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Do you think that SEO is into the same track too - like SEO 2.0?

Yes - advanced SEO had always been there - the SEO 2.0.

So, what does SEO 2.0 look like - goldfish in the wild or a zebra in an aquarium?

In traditional SEO, the main focus had been to improve search engine ranking for targeted keywords and getting as many visitors as possible. That’s it - traditional SEO stopped working there. And in traditional SEO, the main focus had been linking in and linking out and fixing keywords in the Meta Description and H1s.

But in SEO 2.0, the whole scenario is changing.

Now, the main focus is on visitors and their needs and overall experience in a website. It is about creating an environment and a platform for social communication. Webmasters are confident about one thing, if they can satisfy the visitors, search engines (read Google) would be bound to send them more traffic.  And thus, advanced SEOs are not writing title tag for search engines; they are just defining the page and writing the content to satisfy the visitors. Now SEO is visitor-centric.

And another most important aspect of SEO 2.0 is that people do not fully depend on search engines to get traffic. The concentration has shifted to traffic long tail. And the traffic long tail generated from social networks is getting more importance. However, there had been lots of debates on the issue whether those visitors are convertible into business or not. And it solely depends on the environment you provide in your website. Some people are successfully using them to increase sales and some people are just wasting their bandwidth.

Going local to be a global player! That’s the best part of SEO 2.0 where the webmasters focus on local visitors.

Being human from machine: “Who are you” is as important as the product you offer - communicate - convince - sell. Web is no more just an information source. Yu got to give it a human touch.

Some SEOs do that.

What else? Write a comment and get a link…

Popularity: 9% [?]

Popularity: 9% [?]

We often say that being simple is not so simple unless you are simple by nature or by chance. And look at this sentence - to define simplicity and to be politically correct, I have made the whole sentence and the idea more complex.

Anyways, as it is not simple to be simple, so it is not at all simple to write for general people.

What was the last time you discussed with your content writer about your target market - what they do, how they live, what they eat, blab, blab, blab!

Whenever, we say “general people”, the very first thing that comes to our mind is a crowd and a unified entity; something like - a lot of people coming out of a tube - or a group of cowboys running on horses in Wild Wild West.

And more importantly - they are faceless.

Things do not happen like this when you deal with your customers in your business outlet. You can guess a lot about the person from his or her approach, dress, accent etc. when you interact with them directly. And good salesmen offer a customized solution to each prospective client and eventually close the deal.

Do they really utter the same sentences every time (I would like to exclude the opening speech of a telesales)? They don’t - though they have a similar line of action or a pattern.

And this approach outlines the success story of a good salesman.

Now, it is not possible to cater to each and every prospective customer of your website with unique and custom made content. Even dynamic websites can only change content depending on some “not so social” data. And raw data are not good enough to offer any customized solution.

How do you deal with this problem? How do you prepare your content when you are directly selling a tangible product!

One of the best ways is to talk to the direct market representatives or telesales people. They know the market better than the marketing manager as they deal with the clients directly and they are close to the problem. The manager can only provide you some raw data and fact sheets. But those people know what the target audience really wants and what satisfies them.

If you are not ready to go through this process, just prepare your content like a newspaper report and let the visitors do what ever they wish. Or follow the pattern of speech of those direct marketers of that product.

And you thought content writing is all about playing with Keywords.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

The most common link building strategy employed by most of the seo companies is to add a few resources or links page and rush out in the web to find opportunities for reciprocal link building. To the most they develop a few complimentary websites and go for ‘three way’ or ‘four way’ link building.

However, try to think about it from a different perspective. When you are using your mother site for link building (in case of two way reciprocal linking), aren’t you putting your website’s future at stake? Don’t you think search engines have all the rights to penalize your site? It is not always possible for you to monitor the neighbors you are creating in this process.

The second way, where webmasters are using complimentary websites for three way or four way link building, is a bit secured. At least, you do not put your mother site’s future directly at stake. However, there is always a chance that smart search engines like Google would track a linking pattern. But it is still more secured than reciprocal link building. At the same to, you would need to spend a lot of time to develop the complimentary websites and gain some PR.

You would even find some webmasters who solely depend on article marketing to improve search engine ranking. They submit articles to different directories and if these articles are good enough they get syndicated by other websites. However, if you track the progress of an article marketing campaign, you would see that, the syndicators do not always link to your website directly. On the contrary, they link to the article directory as the source of the article. To add to this, they often strike out any link embedded in the body of the article. Thus you do not get full value of article syndication. To add to this, you would hardly find more than 15 to 20 article directories worth submitting. And the best of them do not allow you to put a link inside the article body. So, what is the value? And, as far as my experience goes, one link from one domain is good enough and thus there is hardly any need to publish more than one article in a directory.

In all these situations, you actually end up in a breakeven status - 1:1.

Let’s rethink our link building strategy - can we be more strategic in our link building effort! What should be an ideal link building strategy where the ROI would be more than 1:1!

For example, a successful link bait or networking offers better ROI. But you cannot say for sure that at least 1 out of 5 link baits would be successful.

What else?

Popularity: 8% [?]

Popularity: 8% [?]

A lot of webmasters (in fact most of them) pay maximum attention to home page’s (/index.something) decoration and optimization. Perhaps they feel home page is the door through which visitors will get into his or her online shop?

But, does it really happen? Are you sure that the home page is the only door to your shop?

If your answer is yes, either you are running a one page website or you have never checked your analytics report.

Every page of your website, where a substantial amount of people land, should be considered your home page. And you must concentrate on these pages as much as you do on your index page.

But how do you define the term - “substantial amount of people”?

If you think that it is sheer amount of people that is generated in that page, you would be mistaking - you must also think about the quality of the traffic and even traffic source. At the same time, you should also consider the time period.

So here are the things:

1. Amount of traffic: Obviously this is very important - you would hardly like to spend time after a web page that seldom generates one or two visitors for different keywords or links.
2. Quality of Traffic: It is very tough to determine the quality of traffic. However, you may get some idea about them by understanding their intention behind getting into your website. For example, if Net Business Blog publishes a list of 100 most beautiful Cats in the World and it starts getting loads of traffic from different sources; do you really think they would qualify as the target visitors of this blog?
3. Traffic Sources: if “100 most beautiful Cats in the World” makes it to the front page of Digg, it would definitely generate loads of visitors. But if you get the same or even less amount of traffic from organic ranking, it is much better than Digg. Any doubt about that?
4. Time Period: If “100 most beautiful Cats in the World” makes it to the Digg’s front page, it would generate loads of traffic; but it would last for a few days only. Now compare this with steady or increasing traffic sent via search engine for a significant amount of time. Which one is worthy enough to consolidate!
5. What else? (write a comment and I will include them in the list)

Spend some more time with your analytics data and identify the biggest doors to your site. Once you have identified those pages, find out the best way to navigate them to close a sale. Your bounce rate would surely go down.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

While working with different clients, the primary obstacle we face is that the client is too confident about the greatness of his content and do not want to change it at any cost. The second scenario is even worst; the client does not have enough time or resources and asks a freelance content writer to write the content for $2/page around some keywords.

In both the cases, the website stumbles on the ground even before the race actually started. Only if someone had given enough importance to the content they are publishing, they would have saved a lot of money and time while promoting the website in the market.

Why should you always think about Google - after all, Google won’t buy your product - if your content cannot please your target visitors, you reach nowhere. And ultimately, Google will stop sending visitors to your website. And at this point, you loose business, time and effort you have invested to rank top and more importantly you loose energy.  But if you can win your visitors, search engines will be happy to send them to your site.

And, right after developing the website, people start moving around for links and more links and more links. They start knocking every possible contact us page to get some quality one way link. But they forget to develop the content or quality of their pages.

Why would someone like to link to you for free, if you do not have any quality? A great design, to the most, may fetch you a best design award but it won’t improve your ranking for targeted keywords.

If you are running a business (irrespective of size and market segment) and starting a website to host or promote your business that means, you are well aware of the domain you are dealing. If this is true, participate in the development process and try to help the visitors - search engines will follow you.

And just answer a simple question - what would you have done if there had been no Google or Yahoo to guide the visitors to a website! What would have been your business development model in such a situation?

Popularity: 8% [?]

Popularity: 8% [?]

There had been a lot of discussions in different forums, groups and blogs on the issue if site wide links are good or not from search engine’s perspective. Same thing happened in case of paid links.

However, a lot of webmasters restrained them from going out for site-wide links.

But think about it from a different perspective - Would you buy a painting by Picasso unless it is signed by him! Or, do you think that a painter would leave the opportunity to sign a masterpiece!

If you are a web designer or contributed to develop or promote a website, what is wrong in getting a link from them? It is important for your branding - not just for the link value. If Google says ‘no’ - it must think twice.

At the same time I would like to say there are also a lot of sayings that you must get links from related websites. Now, tell me another thing - which websites fall under the category of similar websites for a web designing company or a web development company or a web marketing company or a seo company!

They can simply move forward and try to get links from any domain (even P 0 R N - if you design those websites). However, before you start getting such links think twice if your business domain support such a wide category - just try to establish a logical relation and move ahead?

But does this mean that site-wide link is good?

In my opinion, one link from one domain is good enough - simply enough. Don’t put the link on the common template.

But, if all your incoming links are site wide links, this is not a good or healthy sign. This actually develops a pattern - if you are a good website, you would get natural links from different websites - content based, forum posts etc. You must create a versatile link jungle. The same rule applies to reciprocal link building too.

And I can show you many SEO or web designing websites who are ranking high for different competitive keywords and they have huge pull of site-wide links (they have other links too).

And the last point - do not use the word “website design by NBB” in all the websites as anchor text - this is spam. And if Google thinks you are spamming, you have nothing to complain.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Popularity: 8% [?]

For a long time, SEO experts are having big fights with web designers. And one of the most common situations is when the designer wants to develop Flash based website and the SEO experts want to have more content in the page to play with search engines.

Perhaps, now, when Google is able to crawl flash based content (thanks to Adobe), the fight should end in one front (though you have lots of issues yet to be solved with your designer) at least. As a SEO, all you need to do is to tell your designer to follow the list provided by Google on Flash design.

Anyways, web designers get ready to create more flash based designs and developers get ready to add more interactivity within the flash content.

There is a reason why I pointed interactivity in the last paragraph. If you read the tips (or FAQ) provided by Google, you would find that, they will be crawling only the texts in a flash file (it is still weak in reading images). As they put it - “We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on“.

What does it mean?

It is time to be more and more interactive with the target visitors.

HTML or Java has their own limitations. Java is better than HTML to make a site interactive but Java cannot provide you the edge over search engines as the normal HTML.

In the same way, videos or slideshows have there own limitations - you would still need to use texts to optimize a video clip or podcast or slideshow for search engines.

With this latest update in Google’s algorithm, you can somehow overcome all these problems. You can interact more freely with your target audience and guide them as you wish throughout the process. At the same time you can remain a search engine friendly website.

And guess what, Flash designers and visualizers would be in great demand for next couple of years until Google starts reading images.

However, I would like to point out one thing - do not make your Flash file to heavy and do not use Flash unless it is very important. Plain text is still the best option for the information seekers and web is full of them.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

We often say the keyword research is the most important part of webpage development. However, if you want to do proper keyword research, you would need to pay subscription fees. For example, Wordtracker would charge you something around $59/month or $329/year. For a blogger who is not earning enough from his or her blog, this amount may seem very expensive.

Another big problem is that, for a blogger keyword research is a continuous process if they want to get enough visitors to their blog (ideally before publishing any post, you must do some keyword research - do you?). Especially, if you are looking to target keyword long tail, you must subscribe to one of them (unless you are experienced enough to guess it right.). And thus there is no other option but going for the yearly subscription to save some $$ in the long run.

But is there any other way to keyword research?

There are some free keyword research tools in the web. Though all of them are free, you may not expect complete result from a free account except from Google AdWords (even though Google AdWords is not primarily a keyword research tool, it is close enough to help you).

So how do you start?

At the very beginning do guess some keyword on the topic of your blog post. Prepare a small list - it is better to be generic. For example, if you are writing a post on proper keyword research for bloggers, “keyword research” or “free keyword research” should be taken as generic keywords. Now use those free tools to find out other variations of these keywords that your target audience is actually using.

So do you think that you have got all the keywords you want?

Ok, let’s go a bit deeper - now use these keywords to search in Google (.com or .co.uk or .com.au - depending on your target market) and find out how many people are targeting these keywords. You can also go for exact search (use the keywords in the “”) to know how many people are using that exact key phrase. This would give you a lot of idea on your competition.

Now you are ready to get your targeted phrases. Good key phrases should have more searches and less competition.

You can also try using Google Suggest or Google Trends if you need something more.

Trust me; the time you are spending in the process is worth it. And if you are writing some post as a linkbait, you simply can’t afford to ignore it.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Popularity: 10% [?]

Tagging is undoubtedly a web 2.0 phenomenon and it may actually hold hands with the visitors or readers of a website. (Take a look at Amazon Unspun. Do you remember that Amazon has already taken a great marketing strategy by implementing a simple section - “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” at the end of a product?)

And undoubtedly, it can help you a lot in case of SEO and more importantly, keyword optimization. At least we are trying it in one of our client’s website.

What happens in a traditional product based websites? They line up different products under different categories and sub categories and put everything into the sidebar.

But what if we change the website layout and place a tag cloud at the top of the page and associate the popularity (voting or page views) of the product with related tags (keyphrases)?

I am implementing this idea in a website that connects service providers with respective buyers in a local niche. The main reason why I had to take such a step is that they had around 2000 keywords along with 170 categories and more than 1500 subcategories.

Now, to keep things simple and to keep almost everything into the eye fold, I was looking to do something different (obviously not for the sake of being different). Another big reason to implement tags was keyword targeting. If I had to accommodate maximum number of keywords in the home page, it would have looked like SPAM. And at the same time if I needed to use all the categories into JS Dropdown menu, it wouldn’t have passed any value to the internal pages. To add to the situation, we did not want to keep the product beyond two clicks.

Apart from adding tags in the home page, we introduced tags in the category pages too. Thus the category pages had sub categories and products as tag along with the popular products under that category.

We are yet to come into some definite conclusion as the whole system is only a few days old. Soon we would come to know about user experience and make necessary changes (we may scrap the idea of tagging too if it does not work effectively).

What else, do you want to know the name of the website? Oops, can’t disclose client’s identity.

But what do you think about that?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

As SEO Consultants, we almost always need to work on websites that are already running for quite sometime. I often call myself website doctors when I need to tell someone (who does not know much about web) about my job or job responsibilities.

Anyways, the trend is very simple; people start a website thinking that it would get them business. Or, after running a website for sometime, they come to know that SEO can improve their business. But by the time we get those websites, it is already late. Often we need to recommend complete remodeling of the website. And at this point, most of the clients are never too happy to implement any major change.

When should one start thinking about SEO?

SEO runs hand in hand with the business model - the goal you want to achieve after a certain point of time and after certain amount of investment (both time and money). And if your website is your only business outlet, there should not be any doubt about thinking SEO from the very beginning.

What should be the common website development flowchart when you have identified the goal or objective you want to attain?

Understanding the target market and competition > Brainstorming and identifying proper keywords > selecting a good domain name > Developing the website > Evaluating end user experience > Redeveloping the website (to be continued…) > Closing Goal

And in the “developing the website” section - some on page factors (content, design navigation, optimization etc.) and almost all the off page factors (link building, organic and inorganic promotion, tracking competitors etc.) get in and it continues throughout the lifecycle. But the whole process becomes tougher when the client has made some big mistakes in the initial stages of development. And more importantly, the problems become more acute when clients do not want to share the complete history of the website development process. It creates lots of puzzling situations for us.

But what if you consult a good SEO consultant when you have developed an idea to start your business online? He or she may guide you step by step. If this is a problem and you do not invest on consultation, please do some extensive research on SEO to get some idea about how to start a business online. At least, you would come to know what you need to do to stay in the first track of web business.

I often say one thing - a good idea is not good enough unless properly executed. Same rule applies to your business too.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Popularity: 9% [?]