Thursday, September 18, 2008

Why SEO?

  • SEO is the only efficient way that allows the target audience to reach you rather than you finding them.
  • SEO assures round the clock internet marketing of any products or services.
  • SEO is an affordable and economical option as compared to other promotional programs with recurring costs.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

It’s impossible to write a book on search engine positioning without a chapter on the search engines themselves. What I hope to provide for you in this chapter is a slightly different slant on the subject. The actual technical details are much less important than you’ve been led to believe – what matters most is the implications for your strategy. Therefore, instead of boring you with a set of charts describing which search engines have which features, I’ll explain what’s generally true for all search engines, as well as what significant differences you’ll encounter. Throughout, you’ll be given concrete steps to take that minimize or eliminate the need to worry about specific search engines. In the long run, market pressures ensure that search engines will converge toward each other anyway. While there are still significant differences between them in some areas, the methods you’ll learn in this book will help you stay on the right side of those differences. The "fast start" system is based on the current state of the art, but we haven't ignored the many changes that are already in the wind. The same strategies will continue to apply, regardless of any short-term changes in the industry. At the time of this writing (September 2003), Google is in a very dominant position in the search industry. With AOL and Yahoo delivering Google results, and the Google search engine itself also a popular portal, 3/4 of all searches on a given day probably originate on a portal utilizing Google's results. This is great news if you follow my system, because Google loves content-rich sites with clear structure, which is exactly what I will teach you to build. If Google goes away tomorrow (highly unlikely!), that wouldn't really force us to change our strategy.
1. Create videos that focus on your brand and reinforce on the people your brand value.
2. The most important tip for your video optimization is a proper content. People need to love your video for your content too; else they would not go in for it.
3. See to that your metadata has the video in it, since many users search with this keyword. On adding this word in the metadata, chances of your video coming up as the search results tends to be high. But remember not to overuse the word.
4. Try choosing preferred formats like .mov, .avi, .wmv. This can help the users to have the videos in the formats that they want. May be you can have anyone of the formats to be available for search engines.
5. Have your videos with 10min or less in length. If longer, it might bore your viewers. If you want to extend the time, make sure that the video shall keep them engaged firmly or add it as part 1, part 2 and so on
6. Try to maintain a catchy title with the keyword that you would like to use for the video. It can act as a biggest convincing factor for your visitors to opt it from the search results.
7. When you have multiple videos, try using thumbnails that will enable your viewers to view the video of their choice. This will help them to decide on which video they want to spend time on completely. Generating the thumbnails can vary in various sites.
8. It’s seen that the search engines are interested towards the videos that are rated, so do the viewers. Hence give an option for your visitors to rate the videos. This can interest the search engines and the visitors towards your videos among the results.
9. On using any commercial content in the video, see to that there is a watermark that indicates the origin of the content. In case your video is copied by numerous sites; it will continue carrying your brand and site details benefiting you.
10. Keyword usage in the filename and in the URLs is very beneficial. Search engines give appreciable weight age on these videos. Try avoiding stop words in the filenames, like “the”, “and”.
11. Appropriate usage of keywords in the link text gives your video a lot of benefit.
12. Have your video placed in many places as you can. Good exposure to your video is very essential. This can also be done by trying to publicize your video using feeds like RSS and MRSS feeds.
13. Try using social bookmarking sites to increase the visibility of your video. Irrespective of the promotion medium used, this option can help you a lot.
14. Have “send to friend” option. Benefit them and also get benefitted.
15. Try offering the option to have your video embedded in other sites too. People can help you to spread your video around as much as they can.

LINK POPULARITY

Before we go any further, what is "link popularity"? In very simplistic terms, link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. These other sites consider your site important enough to link to. So, in the engine's view, your site is considered important as well. What is meant by "link popularity" can get much more complex, which is discussed further in this article.
However, one of the most difficult areas of SEO is building link popularity. Why? Because the engines don't want "artificially created" (or useless) links, so there are no easy ways to build link popularity. The days of link farms and huge link exchange programs are over. Try those strategies now and you can easily find yourself booted out of an engine.
Rather, the engines want links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site.
But besides the link popularity you gain by getting an authoritative site to link to you, you also gain additional visibility for your Web site. So, when working on building link popularity, don't forget those two basic reasons for requesting links.
Link to all contributor web sites can be found at the end of this article.
This is by far the oldest and best-known method of improving link popularity. Basically you email or contact the Webmaster of a site that is complementary but generally not competitive to your own. You ask them to link to your site while outlining the benefits of doing so. You would generally offer to link back to them in exchange for this courtesy. Be sure you have developed genuine content on your Web site of interest to the trading partner. Explain the advantages to them and to their visitors by providing a link to your content. Tell them where the link on your site will be or set the link up in advance with the stipulation that you'll be glad to leave it there if they'll add a link to you in kind. Take the time to look over their site and then suggest where a link to you might be appropriate. Most importantly, personalize your emails! You must distinguish yourself from all the spam they receive daily. If the link is particularly important to you, call them personally or write them a letter or send a fax to show them you're serious.
Here's the simple means to find those good links. Go to the major search engines. Search for your target keywords. Look at the pages that appear in the top results. Now visit those pages and ask the site owners if they will link to you. Not everyone will, especially sites that are extremely competitive with you. However, there will be non-competitive sites that will link to you -- especially if you offer to link back. Why is this system good? By searching for your target keywords, you'll find the pages that the search engines themselves are telling you are good, as evidenced by the fact that they rank well. Hence, links from these pages are more important -- and important for the terms you are interested in -- than links from other pages.
When asking for a link:
· ALWAYS have a link already put on your own site BEFORE you ask for a link in return and give the location of the link. It's harder to say no if you can provide the URL of where their link is.
· ALWAYS give them the exact link text to use, even going so far as to put it in HTML so they can just cut/paste it onto their page.
· MAKE SURE they actually have a links page!
· GIVE THEM as much information as needed in order to make it easy for them to link to you. If they have a big site that's divided into sections, give them the exact URL of where your site would fit in. Then, provide the HTML for the link to your site.

Link Building

Link building is a process of creating inbound links for a website with an aim to increase a site’s popularity and search engine ranking.Link building is an important off-page optimization factor that helps boost natural search engine rankings if done wisely. Link Building can have a negative influence on a website if you have the wrong partners for exchanging links.Over the years, link building has seen significant changes in strategy. Reciprocal linking is has given way to three-way linking or only inbound linking campaigns.Link Building is an integral part of any SEM campaign and is almost certainly required to rank on popular search engines.