When there's hope, there's always a chance that we can plant a healthy tree and it's on our attitude. The same thing with search engine optimization, when we do our SEO services, we must think that in order to grow our tree, high quality services must be observed. But first let's start from the bottom, shall we?
First we plant a seed that symbolizes a beginner or a newbie. In order to make the stem grow over and over again, we must learn from the basics to advanced. Don't jump till you don't know what you're doing, or else the stem will just stay as ease or will fall. We consider ourselves as the SEO tree.
As we grow our knowledge, it's just like the water flows like a rain to make the roots grow until leaves came out. We must try to see that when we are growing and growing, just keep pushing until you finish the course or the chapter of search engine optimization. The tree could take months until it bears fruit and to finish its exact form.
The same thing with us, if we're able to act as a SEO tree, we will always continue to grow and at the same time, our own tree could be more meaningful than ever. For all newbies and professionals, bearing our fruits to our branches will make us very successful, just like the successful websites of Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.
We'll I'm not really good in creating a landing page, but I know why is it important? Why do we need a landing page? Why is it that every webmaster and SEO guru like me have to create our own landing page? Landing pages are a great preview of what are you offering to your customers and visitors before they will click on to the main page of the product or offer. It can be done through any affiliate hoplink or CPA offer. It's a brief introduction like no other.
So how do we create a simple landing page? Simple!
Choose from either of these blogging platforms:
1. WordPress (my favorite)
2. Blogger
3. Yola
4. Weebly
5. Squidoo
After which, you choose an affiliate product or a CPA offer that you would like to promote. We'll, if this product feel that you have passion like weight loss for example, then choose that product and get it's affiliate link for your landing pages. Now this is the most difficult part, which is the keyword research.
Of course, you want to be on the top of Google rankings? We'll you must go to Google Keyword Analyzer tool and to search keywords for your niche on who has low competition but average search numbers monthly (not too low, not too high), only average. After choosing the right keyword, name your blog with that keyword.
This is an example of a landing page which the keyword is used on the Blogger domain:
This is so simple, as you can see there is only one blog post. You can also see the image being posted on the blog post, but where's the affiliate link? Simple guys! It's on the image itself, which is attached as hyperlink that points to the affiliate link on your landing pages.
Your final step is the promotion using your own SEO and link building tactics and promote the landing page to Facebook, Twitter, high PR forums, social media and bookmarks, web directories, etc. This is how important is a landing page, and it's one of the reasons why affiliate marketers are earning lots of leads and sales on their respective affiliate links. We can do it, as long we're smart and have knowledge on promotions and affiliate marketing.
Most of the webmasters do not do proper redirection of old pages when the website is redesigned/revamped into an entire new one. The effect is that there will lot of broken links and you will also lose alot of inbound links. Here is a way to check the issue and if you do have old broken URL's you can turn them into effective link resources.
Go to Google Webmaster tools dashboard -- Your Website URL -- Diagnostics -- Crawl Errors -- Web Crawls -- Not Found.
You will now get a list of not found URL’s on your website . There will be a "Linked From" towards the right which shows the pages which are linking to not found pages. You can see the step by step guide about this on Google webmaster central blog.
We have now found the inbound links which are linked to old URL's. Now we need to ensure that this pages are linking to the new pages on our website. If they are not then we can send them a request to link to the new pages on our website. Meanwhile we can also redirect the old pages to the new pages on our website.
Doing SEO takes a lot of technical skill, knowing and understanding how basic html is applied and how meta tags work along with knowledge of site structure and how it all is put together either dynamically or statically are all essential requirements to get a site up to speed in the search engines.
You can jump right into learning SEO if you know the fundementals. It can be easier for programmers or web developers to understand how to do on-page optimization for example.
The off-page optimisation techniques rely on creative approaches in order to get maximum results. If you have a creative marketing mind you can apply this knowledge online and really brand yourself out from press coverage all the way to corporate identity. It's all a matter of having the contacts though. You need to know where to go and what to get and how to get it!
What I love most of all is when it comes to SEO and Internet marketing the sky is your limit. There is an endless approach to marketing on the internet and getting the best results through search engine optimisation usually by thinking smart and applying your strategies creatively.
If you have a mix of knowlege on the technical and creative side you will do well with SEO. This is why there are only very few good SEO experts out there as either they are only good at one or the other. It is very hard to find a creative technical person these days, but when you apply both skills this is when you get maximum benefit.
For example you can get very bored of doing what you do if you are not using creative approaches to keep yourself enthusiastic you must think and do internet marketing with a twist. Earlier I spoke about creative link building techniques . Even now with search engine changes including Spatial and Vertical there is lots to keep us thinking for the future and different approaches we need to take to prepare ourselves for.
I always am appreciative of my graphic design and web design background. I was very creative as a kid growing up, I loved art, and followed the footsteps of my father who was and still is a very talented artist both, painter and graphic designer. I then took my skills further and learnt programming and business. I loved the technical aspect for coding up bits and pieces to make something active on the internet, before that I was also very good with Flash and used to love to animate.
Now I also enjoy to teach through SEO courses that I am regularly holding. All the skills that I can pass onto with my students is very rewarding and to watch someone else have the knowledge that they can apply is also a great inspiration.
There had been lot of buzz in the internet world as Google started their new Google Buzz service. There was lot of negativity spread regarding the new Google service. Gmail Buzz privacy was one among then. The latest news is that Google started to index real time updates from myspace as well as Google Buzz.
Twitter has recently started to use no follow attribute to links that are being tweeted. Many famous twitter users including Andy Beard has joined Google Buzz. This is a quick change fromTwitter and it seems to be a bad decision as well. The no follow will make the tweets hard to get indexed and the tweets which get indexed will be lost very soon.Andy Beard has written a post on Twitter Alzheimers.I have also started my own Google Buzz as I feel that this is the right time to join Google Buzz.You can now follow me on my Google Buzz account along with my twitter account. Hope this will help my real time updates get saved in such a way that I can refer them back whenever I need them.
Really to be strong with SEO you need to be fully focused on ensuring you stay quality by contiuely protecting your efforts. For example, your competitors can easily check your sites backlinks and target the same links.
Be sure that the links you get are not easily obtained. The easily obtained links are usually the ones that are not quality and will easily be scraped up by your competitors.
So there are 2 ways to stay ahead of the game, either go full speed and fast when getting to the top, so even when they do try and follow and chase your links you are already too far ahead. Or go slowly and steadily and cover yourself at the back of what you do. Alot of smart SEO guys do just that. They join in forums for example but they do not add a signature link in their posts. The reason why they don't add a signature link is so that they don't have their competitors track their every move.
The Easily Obtained Links: Sites that say "Advertise here" add your link here" are prime examples of easily obtained links.
The More Discretely Obtained Links: Partnering or specifically contacting quality sites and asking them to allow you to sponsor them.
Either way you go about it, just be quick and smart, don't let fear hold you back too much, as with SEO time is never on our hands and time is very precious. If you are not sure about what you are posting and which site you are posting a link on where your competitors can follow then leave it and go to the next task, but make sure it get's done.
When joining groups, forums or communities a very useful tip is try mixing up your usernames, for example if in one community you use the name joeblow, make the other community you join something totally differnent. This way competitors can not track your username in search results to precisely. Mixing it up is good and more confusing for followers.
Another thing is if you target specific keywords competitors will always be able to check the keywords you are optimizing for in your source code. Obviously when you are good with SEO, particularly on-page SEO you do not have to use keywords so precisely in your meta. I have seen sites rank to the top without using keywords at all in the source code. This can only be achieved if you are highly experienced with off-page optimisation.
If you are very good with off-page optimisation your users will not see what you have done if they usually are used to checking on-page that is, and if you are better with on-page and your competitors are checking your off-page efforts then go as crazy as you like. I tend to use no-follow attribute where and when I can, both off-page and on-page to keep myself covered.
So when slapping on the SEO Sunscreen don't just put the sunscreen on the areas that you think you will get burned. It's important you put sunscreen all over. This way you will not only keep your competitors away but you will also keep Google and other Search Engines from any kind of penalty. This might include dupicate content penalties, cloaking what ever the case may be, just work smart and effectively and good luck!
Bing might already be aiming to take Search to the next level. They are already on the right track as they announced the Spatial Search . Bing have been discussing about Spatial search from last December. The idea is simple. Bing wants users to make most out of their search results. They have introduced the idea based on human psychology. Humans makes decision based on senses like sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.
Bing is making the new search considering the two main sense sight and touch. Bing Maps will start giving an immersive experience of a particular place. Bing have already started their advanced map feature with Twitter real time physical location map and Bing Local Lens .
Is spatial search important ?
Yes. Spatial Search is extremely important when it comes to local search queries like "Hostels in Los Angeles" . I can get a better result with Spatial Search. I am looking foward towards great changes in the search industry with search going to real world datas.
Everybody talks about how to optimise your home page or main root url, but what I would like to share is some insight as to what to do to gain better results with internal pages.
First of all setting the site structure from the very beginning will save you trouble in the long run. For example let's talk about your url's, if you havnt properly set them in the beginning the way your happy with or the way that is good for the search engines, and you later need to change them, then this could do your site more damage then good. So make sure you get this right, and do not use .php=123 urls if possible. Try and have more cleaner folder structured urls. yoursite.com/123 or yoursite.com/category/.
One important aspect about site structure is the way the categories and tags are set starting all the way from the home page and navigation menu of your site. Having static navigation menu is much more crawlable then say a java menu. Be careful to not use too many tags if running a blog site, again, too many tags can be more confusing then good for a search engine particularly Google. Google likes to have a more defined approach rather then broad.
I will give you an example aswell about categories. Make sure you have enough content in a category before you add this as a link on your home page or your blogroll. I see many directories for example with categories created and yet no links or listings within the category. Google starts to de-index your site based on this. So be mindfull of that also.
Because everything ideally starts from your home page, the best thing to do is to keep your home page as clean as possible and to have the inside pages that are most important to you appear on there. Perhaps this could mean your 10-15 most important inside pages appear as static links on the bottom of your home page.
Pages like contact, or terms and conditions, are generally not as important pages to optimize so what I generally would suggest is to make these links nofollow thus allowing more weight to be gathered to inside pages.
To take this further you would also need to link from one inside page to the other and to not link back to the home page from your inside page if possible to try and keep more weight distributed amongst their own.
Be sure to link from external sources to your inside pages giving them more authority and allowing them to be picked up by search engines and crawled regularly.
When linking from external sources to your inside pages, I tend to recommend you link to the main category folder of the deeper inside pages you are linking to aswell as the inside page itself, this gives more weight to the folder that is holding the page allowing it to be stronger. Another thing is to as much as possible link to your sitemap page, as this will contain most of your inside page link aswell and distribute weight evenly to all other pages.
Remember that also when you use anchor text in the external links pointing to your inside pages, try and mix up the anchor text links a little bit. Also concentrate on not only bookmarking your pages through social bookmark sites such as Digg and Reddit, but also in articles and blogs you post add the inside page links within the articles. Search Engines love this.
I hope this post was useful, If you have any experience on what you think works best for you I would be interested to hear it, so please share your comments!
Daniel Lew's post search engine result display made me think about the vertical search engines. Vertical search engines are entirely different from the general search engine's like Google,Yahoo and Bing. Vertical search engines know their visitor and they are made based upon the visitor's interest. You can easly find a lot of travel based vertical search engines like Kayak. There are search engine which go beyond the general search engine feature to provide results based upon word relation in context to search query. Truevert is one such search engine which provides true vertical results beyond general search engine niche intention based result. Another interesting search engine I came across was Bossy which provides single answer to visitor queries.
An example is
Question:: When did germany invade poland ? Answer:: Month: Sept Year: 1939
The latest computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha was intended to provide visitors with systematic knowledge on their queries.
Where is the search heading towards?. The search engine future might go beyond general search engines as new signals of relavance becomes important. Certain factors like user behaviour, speed of providing search results etc will play a much more dominant role in the coming years and this will make general search engines to start taking measures to understand about the user query signals to stay on top of the search industry.
I have recently been playing with thoughts and thinking of ways that perhaps in the future could be possible. Let's think about this for a moment in the way of Google how it displays it's results.
First of all it shows the top 10 results before you click next and then next again to the 2nd ten. Now what if it was possible that they could give you the option to view 100 results per page, without having to click next and next every time. Would this be better in your opinion for SEO companies? Would we then be able to tell our clients we can get them on the 1st page. Perhaps we would need to propose to them a slightly different scenario. But if the results were displayed differently like this could this effect the services we are offering?
Quite simply it would not necessarily effect anything, we would just have to approach our angle differently when offering placements to companies. Anyway like I said this has not happened, and perhaps it will never happen. I mean if it didn't happen before why would it happen now?
Well Google has always tried to make things complicated for us SEO companies and will always do what they can to change the way they display data to move with the times. It's just part of nature and the internet game, don't get frightened as this has not yet happened but you never know what the future lies ahead. I always like to think one step forward.
Another thought that came to mind and something that you never know could happen is what if it was possible to display results all on one page without having to click next and next. Perhaps one day there might be such a thing. You never know, so again would this effect us? Perhaps it would, but again we would have to adjust our market and what we offer.
No matter the case the way results will be displayed their will always be someone on top of someone else, so for us SEO companies it is not a case of what page you are on, it is more a case of who is ahead or on top of you, as everyone looks from top to bottom anyway, it's just natural. I don't know anyone that searches and looks from bottom to top? Do you?
In my real opinion, what has worked well already will continue to work well, now that Google have introduced other data displays such as Twitter results products and videos in the results, you never know what could happen one day good or bad. We just have to be prepared and always be one step ahead!
