Monday, March 30, 2009

dropping-egg-four-stories-keywords

In college I took a basic engineering class and one of our team assignments was figuring out the most efficient way to drop an egg off a four-story balcony–without breaking, of course. The team to get the egg to the floor the fastest (without it breaking) would be the winner. As a dedicated team, we first went our separate ways and then each came back with a prototype for the egg drop.
The next time we met, each of us brought our own invention to try. One by one we tried them. First there was the parachute, which provided a fairly safe landing, but took quite a bit of time to get to the floor. Then there was a paper-made vehicle to hold the egg with a long streamer coming out the back to slow it down a little. This did well, but as it landed, it would tip over and the egg would spill out and break. Then came the Jell-O. One member of our team thought it would be a good idea to put the egg inside a Jell-O mold which was then inside a sealed plastic (breakable) container. As dumb as this idea was, we still tried it. So back up to the fourth floor we went, and looked straight down to the hard-tiled floor. “Ready, three, two, one!” and down went the Jell-O packed egg hitting the floor with a loud pop! Red Jell-O went everywhere, staining the carpets and walls surrounding the tiled area. The egg, of course, was also demolished and the janitor was furious.
Ultimately, we collaborated and came up with an oversize plastic pill bottle stuffed with cotton and a large, flat square piece of cardboard on top to act like a parachute. It was a success. It brought the egg to the floor safely and quickly every single time. Although I will not disclose whether we officially won or lost, there is still a great lesson to be learned here. Our egg never broke, and it still made pretty good time. Other eggs made great time, but those teams were just chancing whether or not it would break.
In real life, if that egg was something you really valued, would you care more about security or speed? Wouldn’t you be willing to lose a little bit of your speed to ensure security? Gaining traffic is the same way—speed referring to just any traffic, and security referring to the right traffic. Properly targeting your site traffic is so important and will greatly improve your conversion rate. However, many businesses still fall into the “speed trap” of desiring to gain traffic without concern for the security or relevancy of the traffic.
Don’t think that because your site is 60% related to a keyword that is searched on 30,000 times per month versus a keyword that relates 100% to your site but is only searched on 1,165 times per month, you should go with the bigger keyword. Obviously you want to try and find the biggest keywords, but just remember that even though a keyword might be as much as 60% relevant to your site and searched on far more, you will still have a high bounce rate. In the long run, you will wish you had chosen the smaller keyword that will bring people that will actually stay on your site and buy something.
So can you just turn back once you have realized this mistake? Yes, but it will take time to re-optimize your site and get solid rankings for your new keywords. When it comes to keyword research and choosing which keywords to optimize your site for, you are really deciding the fate of your business. Don’t fall into the trap thinking that if you go after the biggest keywords they will bring you the most business. Instead, go after relevant keywords.
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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

there-is-a-place-better

You are all familiar with the classic movie, “The Wizard of Oz.” No? Then I suggest you take back that stolen piece of your childhood and watch it. Rent it. Borrow it. Just do what needs to be done.
Now back to my point.
After a long trip down the yellow brick road Dorothy finds herself wishing more than anything to be returned to her farm in Kansas. She finds through the help of the Good Witch (and some magic) that the ruby slippers she has been wearing all along will take her there. All she has to do is click her heels three times and repeat the words, “There’s no place like home.”
Though Dorothy’s adventures in OZ teach her that home is where she will find true happiness, the same sentiment does not apply to link building. Link building is a common SEO strategy that too often is misused. Many people are under the assumption that only linking to a website’s home page will garner the best results and at a much quicker pace. Not true. Deep linking, or linking to pages other than the home page, has its advantages and will actually help your website achieve a higher page rank.
Deep linking magic achieved: Those that choose not to use deep linking as a means of site optimization are right in thinking that a website’s home page carries the most amount of Google juice and has the highest page rank. That page rank is then passed on to other pages and subpages. For example; if you have a website whose homepage has a PR5, then each link off of that page will likely have a PR4, and each link off of that page will likely have a PR3, and so on.

You get the idea. But when you are able to consistently get credible links pointing to other pages within your site, those internal pages will build up page rank. And since most site architectures include a link from those pages pointing to your homepage, your homepage will see a boost in page rank as a result of your efforts.
Spreading the love around: Deep linking helps you to focus your content on one or two keyword phrases per page which will give you a better chance of ranking higher for those particular keywords. Having additional pages with relevant content also increases your chances of being indexed by the search engines.
Doing what comes naturally: Google likes to reward those who play by the rules and punish those who don’t. One thing Google looks for is natural linking. Natural linking occurs when other sites link to relevant content within a site. If you have a website with 500 external links and they are all pointing to the home page, this doesn’t look natural. You’re better off linking to the most appropriate page of the site rather than just the home page because the user experience will be better and Google rewards you for the deep link.
Avoiding a walk down the Yellow Brick Road: When Dorothy left Munchkin Land to find the Wizard all she was told was to follow the yellow brick road. Though we wouldn’t have a movie, it would have been a lot easier for Dorothy to jump right to the Emerald City. The same goes for deep linking. Online visitors will appreciate a link that takes them directly where they want to go without having to search all over your site to find it. And if they find what they are looking for right off they will probably visit your site again generating more traffic.
The next time you work to add links to your site, find a way to link directly to the most relevant page so you can increase the page rank of that page, include links into your site and avoid the un-natural look of building links only to your home page.
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Thursday, March 19, 2009

how-get-my-site-indexed

So you have put together a website and have it published on the web. All the content is in place and all your site’s functionality is working properly. What comes next? This question can be answered by answering another question I have seen several times on the forums at SEO.com and other forums that I frequently visit. This question is, “how do I get my site indexed in Google?”
How does someone get their site indexed in Google and the other search engines? I have seen many different answers to this question. Some of these answers are, “submit the site to Google” or “link to your site from blogs and forums” or even “submit your site to some directories.” While these methods may all work, there is one really effective way to get your site indexed fairly quickly in Google. I have used this method for several sites that were not indexed yet, and each site was indexed in Google within about one week. This is done by submitting a sitemap in XML format to Google through Google Webmaster Tools.
When you create your XML sitemap for Google you can also submit it to Live Search through their Webmaster Center. You should also be sure to reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file. To reference it, just add the following line to your robots.txt file and insert your own domain name.
• Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Submitting a sitemap doesn’t mean you don’t have to do those other things I mentioned as answers to getting indexed. Building inbound links to your site will not only help with getting indexed, but will also help with improving the rankings of your site. You should continue to look for good places to get inbound links. Directories, social media, blogs, and forums are just some of the places where inbound links can be acquired. But building inbound links is a topic for another blog post.
Keep up with the latest SEO techniques by joining me at our SEO Forums.
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

even-try-decide-search-engines

few months ago I posted a brief guide of “The 5 Don’ts of SEO” listing suggestions of things not to do when designing a website. These guidelines include a few of the common “Don’ts” and suggestions from Google to help you keep your site compliant with search engines’ webmaster guidelines. Each month I’ve been going more in-depth with each recommendation. This month’s topic: Don’t Deceive Search Engines.
Everyone wants to have high rankings in the search engines, and sadly, some abide by the philosophy of “Lying, Cheating or Stealing” their way to the top. These deceiving tricks often include:
• Hidden text
• Hidden links
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
Yes, these tricks may work for a short time, but if there is one thing I learned well from my childhood, it is that if you lie, cheat or steal, you will inevitably get caught—and when you do, there are always consequences.
Search engines are ever improving their algorithms to increase ranking accuracy and to improve the overall experience of their users. Their goal is to serve up the best, most relevant results to their users. They don’t like to be deceived and as they find deceitful acts, they apply a consequence. These consequences may include being banned from search engines.
Search engine optimization is not about tricking search engines to get anyone and everyone to your site. It is about building an effective online marketing strategy that delivers a flow of highly targeted prospects who are seeking your product or service. It’s a matter of good traffic over bad traffic, of quality over quantity. The goal of search engine optimization is to increase the good, quality traffic comprising of relevant visitors who are likely to fulfill a desired action on your site, whether it’s to buy something, to contact you, to subscribe to your service, or what have you.
Deceiving search engines may provide you with more traffic to your site for a short time. But in the long run, it typically ends up hurting your rankings and may result in getting you banned from the search engines.
The easiest way to not deceive the search engines is to make sure your site is actually relevant for the terms you are trying to show up for. This of course, is easier said than done, but focusing on making your site more relevant for your consumer is what will ultimately add to your bottom-line.
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Thursday, March 12, 2009

dont-deceive-your-user

I posted a brief guide of “The 5 Don’ts of SEO” listing suggestions of things not to do when designing a website. These guidelines include a few of the common “Don’ts” and suggestions from Google to help you keep your site compliant with search engines’ webmaster guidelines. I wanted to expand a little further and give a little more insight on each guideline. I’ll start with the first guideline: Don’t Deceive Your Users.
There are many ways search engines could view a web page as deceiving an end user. Probably the most common form of deceit on a web page is presenting different content to search engines than you display to human visitors. This is commonly referred to as cloaking. Doing this may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and can result in removal from search engines.
A common form of cloaking is serving up a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images (or Flash or JavaScript) to your site visitors. You may be doing this on your site right now not intending to deceive your users or the search engines. If you are employing these cloaking tactics, or are designing a website rich with Flash or JavaScript, you should make sure that your end users are your main priority.
To prevent your site from being a deceiver, there are a few ways to correctly provide crawlable data for the search engines. These will also be helpful to your visitors who have screen readers or images turned off in their browser.
• Provide alt text that describes images on your pages.
• Provide textual content of JavaScript in a noscript tag.
Make sure the content you provide is the same text for both the JavaScript and the noscript tag. Having substantially different content in these different elements is viewed as extremely deceptive to the search engines and they may take action against your site.
Keep your site visitors in mind as you build out your site. As I’ve mentioned before, a good rule of thumb is to think about what you are doing and who it is for. Ask yourself if what you are doing helps your users, and would you do the same thing the search engines didn’t exist.
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Friday, March 6, 2009

domain-names-and-seo

For years, people have talked about how valuable keywords are in domain names. I’ve heard people claim that a domain name will automatically put you on top of the search results for the word in your domain, and others claim it makes no difference. The truth lies somewhere between, but definitely leaning toward the “yes it matters” side of the argument.
I’m not saying a domain name is all you need. Far from it. Unless your first name is Wiki and last name Pedia, there’s nothing you can do to guarantee a first place ranking, that’s just the way it is. Occasionally, I’ll see simple one page sites, or even parked domains showing up in the search results, apparently due to nothing more than the domain name. You don’t see that often these days, but I still see it occasionally–in MSN more than anywhere else. Most often, a page with nothing but ads will not show up in the search results, regardless of how generic or keyword-targeted the domain name. To show up in the search listings, you’ve got to have a real site, with unique content, and plenty of links to your site.
Also, gone are the days where you can buy whatever-keywords-you-want- to-show-up-for.com and shoot to the top of Google search. Those domains were hot for a while, and I still see new site owners fall into the hyphen trap. Don’t do it! Yeah, it’s hard to find a good, non-hyphenated .com domain name that’s not registered, but use your brain people and get creative, or better yet, buy a domain that someone else has already registered. You can buy a very nice domain on the after market at an affordable price. Just get it out of your head that your domain should cost $8. Unless you’re very lucky, or you want some lame, web 2.0 name that nobody can spell, take out your wallet and spend a few bucks on a real domain name. I’m not saying you have to buy a domain with your keywords in it. You can be very successful in the search engines without it, but there are certainly advantages to owning a great domain name with your keywords. Typically, the shorter and more targeted the name, the better. You might be ok with two or three words, but if you get much longer than that, you’ll start to confuse people. Keep it simple!
Here’s my take on why keyword domains perform so well:
1. The search engines give added weight to your site for your keywords if they’re in your name. They do. You’ll see this across the board to varying degrees at each search engine. MSN seems to reward keyword domains a lot more than anyone else, but they seem to have a positive impact in Yahoo and Google as well.
2. Your incoming links tend to include your site/domain name. If your domain is iamageek.com, you’ll get a lot of links with keywords like “I Am A Geek“. On the other hand, if your domain is software.com, you’ll get links with the word “Software“, not all of your links, of course, but a lot of the links to your homepage will use your primary keywords. This is a clear advantage because you can get a link from highly regarded directories (dmoz), news stories, industry sites, etc. including your keywords (which also happen to be your site and/or company name). Meanwhile your competitors are stuck with the link text “ACME Inc” which does nothing to help their search rankings other than for their own name.
3. Your site will be more linkable. Nobody is going to link the-longest-freakin- domain-ever-registered-in-the-world.com. Besides the fact that they won’t have the endurance to type that whole thing, it just doesn’t lend itself to credibility. Before I even see the site at that domain, I have a negative impression of the site. Why would I want to add a link to such a non-credible site? Exactly, I wouldn’t. If you wouldn’t link to your own domain name, don’t expect anyone else to. Link bait on a crappy domain will not take off nearly as well as the same content on a good domain. In most cases the links won’t happen automatically, you still have to do the work, but it makes the job of getting links SO MUCH EASIER if you have a reputable domain name.
4. A good, short domain name looks more reputable. It looks like a legitimate business. This ties in with the linkability factor. If you back up your great domain name with a world-class site design (or even a decent one), and awesome, unique content, you’ll have a powerful one-two punch that will be able to get respect on the web. A good, generic, domain name will be more likely to be dugg, stumbled, blogrolled, added to resources pages, and just about any other type of link you can imagine. A good, reputable domain will also tend to convert at a much higher rate than the long, “weird” looking domain names, it just carries more trust.
Those are the main reasons why a good domain name will help your search engine optimization efforts. A lot of the benefit comes from the other “side” benefits rather than having the keywords in your name itself. Of course, you still need to have a site that’s worthy of the domain–in terms of design and content–but a great domain is an excellent start. You still have to work and compete to be at the top for your keywords, but the right domain name might be just the edge you need if you’re doing everything else right.
One parting note, has anyone else noticed the convergence of SEO and domaining? Domainers have all these sweet domain names they don’t know what to do with and all these SEOs wish they could get their hands on some of these great domain names. (Psst…some people on both sides are starting to cross over and the two industries are beginning to merge).
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Thursday, March 5, 2009

Saving Energy In A Big SEO Contest

Everybody must be understand that the easiest way to gain better position in SEO contest is hunting backlink as many as we can from dofollow blog. Sadly, although it doesn’t need certain knowledge to apply, but it’s really time consuming efforts. We will always sit in front of our computer any longer to reach the number of backlink that we need. So, it’s not really effective and will take our energy so much.

However, actually there’s an easy way saving energy in a big SEO contest like kerja keras adalah energi kita. Through what? Firstly, before we use this strategy, we should be patient. Because it will push our SERP into higher position instantly. But whenever it works, we will stay there any longer than those who depend their SERP with backlinks of blog commenting.

Now, here’s a good tips saving energy in a big SEO contest. Just use your dummy blog to support the main entry. You don’t need to blog commenting all the time for the main entry. What you need yo do is just link it from your dummies. Yet after that, you must optimize each of your dummy, at least reach the first 100 and done. The more related dummy you have, the bigger opportunity for you to go on top faster.

Even so, many people never use saving energy like this in a big SEO contest like Oes Tsetnoc. The reason is that most of them can’t wait any longer to see the results. So, as I mentioned above, be patient when you use this scheme. I bet in less than two weeks, you feel the different. Good luck.
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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Pelajaran Berharga Dari Kampanye

Kontesnya Mas Pogung sudah usai, namun saya masih tetap semangat untuk mengeksplorasi lebih jauh lagi bagaimana menerapkan trik seo secara lebih efektif dan tidak terlalu membuang tenaga. Kebetulan saat ini memang masih ada bahan eksperimen seperti kontes tukang nggame dan sulumits retsambew, jadi proses belajar tetap bisa berlanjut.

Namun sebelum saya kembali melakukan percobaan, mungkin ada dari kawan-kawan disini yang ingin mengetahui apa pelajaran berharga dari kampanye menurut versi saya pribadi. Dan berikut ini yang bisa saya sampaikan.

1. Domain panti atau domain yang menggunakan keyword bukanlah segalanya. Ini bukan bermaksud untuk sombong atau mengada-ada, tapi buktinya single artikel kampanye saya masih sanggup bertahan di papan atas kan? Bahkan, subdomain bos Kopi Tozie pun masuk 5 besar.
2. Geo Hosting atau penggunaan hosting sesuai dengan wilayah juga bukan segala-galanya. Ini jelas bisa dilihat dari sang jawara pemenang pemilu 2009 kali ini yang justru menggunakan hosting luar, bahkan saya sendiri pun juga tidak menggunakan hosting IIX (lokal).
3. CTR atau Code To Text Rati0 sudah kurang relevan. Jika belum paham soal CTR, silahkan liat di Google, udah banyak yang bahas.
4. Kekuatan utama SEO pada saat ini terletak pada geo targeted backlinks, yakni backlinks yang berasal dari web atau blog yang memiliki persamaan bahasa.
5. Ketangguhan hosting, jika hosting sering down apalagi sering modar, jangan harap bisa bersaing di SERP papan atas

Hmmm… sepertinya itu saja pelajaran berharga dari kontes kemarin, kalau ada yang kelupaan, mungkin akan saya update secepatnya. Atu jika ada kontestan yang ingin menambahkan atau tidak setuju dengan pendapat saya diatas, silahkan anda memberikan komentar disini.
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Tuesday, March 3, 2009

2000 Backlink Gratis, Mau?

Pada saat ini, entah sudah ada berapa ribu blog yg secara bersamaan membahas trik seo, jurus seo atau tips seo dengan istilahnya masing-masing. Tentu ini sangat membantu siapapun yang sedang belajar seo seperti saya. Namun demikian, amat disayangkan mengingat kebanyakan dari mereka hanya memberikan dasar atau patokan saja tanpa memberikan pengetahuan lebih lanjut tentang hal ini. Saya bilang kebanyakan lho, bukan berarti semuanya seperti itu hehe… Melihat kondisi ini, sudah bisa dipastikan bagi kebanyakan kalangan akan mengalami kesulitan dalam mengoptimasi keyword yang di bidik. Dan seperti kawan semua ketahui, salah satu faktor penentu keberhasilan optimasi kita adalah jumlah backlink berkwalitas. Tetapi, pernahkah anda di beri tahu cara mendapatkan 2000 backlink secara gratis dan vulgar? Bahkan, dalam beberapa ebook seo sampah yang pernah saya baca, tak pernah sekalipun saya menemukan trik untuk mendapatkan backlink berlebih. Paling banter, kita hanya menemukan daftar blog dofollow yg jumlahnya tak lebih dari 500an blog.

Untuk itu, kali ini saya ingin berbagi sedikit bagaimana mendapatkan 2000 backlink gratis, mau? Kalau mau, caranya mudah sekali. Cukup klik link Google di bawah ini dan buatlah komentar pada blog-blog tersebut. Kalau tidak salah, dari semua hasil pencarian itu 90% nya masih merupakan blog do follow. Dan berikut link untuk mendapatkan 2000 backlink gratis tadi jika kawan-kawan mau hehe…

* 2000 Backlink Gratis

Sebagai tambahan, jika mau memanfaatkan 2000 backlink gratis diatas, harap sesuaikan dengan target datacenter yg dikejar. Karena hasil diatas mayoritasya menggunakan bahasa Inggris, tentu sangat bagus buat untuk menaikkan keyword di Google.com, dan sebaliknya untuk menaikkan Rusli Zainal Sang Visioner yg kebetulan memakai datacenter Google.co.id, tidak akan berpengaruh apa-apa dan cenderung akan membuat tenggelam.

Ok, sepertinya segitu aja sharing saya tentang cara cepat untuk mendapatkan 2000 backlink gratis dari mesin pencari dan semoga saja bermanfaat bagi semua.
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Sunday, March 1, 2009

does-seo-die-on-web

Hey, Marty, would you mind parking the DeLorean for me while I finish up this blog post? Thanks.
Hi, everyone! I’ve just come back from the future. Well, not really. I’ve actually just been reading through a bunch of articles about the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and other brilliant thinkers. My appetite to research this topic was spurred by this article I read about two weeks ago. It’s been a fun escape into the world-of-tomorrow. Some have already assigned the moniker “Web 3.0″ to the Semantic Web. Here we go again…
So did I find anything of value on my futuristic escapade? Well, I started my trip (as always) by going to see The Oracle to find out what she thinks of the Semantic Web. It’s still unclear to me how people will interact with such a system—from what I can tell there are no consumer apps yet that handle these types of semantic web interactions. But according to the Wikipedia article, computers will do most of the menial pairing of search results that we currently do manually.
Funny enough, there are many who believe that this particular vision of the future cannot come to fruition. Others say it has already begun to happen. I don’t know enough about it yet to base an opinion either way, but I do see elements of a semantic web in now widely used web techniques like tagging.
According to Tim Berners-Lee, Google will not survive on the semantic web—at least not in its current state. Yahoo even recently announced that they will begin supporting certain semantic web standards and technologies to let people produce much richer search results.
So if search engines as we know them need to change at the advent of this new Semantic Web, do SEOers need to follow suit? Will SEO become the task of simply building properly formatted semantic markup for digestion by future search engines? That could be part of it. In fact, part of good SEO practices now include creation of semantic based data feeds (think RSS). And now with the birth of Yahoo’s open search, website owners will be rewarded for producing more semantic data and suppling it to Yahoo. I expect Google has something similar in the works.
But how far out is our paradigm shift? How quickly will the bandwagon pass? Is there a bandwagon at all? The more you think about it, the more you think, “wow, this Web 3.0 is going to be pretty cool! It’ll make SEO and search in general a lot cleaner”. As I began to ponder all of these new ideas, The Oracle sent me to this other article. Stopped in my tracks.
Mr. Doctorow is right on. One of the huge problems Google et al currently face is the overabundance of garbage on the web. This must be what Berners-Lee meant in part when he said, “…make sure people aren’t using their authority to do things that they shouldn’t be doing”. Unfortunately, that’s much easier said than done. There will always be people who are trying to game the system. Website owners of the future will be creating oodles of inaccurate meta-data about their spam sites to trick your computer into pulling bogus information into your data mash-up. Can you imagine searching for a good Italian restaurant near the place you have a meeting tomorrow at noon and you’re given a map full of bogus locations all advertising male enhancement pills. No thanks.
Let’s get back to the original question quickly: does SEO die on the semantic web? I think the answer is a resounding no. In fact, an understanding of keywords, search engines, markup, and semantics will play an even bigger role as time goes on. But who knows what the real future will bring.
Alright, I’m outta here. Where I’m going I don’t need—roads. But I do need to add some quick semantic metadata to this post before signing off (*throws in another old can and a banana peel*). OK, I’m off!
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