm that less than 20% of the major search engine and browser websites are validated and error free.

Reason: What Google says in the interview.

If you were to design a web page, the most primary of your targets will be:

a) to keep the page loading times as low as possible; and

b) to ensure that your page is compatible with all common browsers in the market.

And the prospect of tweaking with your optimized HTML coding to even slightly increase your page size or decrease compatibility with browsers, is something that is generally seen as avoidable, in spite of however form of validation that may bring to your page. Also, the SEO benefits that are often stated in support of W3C validation are indirect and unquantifiable, at best, and validated pages receive no special attention from Search Engines; as affirmed by Google. The spokesperson also went on record saying that, “We would love if a Googler would spend 20% time trying to make sure we validate, and I think we can validate and still have a small page size.” Clearly, Google thinks of validation as frivolous or something that occupies a secondary priority at best.

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog says, in a post published earlier this week, that the famous tag does not affect your search engine rankings. Google says it’s a waste of time and should be ignored. Doing this, you can actually save a dozen-or-so bytes per pageload! It has also mentioned in the post that it is possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s very unlikely since they have ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently see no need to change that policy.

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 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 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.

Initial hype and Previews:

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?

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.

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.

Importance of web analytics?

About WolframAlpha Search Engine

Tips For Requesting Reconsideration in Google

Discussion as follows in the video :

Brian Says :

Hi, I am Brian White and this is my colleague Rachel and we are in the Search Quality team in Google in the Web spam group. We are here today with some tips on the reconsideration process.

Rachel Says:

All right, let's start with the case where you know your site has violated the Google guidelines, it is important to admit any mistakes you've made and let us know what you've done to try to fix them. Some times we get requests from people who say: "My site adheres to the guidelines now," and that is not really enough information for us. So, please be as detailed as possible.

Realize that there are people actually reading these requests, including the people in this room. If you do not know what your site might have done to get a penalty, go back to the Google guidelines and reread them carefully before requesting reconsideration. Look at the things to avoid and ask questions of people that work on your site, if you do not work on it yourself. If you'd like that advice of a third party, you can also seek help in our google webmaster forum.

Brian Says:

Sometimes we get reconsideration request or where the requester associates technical website issues with a penalty. An example could be that the server timed out for a while, or that bad content was delivered for a time, and google is pretty adaptive to these kinds of transient issues with websites. So people sometimes misread the situation as "I have a penalty" and then seek reconsideration. And it is probably good idea to wait a bit and see if things revert to their previous state. Some people attribute duplicate content with leading to a penalty and usually the problem lies elsewhere. And say you are in a partnership with someone else, say another website, and they put this combined effort together in a way that goes against our quality guidelines and involve both your website and theirs and then the end effort reflects badly on both.

You have control over your site, but sometimes it's hard to get stuff cleaned up on sites you do not control. We are sympathetic to these situations. Just make your best effort to document that in a complete reconsideration request. In the case of say bad links that were gathered, point us to a URL that shows your exhaustive effort to clean that up. Also, we have pretty good tools internally, so do not try to fool us as there are actual people, as Rachel said, looking at your reports. If you intentionally pass along bad or misleading information, we will disregard that request for reconsideration.

Rachel : And please do not spam the reconsideration form, it does not help to submit in multiple requests all at the same time, just one detailed concise report and just get it right the first time. Your request will be reviewed by a member of our team and we do review them promptly, that said if you have some new information to add about your site, go ahead and file a new reconsideration request. And finally, if reconsideration does happen, please be aware that it can take some time to notice when a penalty has been lifted.

Brian Says :

Yes, the bottom line is we care very deeply for our search engine users, and we want them to be happy and not have to complain. So make sure that

A) The issues are fixed with your site before filing reconsideration

B) Make sure that we don't have to worry about your site violating the quality guidelines in the future.

So, from the people who are part of the reconsideration process, from our end, thank you.

Rachel Says: Thank you