We all know that SEO or search engine optimization helps improve site rankings. Since Google is the most commonly used, its standards are used as a peg for configuring SEOs.

SEO basics require delivering value, creating great content and promotions, but there are times when Google changes their algorithms. So here are tips that you can follow to improve SEOs.

High-Quality Sites

Have you noticed that Google is now giving more importance to sites with great designs, good branding and unique content? The challenge now is to improve and make sure that your website can compete with others.

Social Signals

Comments on blog posts, tweets and Facebook likes or shares are good indications that people like your web content. This entices Google to increase your rank because they like “showing content that users like”.

Links

Linking isn’t as important as they used to be. They still remain an important factor, but Google is paying less attention to these due to link spams and focusing more on social signals. “According to a survey by SEOmoz, links used to account for 65% of the ranking factors in 2009 and now they account for about 40%.”

Keyword Usage

The old style required creating a page and optimizing it for the keyword you want to rank at. Google opts to send traffic to sites with a lot of content on the topic as compared to sites with just one article about it. It goes without saying that you still need a primary page with your desired keyword, but make sure to have other pages related to the topic and interlink them when you can.

Longer Documents

As mentioned earlier, more content (i.e. more words) gives your site better ranking.

Image from  Maria Reyes-McDavis

Uniquely interesting titles are good. When they are outrageous and cryptic, they do tend to get more clicks as human readers would wonder what the post might be about. However, if you focus solely on this consideration, your post might not even make it to the first 5 pages of the SERPs. And what good will your cryptic title do you when people cannot find it in the first place?

My suggestion is this – try to work on your post title getting to the top of the SERPs. At the same time, don’t hold back on your creativity. So how can you work on getting to the top?

One way would be to incorporate keywords into your post title. The idea is to make use of words or phrases that are commonly used in searches. Now how do you find this out? Make use of keyword tools – there are so many out there! You can even use Google’s free tool, Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If you wish to do so, you can search for other keyword tools that can help you figure out which keywords are most used for certain topics. Once you have determined these words, then you can craft a post title that is engaging and SEO-friendly at the same time.

There are times when plagiarism is more serious in that it copies a rather large portion of your website’s content or the entire website itself. This cases of plagiarism obviously becomes a big problem since it can and will probably affect your ranking. Crawlers tend to not crawl a site which they have determined to be a mirror site of another to avoid duplicate results in their SERPs. If this happens and the crawler mistakes your site for the mirror site then not only will your page rank be affected but you won’t even be listed in the SERP.

In cases like this it is still recommended that you take the diplomatic route first. You can contact the website or blog owner and ask them to remove the offending website or webpages. If they do not comply then you can contact their hosting service and ask them to pressure the owner to remove the offending content. If this does not work then that is the time to turn into a tattle-tale by submitting a complaint to search engines. Search engines such as Google take such things seriously and really do act upon reports of plagiarism.

Photo credit: tnarik

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all the rage with website owners and developers. However, more and more website owners are going overboard and forgetting what SEO is really supposed to be about. In the pre-search engine era people had to remember website URLs or use directories to go to the website containing the information they need. With the advent of search engines finding information became much easier and people found themselves automatically using search engines as the portal to getting whatever it is they need on the internet.

As search engines gained importance website owners and developers found themselves developing techniques, now called SEO techniques, to help get the search engine’s attention and rank higher. The sad thing is that many now employ SEO techniques simply to achieve higher page rankings and forget that search engines existed in the first place to provide substantial and accurate information to web users. Many websites use SEO in hopes of making it to the first page of SERPs but disregard the fact that websites should actually be built for users.

Nowadays many websites are designed not for visitors but for the search engine. This defeats the entire purpose of information sharing. Businesses and individuals get so wrapped up trying to make money in the net by using SEO techniques that they overlook the fact that a real website with substantial content along with good SEO methods will ensure more traffic and more revenue in the long run.

It is a really sad thing that many great websites that don’t employ that much SEO methods are being buried in the back of SERPs while crappy websites designed simply to make a profit sometimes get higher rankings.

Recently, SEO has been getting some bad rap. It may deserved or undeserved, but that really shouldn?t concern you if you stick within what is called ethical SEO. Experts would say that this is the best way to get search engines to notice you and give you lasting results.

So what is ethical SEO? The main point in ethical SEO is not to use any illegal means to advertise on your website. Neither does it cover the use of ?shady? methods to increase traffic. The major drawback to ethical SEO is that it does not give immediate results. It is a strategy that requires A LOT of patience and hard work. You have to develop and form your own strategy to suit specific needs and target your specific market. There is simply no shortcut to ethical SEO. On the other hand, with ethical SEO, you get lasting and real results. With impeccable content and excellent service, your hard work will pay off and you will gain the trust of your customers as you continue to rise in the page rankings. With ethical SEO, you get reliable results and permanent benefits. At the end of the day, that?s what really matters. You may get to your goal slowly but you?ll get there eventually, and when you do, you will be ready for the windfall.

Some of the features of Google Analytics are given below.

Firstly, it is much easier to use. With the special AdWords feature, Google provides more flexibility with the keywords and also provides you immediate ROI results. It also provides good suggestions as to which keywords can make the site or product more attractive. Nextly, it focuses on only those modifications (in your website) which will gain you profits. As the service is available in many languages (English, German, Spanish, Korean, etc.) there is a wider scope for improvement of the site along with the marketing campaign.

As Analytics is powered by the same server which runs Google, it can be reliably used for even top corporate projects. Also, it is very much easy to use. For e.g. instead of purchasing or downloading some software or script, just pasting the tracking code in the web pages directly begins the tracking. Google Analytics also provides Executive summaries of the conversions, traffic directly to you so that you don?t have to hunt for the reports. You can then comfortably compare keywords, revenue & basically, the performance of the website. It also provides you the comparative reports of the performance, for e.g. if you need to compare this weeks performance with last week?s you can very well get the entire tabular data. This service extends so much that you can tally this winter?s reports with last summer?s reports. Google Analytics can also be used for e-commerce websites, as you can compare revenues, arrange & modify campaigns & get a whole view of the metrics.

Another special feature of Google Analytics is the Funnel visualization. Sometimes it so happens that a visitor starts exploring your site but quits in the middle. Mostly, it is due to puzzling or maze-like data or irrelevant information on the site that confuses the visitor. Google tracks the positions of the quitting & hence provides you the opportunity of modifying that particular area of the site. Google also provides you the segmented visitor report, which includes sorting of visitor information by location, by action, by new versus returning visitor, making it easier to compare the keywords and the traffic. Geotargeting helps in tracking the location of the visitor and also gives your information about markets in various areas & their potentials.

Hence, it provides you a better option of the market analysis & gives you more options of setting up or modifying your campaign in order to increase the market value of your website.

We’ve been talking about RSS feeds and what it can do for your website. We know that incorporating RSS feeds into your site results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders and thus leads to faster indexing.

Have you realized however that by syndicating your RSS feeds successfully you can achieve the same results? How so?

If you have subscribers when a search engine spider crawls your subscriber’s site (assuming that your subscriber incorporated YOUR feed into his own website) the feeds will of course contain a link back to your website. Once the spider follows the link it will notice your website and so index your site as well. Now if you have a lot of subscribers the chances of being crawled through back links are much greater. In addition to this the spider will of course notice the plentiful back links, which will result not only in faster indexing but in a higher page rank.

To get noticed fast one thing you can do is to subscribe to your own feed using Google Reader, MyYahoo, and MyMsn accounts. Surely the three search engines will at least pay attention to their own services.

Google Trends results for “elursrebmem”. Notice the lack of results prior to the contest in 2006.

The SEO contest would then be a race to the top of the search engine results page (SERP). After a few months, the website (or blog, even) in top position at Google would be declared the winner.

Contests like these would require much work SEO-wise, including on-site tweaking to optimize the page for indexing, and as well gathering much-needed inbound links. Organizers may impose rules such as domain and site ageing (so contestants would be forced to start with fresh domains with a low starting pagerank) and guidelines against “black hat” SEO. These are meant to level the playing field.

One issue with such SEO contests is that some people claim that optimizers are polluting the search engines with unnecessary and irrelevant keywords. After all, the terms used are usually useless outside of the contest itself, except for possible news items that may cite the actual competition. However, it’s still one way by which SEO gurus can showcase their expertise and novices can hone their skills. Some people also use it as their “calling card” for getting clients to sign up with their SEO businesses. Sponsors also benefit a lot from quality inbound links.

Next: We look deeper into the relevance of SEO contests.

The current main search engine (Google) doesn’t recognize the individual words from the above non-hyphenated domain names, so they would not help future optimization plans. The hyphenated domain http://www.blog-news.com is seen by Google as- www blog news com since Google treats . (dots) and – (hyphens) as a space. We say “google can parse those keywords out of the domain name”.

Note a domain with a single keyword (i.e www.keyword.tld) will have the single keyword recognized since Google sees the two dots (in the example above) as spaces. So when choosing a domain name either go with a single keyword domain or have multiple (or at least one) keyword(s) separated by hyphens.

So what exactly is Google caffeine?

Google caffeine is Google’s biggest and baddest change in search algorithm. The key to this change is that it is an actual change in the formula and not just minor tweaks. Parts of the entire search infrastructure was, according to Google, completely rewritten. The results? A search engine that will “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions.”

Of course with the Bing hype people immediately asked whether Caffeine was Google’s answer to which Matt Cutts promptly said no. As Matt Cutt’s said, “I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for month.”

For SEOs the even bigger question is how this will affect our SEO strategies. The best way to figure things out is through the same old fashioned method of experimenting and keeping track of how well the websites we maintain are doing in Google Caffeine’s SERPs. Of course it is also essential to keep tabs on how other’s SEO efforts are paying off so make sure you keep track of discussions going on in different forums and groups about Google Caffeine.

To try out Caffeine just go to this link: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/