Naming your business

Its best to include your primary keyword in your domain name, but if you have a built brand, or a well known business, you should use the domain for your brand or company.

Keep away from using underscore ( _ ) in your domain name or page

If you can’t have your keywords in your domain name, another technique is to include your keyword by creating sub domains. Eg. mumbai.seo-optimization-experts.com to target by location, or ppc.seo-optimization-experts.com to target a new pay-per-click service. Use sub domains for 3 – 4 important keywords you want to target, and don’t overdo it by creating sub domains for every keyword in your list.

In the beginning there was a word – it was called a Keyword.

Keywords are the foundation of your online business. It all begins with selecting the right keywords for your business. The on-page optimization, the content creation and all future link building campaigns will stem from the keywords you select.

There are various statistical and analytic tools available on the net for keyword suggestions, and many of them are free, so use them. Keywords discovery is based on hard facts, trends, and history of performance of the keyword; it’s not an estimated guess!

Don’t underestimate the competition. Analyzing your competition for keywords they use or don’t use is a step you don’t want to miss. If your competition is on page # 1, they must be doing something right.

Don’t fight the big boys. No matter how hard you are willing to work, or pay a SEO expert to do that work for you, it will take time, patience and money to go after the big keywords. Set optimistic goals and start with keywords that have lesser competition, and yet good traffic potential. These types of keywords can be researched into, also called long tail keywords; they can be identified once you understand how your potential customers search for information on a product or service like yours. Eg. Create keyword centric topics – articles, blog posts, how-to guides, FAQ’s etc.

Start with city centric keywords. It makes sense to start with keyword combinations that include your city of business Eg. Seo expert mumbai. Once your keywords are ranking well in your city, it’s time to expand your business with country specific keywords Eg. seo expert india. And finally you can go after the BIG global keywords!

Start with keywords that are local. General keywords (eg. seo expert) get a lot of traffic, but they are difficult to rank for, so start with your city (eg. seo expert mumbai), and work your way to country (eg. seo expert india). With time, consistency and patience, the bigger traffic pullers can get targeted.

Start with targeting easier keywords with good traffic potential. You will see faster results on your site and it becomes motivation to go after the more difficult keywords. Even an extra character like ‘a’ in your keyword will have different competition and rankings in search listings.

Test-drive your keywords. Run a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign for 15 days to a month and see which keywords are being searched for, their performance history, and titles and descriptions that work with your customers. This helps identify the winning keywords you should be targeting on your website, plus getting the extra traffic and business can be quite a high.

Each keyword or keyword phrase is a traffic funnel to your website, and keywords on page # 1 of search engine results have a higher chance of getting clicked. There are always “more keywords” you can target, you have just not looked deeply enough.

Meta-Tagging. When is it enough to say enough!

No matter what one says, it’s important to focus your pages i.e. page name, title, desc, other relevant Meta tags, and the body content around a specific keyword. What this means is that you create ONE PAGE of content themed AROUND one KEYWORD you want to target, and include the keyword in your page name, title, description, and other relevant Meta tags on that page.

Well that makes sense, considering that each keyword will need to be targeted separately, each keyword will have different competition, and links will have to build to target each keyword page.

In the body content of the page, write for the reader only and not for the search engines. If you are writing about a particular topic in focus, the keyword will be included naturally into your sentences in any case, if you can write well. The emphasis is on ‘natural’ writing, and NOT seo writing (if such a word exists). Don’t stuff your keyword in Meta tags and body content. It should all make sense to your potential customer when reading your title, description and body content.

Other than title, description, keyword, headings (hi, h2, h3) and link text, there are NO other Meta tags of relevance. Remove all irrelevant Meta tags. Keep title tag around 60 characters, and the description tag around 100 characters. Short and simple copy works best.

Creating Content that Attracts

There is content that’s created for your website – listing your services, products, infrastructure, contact details, post jobs etc. This is important to brand your company, sell your services/products, introduce the team, and give information to potential clients on how to get in touch with your company.

And then there is content for the purposes of educating and informing your users about developments in the industry/business you operate in, product tips, FAQ’s, How To guides etc . You can post the content in the form of articles, or blog posts, or new content pages on your site. This kind of content is informative, useful and is liked by users and search engines alike.
The content created should be focused around keyword phrases you want to target. Eg. How to hire a seo expert.

Use content for creating internal links and external links. Internal links should be used from within the content to point to (anchor text) another page of related information, and external links point out of your domain to other useful sites and resources. Internal linking also works well when you link from pages with good page rank to pages that don’t have page rank.

On average create 3 – 4 articles, or blog posts a week. This content should then be syndicated to selected article submission sites, and promoted across selected social bookmarking and networking sites to build quality natural links.

If you can create innovative and useful Video content and submit to sites like YouTube, you will have an edge over your competitors. Don’t make dull, poor quality, badly edited or lengthy videos! If your videos are not generating traffic, then rethink your content and presentation. Try one video at a time and learn from your mistakes.

The Link Building Matrix (Reloaded)

The search engines are becoming smarter by the hour. Link building was always an important parameter for search engines to understand the value of your content, and will always be. But, due to good reasons, search engines now give more value to those links that come from relevant, credible and popular sites, and links that are gained on the merit of your content.

No link exchanges, no reciprocal links (unless it’s between two mature and relevant sites), no paid links (unless they are part of pay-per-click campaign, or part of your advertising on other sites).

Get links from diverse and relevant web, user and social communities that you are participating actively in. A healthy matrix of quality and diverse links includes web directory submissions, article submissions, social bookmarking and networking, video submissions, PR submissions, blo
gs reviews and commenting, participating in forums, Yahoo answers, submitting how to guides etc.

Directory Submissions – To Pay or Not to Pay

When I first start link building for a new client, I always start with getting a few good quality links from selected web directories with high page rank (PR 3 above).

With many free high page rank directories on the web, you can create your business listing and submit to these directories for no cost. Expect little or no traffic from these sites, but the links they give you back are good for your rankings.

There are few good paid directories. If you have a budget of 400 $ (Yahoo directory included), then go for paid directories, otherwise focus on other link building techniques. You may get some traffic from paid directory sites especially Yahoo, but the link back is permanent.

Post to around 100 good web directories every two months. Build a portfolio of good quality web directory links over time. All submissions are to be made manually to web directories managed by human editors. A good web directory takes 10 to 15 days to verify a submission, though its not the only factor to concider.

Don’t try and complete your directory submissions quota in one sitting (i.e. 600 directories at one time). It’s not about reaching a number or completing a target, but building quality links consistently over time.

Article Submissions – The power of Syndication

Articles submission sites are my favorite for increased traffic, reputation and for building quality links to a website I am working on. Generally once you write content for the web, you cannot use that content any place else on the web, else it will be caught by the duplicate content filter of search engines. But submitting your content to article sites is not treated as duplicate content.

Write once and syndicate to 10 to 15 popular and relevant article sites with high page rank. This number works best as you can build your personal reputation as an expert author, increase traffic to your website (I get good traffic and referrals from Ezines), and build links from these sites.

First submit the article (3 – 4 a week works best) or blog post to your own website. Then consistently submit your articles to top and relevant article submission sites over a period of time, and building your credibility as an author on the topics or industry you are writing about.

Blogging – Start Talking

If you can’t write, don’t have anything interesting and unique to talk about, and don’t want to learn what your readers like, then hire someone who can!

Start a blog only if you plan to continue writing and building content. Working hard to write great content and promoting your blog is going to be hard work. If you plan to stop creating informative, unique and entertaining content after 6 months, don’t bother starting (especially with SEO in mind).

Blogs and blog posts (your content) get ranked much faster by search engines. It’s a proven fact. But unless your content is good enough to excite webmasters (who actively search blogs, RSS feeds, article sites and social sites for the latest buzz) to link back to your content, the ranking won’t be maintained.

Make each blog post count. Once you post on your blog, syndicate that content to article sites and promote across social bookmarking and networking sites for maximum leverage of your content.

Innovative corporate blogs are doing better at generating traffic than their websites. But don’t expect your blog to generate business for you in the short term. It takes time and patience to develop a voice that can sell your ideas to your readers.

Social Media – Start Listening & Bookmarking

People are talking right now about your brand, your services and your products online, whether you are listening or not does not matter. Either you can participate in this conversation, or hope that ignorance is really bliss.

“I need information now” is the new mantra of people, and the popularity of sites like Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Facebook is backed by the fact that these social platforms allow users to communicate, share and receive information faster.

You create content (articles or blog posts) and post it on your website. Then you syndicate that content to selected article sites. The next step is to promote your content across social bookmarking and networking sites.

Select 10 – 15 social bookmarking sites and consistently submit your content each week to these selected sites. Participation is the key here. It’s not good enough to post your content or link and hope for the best, you have get reviews or “thumbs up” for your content. Get atleast 3 – 4 thumbs up or reviews for all your postings for maximum leverage.

Over 11 years of experience in conceptualizing digital solutions and Internet/mobile marketing strategies for various brands across business, entertainment and media segments.

I have a passion for:

Creating integrated brand solutions for web and mobility platforms

Handling online brand campaigns for well- known Brands

Assisting brands to connect with the TG with Content based solutions

Brainstorming with a creative team to come up with innovative concepts

Ideating and implementing Internet marketing strategies across search engines, blogs, social networking and bookmarking sites, video sites, wiki’s, article submission sites, RSS feeds, etc.

Search Engine Optimization strategies for increased traffic via Google, Yahoo, MSN.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/what-i-have-learnt-about-seo-so-far-940596.html

It’s been said many times before, that creating unique and compelling content in the way of articles, FAQ’s, how to guides, eBooks, user testimonials, blog posts and innovative videos, and taking the time to syndicate that content across relevant user, web and social communities, is the best way to get people to link back to your content. This is also termed as “link baiting”.

Having said that, if you have been sincere in creating and promoting your content over the last 6 months to a year, and in building quality and diverse links to your website with relevant anchor text, then a neat seo opportunity lies in revisiting your past content archives.

Sometimes we SEO experts get so caught up in building external links and battling it out with the competition for our clients, we forget to make ideal use of internal link building to get a boost in rankings.

External links tell a search engine that there are other websites and communities (other than you) that think your website to be of some value, in the same way, internal links tell the search engines which pages you think are most important by counting the number of links pointing to that page.

While building a link matrix of external links with relevant anchor text is important to search engines, the internal link structure and anchor text also plays a big part in a successful search engine optimization strategy. In addition good internal linking makes it easy for the users and search engines to understand your content better with category and sub category pages that link to the deeper pages of your website.

Expert SEO TIP: Tweak your Content for Higher Ranking

They say that the answers we seek lie in the past “going back to the roots”. In revisiting your past and looking at it with a new perspective you can begin to understand the mistakes made, the underlying fears and insecurities developed, lessons learnt, and maybe some answers for the present moment.

By revisiting your past content, and looking at it with a fresh perspective, you can find innumerous SEO opportunities. I have listed a few of them below:

1. The Title – Can the title of the content page, article (or blog post) be improved, or better written to incorporate the keywords you are targeting currently?

2. Internal Linking – Many times when we revisit old content pages we find opportunities to include anchor text links to the important pages (focused around our primary keywords) of our website and internal links to relevant newer content pages. This helps in building relevant internal links and gives users a choice to navigate through your content easily by clicking on the link/topic of interest.

3. External Linking – Revisiting old content also reveals many opportunities for creating relevant external links. An external can be given if the external link provides some additional value to the topic being discussed. External links should also be given to authoritative sites and to relevant sites in your industry. An external link tells the search engine and your users that you are helpful and not afraid to link out (sometimes even to a competitor’s site). Become a hub for resource links in your industry.

4. The Tags – Do you need to tweak those tags (or Meta tags) to make them more focused? Are there some keyword variations you want to add to the list? Remember to keep it simple!

5. Improving the Content – Did you find grammatical errors (hopefully not) that need to be corrected? Do you have some new insights into the content that was originally created? You can always add value to the original articles, and maybe make a new article out of it (the link juice can be passed down to the new article, cross linking possibilities and its new content for search engines). Also revisiting your content is a great place to find new content ideas, and missing gaps in your older content.

6. Targeting New Keywords – Over the last few months you may have discovered new keyword phrases or long tail phrases you want to target, and maybe move away from some keywords combinations that have not been working so well. This is the time to use your old content to give the new keywords a boost.

7. Pass on PageRank – If you notice that each individual page of your website has a different page rank. The index page generally has the max page rank (Normally because the index page also has the max inbound links which is one of the criteria of search engines while calculating PageRank). Did you know you can use internal linking to pass the rank juice from well ranked pages to ones that do not have PageRank?

Find relevant opportunities, and work on adding value to older content, and you should see a significant boost in search rankings.

A word of warning here, don’t overdo it. At the end of the day, though we may get some answers by “going back to our past roots”, we have to eventually come back to live in the present moment.

Over 11 years of experience in conceptualizing digital solutions and Internet/mobile marketing strategies for various brands across business, entertainment and media segments.

I have a passion for:

Creating integrated brand solutions for web and mobility platforms

Handling online brand campaigns for well- known Brands

Assisting brands to connect with the TG with Content based solutions

Brainstorming with a creative team to come up with innovative concepts

Ideating and implementing Internet marketing strategies across search engines, blogs, social networking and bookmarking sites, video sites, wiki’s, article submission sites, RSS feeds, etc.

Search Engine Optimization strategies for increased traffic via Google, Yahoo, MSN.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/seo-strategy-revisit-your-content-for-link-building-940597.html

We work hard to run an honest business and build a good brand, but there will be times when even the most sincere brands will face a disgrunted and unsatisfied customer.

In the olden days this customer would write angry letters to the CEO, and spread the bad word about your brand and services through his network of friends and peers. The damage they could do as an individual was relatively low.

Today, this customer can easily start a negative blog about your company (e.g. yourbrand.blogspot.com), or initiate a new topic on a public forum to trash your brand, and even use the services of online customer complaint websites like http://www.ripoffreport.com/, http://www.complaintsboard.com/ to hit you where it hurts most.

Now, not all negative publicity starts with the customer, your brand could easily be a victim of a brand-hijacking or spam attack orchestrated by your competitor to drag your goodwill down the drain.

Either way, your brand image and reputation online is at stake here.

How does this affect my brand?

Today online buyers of products, services or information, often search for your brand name to check for negative reports and previous complaints before deciding to do business with you. So when a potential customer is searching for your brand, other than finding your website, he will find the negative branding and complaints as well listed on the search results page.

Search engines give a lot of ranking prominence to complaints, and to sites like ripoffreport.com etc to protect their users from the many fraudulent brands and ill-managed companies online. Since these complaint sites have a high page rank and reputation, they are often misused and can cause damage to your brand reputation.

An easy way to check if your brand is under “attack” is to type your brand name, or brand name.com in the search box and see the results. You can also track your brand reputation by setting up a Google Alert for your brand name/s, so when there is any news about your brand, you get the information immediately, and can take corrective action.

What to do when facing negative publicity? Is preparation is better than cure

1. Assuming you are a sincere company, first always try to talk to the customer and see if you can sort out the problem, even if the customer has already been taking extra effort to spoil your brand reputation. Something it’s as simple as listening to your customer’s complaints and trying to resolve them can make the bad publicity go away like a bad dream. Plus you have a happy customer now, who will be more than eager to retract their negative comments from their personal blog, public forum or complaints sites.

2. If the customer is not responding to your requests to make peace, then try and reduce the affect of the negative comments by telling your side of the story, with a little peace offering (discount coupon, gift certificate etc) for the irritate customer. Other users will see this as a positive thing – that your brand is willing to take an extra step to resolve issues with unhappy customers.

3. Sometimes you can’t please everyone no matter how hard you try, and it’s time to take corrective measures immediately. “The best way to beat negative publicity is to increase the positive publicity”.

4. Get your happy customers to give you a testimonial, and display the testimonials on your website and blog. People always say good things and bad things about any brand; the idea is to get more of the good stuff visible for other potential customers to see.

5. Creating great content that can rank highly will surely push the negative stuff further down the search listings.

6. Participate by writing on prominent article submissions sites like ezinearticles, articlesbase, goarticles etc. Create an account with your company name, and give your company profile in the space for author, and a neat link back to your website.

7. Build your social reputation by promoting your content across social bookmarking sites like dig, delicious, propeller, reddit, folkd, furl it, blink list etc.

8. Release some good PR using prominent PR submissions sites like PrWeb, and get your brand name in the title of the press releases. In addition if a journalist picks up your press release for his publication, that’s a ton of positive publicity right there.

9. Create mini-brands for your brand by creating your company profiles on websites like hubpages, squidoo, aboutus, wiki, facebook, twitter etc and participating actively in these communities.

10. Start a corporate blog. Other than search engines loving you for your content, you can use the blog to spread the good word about your company, while offering other useful information. Ask you existing customers to take a satisfaction poll on the blog?

11. Create innovative videos of your promos, how to resources, training videos etc and submit to sites like YouTube. If you videos become popular, then your brand becomes popular.

12. Hire an Expert SEO, or a SEO company thats has the experience and understanding to manage your brand reputataion online.

13. Preparation is better than Cure. Even if your brand is safe right now from negative attacks, don’t wait till it happens. Use the ideas listed above to build a better brand and a stronger brand online. Start today!

Over 11 years of experience in conceptualizing digital solutions and Internet/mobile marketing strategies for various brands across business, entertainment and media segments.

I have a passion for:

Creating integrated brand solutions for web and mobility platforms

Handling online brand campaigns for well- known Brands

Assisting brands to connect with the TG with Content based solutions

Brainstorming with a creative team to come up with innovative concepts

Ideating and implementing Internet marketing strategies across search engines, blogs, social networking and bookmarking sites, video sites, wiki’s, article submission sites, RSS feeds, etc.

Search Engine Optimization strategies for increased traffic via Google, Yahoo, MSN.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/your-online-brand-reputation-matter-and-how-to-tackle-negative-publicity-940601.html

Block level analysis is an attempt to solve the faults in PageRank and Hyperlink Induced Topic Search (HITS). PageRank and HITS are one of the best algorithms used by major search engines like MSN to improve the performance of a web search. Block level analysis is a good method as it breaks down a web page into multiple nodes or points on the web graph. This method can surely help a SEO expert in his quest for optimizing web pages.
Block Level Analysis is Microsoft’s attempt to improve the web search performance by optimizing the PageRank and HITS algorithms. It determines whether the content is a part of a navigation system or is page specific. This ranking system also presupposes that all links are not equal. It determines whether a link is a natural editorial link or advertisements. This analysis is conducted to ensure that advertisement links should not be counted as votes.
The whole idea behind block level analysis is that a web page can be divided into blocks with different topics. The relevance and weight of links are determined by its location within the blocks. By dividing web pages into blocks, web pages will not be counted as single, small units. Thus it will ensure a very good web search experience.
So what’s the Importance of Block Level Analysis for an SEO company?
The block level analysis concept certainly delivers much better search results than current search results. However there are some problems associated with this method as search engine spiders only see text on a web page, while an average searcher sees a combination of pictures and text. Moreover, the concept is dependent on the presupposition that all web pages will have the same layout, but this cannot be applied to flash websites.
For SEO services, block level analysis will mean more optimized pages with good content and excellent link building strategies. Links that are relevant to the content of a web page will be taken into account. Search engine optimization services will have to adopt good and aggressive SEO policies to optimize a website.

I am the webmaster at www.synapseinteractive.com . Synapse Interactive is a SEO company company in India.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/does-block-level-analysis-improve-the-web-search-experience-939745.html

There are many factors responsible for site and page authority. These include site history, unique content, inbound and outbound links, traffic trends and site structure. Site and page authority is determined by its ability to rank well in search engines. A search engine optimization company uses various factors to maintain the site or page authority.  Let’s learn more about the link factor.
The relevance and quality of inbound and outbound links are important factors in determining site authority. Furthermore, inbound links, which are better called backlinks, are considered more useful and important in the entire link exchange plan.
It is considered very important for your website to make each page an authority page. This can be achieved if you build inbound links or backlinks to each one. To generate quality backlinks, your first aim is to ensure that some percent of your backlinks point to your home page.
Search engine optimization services always generate fresh backlinks. A fresh backlink determines the page authority. Many services add social bookmarking buttons on web pages to ensure readers easily bookmark your pages. Also, submitting RSS feeds to feed directories can automatically create backlinks to your individual web pages.
Any SEO consultant mainly concentrates on inbound links. But, outbound links also determine your page and site authority. Outbound links are very important if a site is content-based. Search engines like Google emulate how an average internet searcher would search and hence websites with outbound links get higher page ranks on SERPS. Outbound links in your web page work just like “references” in a book. So, the more outbound links you can give to search engines, the more they will believe that you have backed up your content site with quality resources and this will help your site to rank higher.
However, it is very important to have unique and less backlinks and outbound links. Remember, site and page authority relies more on link relevancy and duration. This will make your website reach higher rankings.

I am the webmaster at www.synapseinteractive.com . Synapse Interactive is a Search engine optimization services company in India.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/the-importance-of-quality-inbound-and-outbound-links-for-site-and-page-authority-939774.html