This article will cover the ground level terms and basic understanding of SEO. This will be a tutorial for those who are new to SEO and a revision for the one's already in it.
What is SEO or Why do we do SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the heart of any website. A website/ blog when created cannot be visible on its own. It is the fuel which runs the website. This is the technical part of website promotion. SEOing is helpful in improving the quality of the website by the use of Search Engine ( Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista) via natural/organic/algorithmic search results. A basic requirement for a SEO will be some technical knowledge ( familiar in HTML). SEO is the basic activity of optimising the website or the pages in a way to make it search engine friendly. Earlier a site is presented to the search engine, sooner are there chances to rank higher and getting more searches will lead to more visit on your site.
There is one truth regarding SEO that eventhough we do every possible thing to promote our website, it does not guarentee you in the top rating but if you neglect the basic rules, it certainly will not go unnoticed. It is better to set a target of getting into the top 30 results of the search engine on a particular keyword than trying to be numbr one on 10 keywords.
There are different types of search
1. Image Search
2. Local Search
3. Industry or Vertical search
1. Image Search- Helps you search for Images, animations, pictures. At the moment this the fastest growing search services on the Internet. Following big names provide Image searching
- Google
- Picsearch
- Yahoo
- Alta Vista
- Live Search
- Media Mingle
- Retrieva
2. Local Search- Local search are similar to the yellow pages. These are search engine which does Geographically constrained searching. Say eg- if you are looking for Grocery shops in a particular location or a creche for your kid within 3km from your house, local search engines are the best guides. Google Maps look for physical addresses mentioned in the regular webpages.
Froogle.com and Yokel.com ( Product Search Engine) use techniques such as targeted web crawling and direct feeds to collect information about products for sale in a specific geographic location
Other local Search engine portals are:
a) Windows Live Local
b) Ask.com's Ask City
c) True Local
d) Zevents
e) Yahoo Local
f) Dias Pages
3. Industry Specific/ Vertical Search Engine- These are Search engine that provide information on specific business or a specific vertical. Eg- I am planning to buy a Mobile phone and i want to know the providers of Mobile Phone, Vertical search delivers the business what the big sites cant and without using the combination of complex keywords. Vertical Search Engine sends their spiders to a very large polished database and their indexes will contain data regarding a specific topic which are of maximun importance to the people in a particukar area.
SEO cannot be called as advertising. Though SEO is a part of Search Marketing. One can promote their website through Paid Listing (PPC). The basic idea behind SEO is to get top ranking because your site is relevant to the term/keyword searched for.
How do search engines work
Search Engine is a software program that searches the web to find documents in combination with the specified keywords entered. Broad based search engine like Google, yahoo have Web Crawlers/Web Spiders/ Web Robots which fetches large documents. Then an indexer, which is another program reads the documents searched for, and returns with a search index containing the words in the document. Each search engine creates a algorithm for index so that relevant and meaningful results are obtained for each query. Search Engines are non human, they are not intelligent to decipher everything on the web. They are mostly text driven ( We will learn more about this further in my coming blogs). Search Engine Crawls the web looking at different items( mainly text) to understand what the particular site is all about. After the search engine crawls, indexes, processes i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database, it calculates its relevance and then last activity is retrieving the result- it returns with the most releavant data seeked for and displays them in the browser.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
All you need to know about your gaming device
Gaming Consoles or Gaming devices until recently were not a significant segment or industry. In the recent past, the electronics gaint and the big names in the market like Sony, Microsoft unveiled the potential of Gaming Consoles. They came as angels for the game lovers. At one hand, this is a great thing as we will not have to rely on gray market for our consoles or wait for someone to gift them but on the other hand, it would be so many options for the newcomers.
If you are looking forward to buy the latest gaming console and find it hard to differentiate between an Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Sony PS3, we provide you some help in decision making before buying your favourite one.
The Brands
Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft. The Xbox 360 comes in three different versions, the "Arcade" console, the "Premium" console, and the "Elite" console, each having its own selection of included and available accessories. Another version of the Xbox 360, called the "Core" which was available from launch, has since been discontinued for retail and replaced with the "Arcade".Bear in mind that the Xbox360 comes equipped with only one controller, so if you wish to play with someone else on the same console, you’ll have to buy another.Ensure that you have a High Definition LCD or Plasma TV to enjoy your Xbox360, because if you’re planning on playing it on a standard definition television set, you might as well not buy it.
Sony PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3 (officially marketed PLAYSTATION 3,[5] commonly abbreviated PS3) is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game systems.
A major feature that distinguishes the PlayStation 3 from its predecessors is its unified online gaming service, the PlayStation Network,[6] which contrasts with Sony's former policy of relying on game developers for online play.[7] Other major features of the console include its robust multimedia capabilities,[8] connectivity with the PlayStation Portable,[9] and its use of a high-definition optical disc format, Blu-ray Disc, as its primary storage medium.The PlayStation 3 comes with only one controller and no HDMI cable. As with the Xbox360, you might as well not buy a PS3 if you don’t have a High Definition television.
Nintendo Wii
Nintendo Wii is the most unique of the three consoles. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. A distinguishing feature of the console is its wireless controller, the Wii Remote, which can be used as a handheld pointing device and detect movement in three dimensions. Another is WiiConnect24, which enables it to receive messages and updates over the Internet while in standby mode. The Wii comes with only one controller.
If you are looking forward to buy the latest gaming console and find it hard to differentiate between an Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Sony PS3, we provide you some help in decision making before buying your favourite one.
The Brands
Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft. The Xbox 360 comes in three different versions, the "Arcade" console, the "Premium" console, and the "Elite" console, each having its own selection of included and available accessories. Another version of the Xbox 360, called the "Core" which was available from launch, has since been discontinued for retail and replaced with the "Arcade".Bear in mind that the Xbox360 comes equipped with only one controller, so if you wish to play with someone else on the same console, you’ll have to buy another.Ensure that you have a High Definition LCD or Plasma TV to enjoy your Xbox360, because if you’re planning on playing it on a standard definition television set, you might as well not buy it.
Sony PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3 (officially marketed PLAYSTATION 3,[5] commonly abbreviated PS3) is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game systems.
A major feature that distinguishes the PlayStation 3 from its predecessors is its unified online gaming service, the PlayStation Network,[6] which contrasts with Sony's former policy of relying on game developers for online play.[7] Other major features of the console include its robust multimedia capabilities,[8] connectivity with the PlayStation Portable,[9] and its use of a high-definition optical disc format, Blu-ray Disc, as its primary storage medium.The PlayStation 3 comes with only one controller and no HDMI cable. As with the Xbox360, you might as well not buy a PS3 if you don’t have a High Definition television.
Nintendo Wii
Nintendo Wii is the most unique of the three consoles. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. A distinguishing feature of the console is its wireless controller, the Wii Remote, which can be used as a handheld pointing device and detect movement in three dimensions. Another is WiiConnect24, which enables it to receive messages and updates over the Internet while in standby mode. The Wii comes with only one controller.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Does your Brain work like Google Brains
Can you imagine Google having brains?? All this while we thought only Humans possess brains. I recommend you to check out the video below. It’s absolutely unbelievable to Human Eyes. How would you imagine Google having artificial intelligence?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5DS0w9mJ4
Google co-founder Larry Page has a theory: your DNA is about 600 megabytes compressed, making it smaller than any modern operating system like Linux or Windows.
The programming language of humans, if you will, would include the workings of your brain, said Page, who offered his hypothesis Friday night during a plenary lecture here at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. His guess, he said, was that the brain's algorithms weren't all that complicated and could be approximated, eventually, with a lot of computational power.
"We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale," Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. "It's not as far off as people think."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5DS0w9mJ4
Google co-founder Larry Page has a theory: your DNA is about 600 megabytes compressed, making it smaller than any modern operating system like Linux or Windows.
The programming language of humans, if you will, would include the workings of your brain, said Page, who offered his hypothesis Friday night during a plenary lecture here at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. His guess, he said, was that the brain's algorithms weren't all that complicated and could be approximated, eventually, with a lot of computational power.
"We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale," Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. "It's not as far off as people think."
Thursday, March 20, 2008
How to increase your page rank
Page Ranking for any website is a crucial indictor of the performance of your website. Seeing your page rank fall can be depressing. Below are the top 50 ways to increase the page ranking for your websites
1. Network offline. Helpful networking tools include LinkedIn, MeetUp and MyBlogLog. These sites provide real world contacts to simplify and streamline the process of networking. They’re also useful in building beneficial online relationships – not to be overlooked. Also reach out using conferences that are available in your area and abroad.
2. Be consistent into month two. Keep the tone, style and topicality of your blog consistent for the first two months until spiders get it. Then, you can branch out to peripheral topics to expand reader interest.
3. Bait your blog. Post unconventional and controversial articles to create lengthy threads that, in turn, create site stickiness.
4. Get linked alongside related blogs on other sites. You can contact the blog administrator to swap links, you can become a regular guest blogger if your writing is good enough or your knowledge extensive. Niche sites are great for building blog links networks.
5. Cross link your posts. Link amongst your related blog posts using the keywords you’re optimizing your blog for as the anchor text.
6. Respond to comments in your blog. This accomplishes three important objectives: (1) it shows that there’s a human behind the blog; (2) it gives you a chance to show your expertise; and (3) you can lead the thread in a new direction or keep the discussion going. Oh, it’s also the polite thing to do, as well.
7. Deep links or links to sub-pages are vital. There’s a tendency to link from a remote site to your home page. Not necessarily the best strategy. Consider linking to pages deeper in the site – pages related directly to your blog post. This way, visitors are in your site and less likely to bounce.
8. Submit industry or topical news to general news sites. Not just industry related sites. If a small oil and gas company brings in a gusher, it’s of broader interest than to just industry insiders. Also adds credibility and another link.
9. Update or create a Wikipedia page and link to your site. Another means of establishing yourself as an authority. Just make sure the Wiki piece is accurate, well written and typo-free.
10. Direct (future) page rank efforts to well-optimized content on your home site. Don’t direct visitors and bots to the garbage bin of out-dated content stored in the site’s archives. Point them to the new news.
11. Syndicate content outside of your blog. Every site owner needs content. Fortunately, there’s plenty of it free for the taking. Sites like Helium, Ezine and Go Articles are content supermarkets. Post your piece and pick up non-reciprocal, in-bound links for your effort. Content syndication increases link popularity.
12. Use QA sessions in your blog. You’re the expert. Also, invite guest bloggers to handle questions beyond your skill set. Helpful, simple advice keeps visitors coming back and makes you a guru.
13. Add imagery and video content to your posts. A picture is worth a thousand web words. Charts and graphs simplify complex information and don’t take up a lot of room. If you aren’t an artist, create a relationship with a freelancer. Never use clip art.
14. Answer questions on Google groups and Yahoo Answers. People write in with all sorts of questions, some sure to fall within your area of expertise. By signing on as an authority in a field (your arena) you build credibility. Plus, it’s fun helping others from the comfort of your own work station.
15. Find free stuff to give away. Free still works on the web. There’s lots of open source software (OSS), mortgage calculators, real-time stock feeds and other digital goodies that visitors can download free. Free is nice.
16. Write about popular brands or celebrities where possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging short sales in the market or clothing for the over-sized human, celebrity and name brands get picked up by spiders.
17. Create surveys. Surveys are more in depth than a poll. One survey you might want to try is one in which buyers rate the services and products you sell. Great marketing information. Consider placing a satisfaction survey somewhere on your site.
18. Poll your readers. Everybody’s got an opinion. Provide a platform to let posters and readers vote on a topic related to your site. It doesn’t do any good if you run a retail outlet and poll visitors on who they’d like to see in the White House. Stay on topic.
19. Focus on contextual relevancy before quantity of links. Connectivity within a market or topic segment has more value than SEO anchor text, at least in the short term.
20. Cite the sources of your content. This adds credibility to your posts. It also provides a trail for a reader interested in learning more about the topic at hand.
21. Write content for various experience levels. For many spaces DIYs are the largest sector. Some readers are just starting out. Others have been at it for years and probably know more than you do, so post blogs to appeal to a broad range of skill sets — from green rookie to wizened old vet.
22. Publish new content on weekdays. Even search engines need a break. Actually, more people are online Monday through Friday so your latest blog post is still the latest when posted on Monday rather than Sunday. A little thing, for sure, but little things mean a lot online.
23. Participate in your link community. Forum and blog links are ephemeral, lasting a day or two as web fodder, so there’s always the need for more green. Interact by posting to not only drive traffic with the link, but to also pick up another link from a credible site. All good.
24. Only purchase ad links on relevant niche sites. This, by default, limits competitive links and delivers more qualified (knowledgeable and ready-to-purchase) visitors to your site.
25. Focus on ranking for three key words or phrases to start. The keywords you select should appear in your HTML title tags and within the site’s content when appropriate. However, watch keyword density levels. Anything above 5% starts to sound like gibberish. 2% to 3% keyword density provides more creative latitude for the content developer, and still lets bots know what the site is about.
26. Develop some friendly contacts on social media sites and participate in the community. Ask contacts to promote your blog content. Also ask for contributors. People love to express their opinions.
27. Buy or build a screamin’ hot blog design and submit it to design galleries. Hire a site/blog designer, or bring your vision to fruition. This enables your blog to appear five or six demographic iterations from your home site, expanding the site’s reach outside the immediate site community. This creates new marketing channels fast.
28. Build credibility. Publishing authorities on your site’s topicality usually does the trick. Once blog credibility is established, identify trends, solve new problems and gradually expand the topic range of your blog.
29. Ignore Alexa. A lot of new site owners rely on Alexa for site metrics but remember, Alexa is a popularity metric since only Alexa toolbar users contribute data. and that’s a less-than-universal test population.
30. If your blog isn’t pulling, have the code reproduced so it’s as semantic, accessible and code-to-content optimized as possible. Also, hire a code expert to position content above ads or any other content in the site markup.
31. Don’t place ads on your blog, yet. If you feel you must (you’re seeing nice PPC revenues), determine that your site’s HTML is optimized to position those ads at the bottom of each blog page.
32. Ensure the blog is optimized for Technoratti. Claim your blog, set an avatar and pings, use tags where appropriate and be sure to ping various blog tracking sites.
33. Encourage viral link building. Take a stand. Introduce the coming paradigm shift in web commerce, provoke controversy. It sells.
34. Send a personal note to posters. Not all bloggers have the time to do this but if you can send a personal email thank-you note to a poster, you’ve increased the chances of that poster becoming a member of your site community.
35. Make friends with other bloggers in your commercial, business or NFP space. Ask to become a guest blogger, or seek endorsements from the “names” within your site sphere.
36. Call posters by name. If Bob M. from Athens, Georgia, posts to your blog, recognize his contribution with a “Thanks, Bob” at the end of your response.
37. Don’t use duplicate content. The only duplicate content that appears in your blog posts are quotes, and they should be identified with quotation marks.
38. Get guest bloggers. Add links from their blogs and establish your site’s link community. There are people within your web neighborhood with opinions and good information. Contact them to invite submissions to your blog and your site in general.
39. Vary topics, content length, relevancy and posting times. However, be consistent, as well. Keep blogging. It can take time for a blog to catch the notice of a search engine spider.
40. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don’t forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year’s “next big thing” is this year’s hackneyed cliché.
41. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a “site hosting” or “site design” blog.
42. Submit your URL to blog directories. There are “best of the web,” and paid directories, like Yahoo, and free directories like the Open Directory project at www.dmoz.org. Every directory listing is another link to your site and another way visitors can find you. Just google them to find more.
43. Don’t stuff blog post titles with keywords. It’s a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be 40% keywords, 60% non-keywords.
44. Remember SEO basics. Use provocative, keyword-rich title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and only link to high-quality sites. Never over do it. Keep your posts relevant, natural, accurate and, above all, current.
45. Study the competition. They’re studying you. Check out spyfu.com to do a little undercover work on search analytics employed by competitor sites and their visitors. You can’t touch the content but you can’t copyright an idea, either, so pick up some new paths of thought from others in your site’s arena.
46. Provide a “Tell Your Friends” link on your blog. Birds of a feather do, indeed, flock together. So, if one of your regulars shares an interest in philately, chances are s/he has other friends with an interest in stamp collecting.
47. Use a conversational tone. Dry, starchy academic writing is strictly for the textbooks. Write words that people “hear” instead of read.
48. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground.
49. Don’t worry about page rank. PR is highly over-rated as a yardstick of online success. Connectivity within a web community and expansion through content syndication and guest blogging are more critical to building site credibility than page rank. PR will take care of itself over time if you do it right.
50. Build a blog or move to Wordpress. Wordpress is a blog platform that’s open source (free), robust, extensible and easy to use. Add Feedburner, which equips site owners to broadcast RSS feeds and develop user metrics. Next, synch up Google Analytics and a sitemap plug-in to simplify populating the blog and developing useful, actionable metrics. Also, make sure your blog is pinging www.technoratti.com and other social-ranking sites like www.digg.com.
1. Network offline. Helpful networking tools include LinkedIn, MeetUp and MyBlogLog. These sites provide real world contacts to simplify and streamline the process of networking. They’re also useful in building beneficial online relationships – not to be overlooked. Also reach out using conferences that are available in your area and abroad.
2. Be consistent into month two. Keep the tone, style and topicality of your blog consistent for the first two months until spiders get it. Then, you can branch out to peripheral topics to expand reader interest.
3. Bait your blog. Post unconventional and controversial articles to create lengthy threads that, in turn, create site stickiness.
4. Get linked alongside related blogs on other sites. You can contact the blog administrator to swap links, you can become a regular guest blogger if your writing is good enough or your knowledge extensive. Niche sites are great for building blog links networks.
5. Cross link your posts. Link amongst your related blog posts using the keywords you’re optimizing your blog for as the anchor text.
6. Respond to comments in your blog. This accomplishes three important objectives: (1) it shows that there’s a human behind the blog; (2) it gives you a chance to show your expertise; and (3) you can lead the thread in a new direction or keep the discussion going. Oh, it’s also the polite thing to do, as well.
7. Deep links or links to sub-pages are vital. There’s a tendency to link from a remote site to your home page. Not necessarily the best strategy. Consider linking to pages deeper in the site – pages related directly to your blog post. This way, visitors are in your site and less likely to bounce.
8. Submit industry or topical news to general news sites. Not just industry related sites. If a small oil and gas company brings in a gusher, it’s of broader interest than to just industry insiders. Also adds credibility and another link.
9. Update or create a Wikipedia page and link to your site. Another means of establishing yourself as an authority. Just make sure the Wiki piece is accurate, well written and typo-free.
10. Direct (future) page rank efforts to well-optimized content on your home site. Don’t direct visitors and bots to the garbage bin of out-dated content stored in the site’s archives. Point them to the new news.
11. Syndicate content outside of your blog. Every site owner needs content. Fortunately, there’s plenty of it free for the taking. Sites like Helium, Ezine and Go Articles are content supermarkets. Post your piece and pick up non-reciprocal, in-bound links for your effort. Content syndication increases link popularity.
12. Use QA sessions in your blog. You’re the expert. Also, invite guest bloggers to handle questions beyond your skill set. Helpful, simple advice keeps visitors coming back and makes you a guru.
13. Add imagery and video content to your posts. A picture is worth a thousand web words. Charts and graphs simplify complex information and don’t take up a lot of room. If you aren’t an artist, create a relationship with a freelancer. Never use clip art.
14. Answer questions on Google groups and Yahoo Answers. People write in with all sorts of questions, some sure to fall within your area of expertise. By signing on as an authority in a field (your arena) you build credibility. Plus, it’s fun helping others from the comfort of your own work station.
15. Find free stuff to give away. Free still works on the web. There’s lots of open source software (OSS), mortgage calculators, real-time stock feeds and other digital goodies that visitors can download free. Free is nice.
16. Write about popular brands or celebrities where possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging short sales in the market or clothing for the over-sized human, celebrity and name brands get picked up by spiders.
17. Create surveys. Surveys are more in depth than a poll. One survey you might want to try is one in which buyers rate the services and products you sell. Great marketing information. Consider placing a satisfaction survey somewhere on your site.
18. Poll your readers. Everybody’s got an opinion. Provide a platform to let posters and readers vote on a topic related to your site. It doesn’t do any good if you run a retail outlet and poll visitors on who they’d like to see in the White House. Stay on topic.
19. Focus on contextual relevancy before quantity of links. Connectivity within a market or topic segment has more value than SEO anchor text, at least in the short term.
20. Cite the sources of your content. This adds credibility to your posts. It also provides a trail for a reader interested in learning more about the topic at hand.
21. Write content for various experience levels. For many spaces DIYs are the largest sector. Some readers are just starting out. Others have been at it for years and probably know more than you do, so post blogs to appeal to a broad range of skill sets — from green rookie to wizened old vet.
22. Publish new content on weekdays. Even search engines need a break. Actually, more people are online Monday through Friday so your latest blog post is still the latest when posted on Monday rather than Sunday. A little thing, for sure, but little things mean a lot online.
23. Participate in your link community. Forum and blog links are ephemeral, lasting a day or two as web fodder, so there’s always the need for more green. Interact by posting to not only drive traffic with the link, but to also pick up another link from a credible site. All good.
24. Only purchase ad links on relevant niche sites. This, by default, limits competitive links and delivers more qualified (knowledgeable and ready-to-purchase) visitors to your site.
25. Focus on ranking for three key words or phrases to start. The keywords you select should appear in your HTML title tags and within the site’s content when appropriate. However, watch keyword density levels. Anything above 5% starts to sound like gibberish. 2% to 3% keyword density provides more creative latitude for the content developer, and still lets bots know what the site is about.
26. Develop some friendly contacts on social media sites and participate in the community. Ask contacts to promote your blog content. Also ask for contributors. People love to express their opinions.
27. Buy or build a screamin’ hot blog design and submit it to design galleries. Hire a site/blog designer, or bring your vision to fruition. This enables your blog to appear five or six demographic iterations from your home site, expanding the site’s reach outside the immediate site community. This creates new marketing channels fast.
28. Build credibility. Publishing authorities on your site’s topicality usually does the trick. Once blog credibility is established, identify trends, solve new problems and gradually expand the topic range of your blog.
29. Ignore Alexa. A lot of new site owners rely on Alexa for site metrics but remember, Alexa is a popularity metric since only Alexa toolbar users contribute data. and that’s a less-than-universal test population.
30. If your blog isn’t pulling, have the code reproduced so it’s as semantic, accessible and code-to-content optimized as possible. Also, hire a code expert to position content above ads or any other content in the site markup.
31. Don’t place ads on your blog, yet. If you feel you must (you’re seeing nice PPC revenues), determine that your site’s HTML is optimized to position those ads at the bottom of each blog page.
32. Ensure the blog is optimized for Technoratti. Claim your blog, set an avatar and pings, use tags where appropriate and be sure to ping various blog tracking sites.
33. Encourage viral link building. Take a stand. Introduce the coming paradigm shift in web commerce, provoke controversy. It sells.
34. Send a personal note to posters. Not all bloggers have the time to do this but if you can send a personal email thank-you note to a poster, you’ve increased the chances of that poster becoming a member of your site community.
35. Make friends with other bloggers in your commercial, business or NFP space. Ask to become a guest blogger, or seek endorsements from the “names” within your site sphere.
36. Call posters by name. If Bob M. from Athens, Georgia, posts to your blog, recognize his contribution with a “Thanks, Bob” at the end of your response.
37. Don’t use duplicate content. The only duplicate content that appears in your blog posts are quotes, and they should be identified with quotation marks.
38. Get guest bloggers. Add links from their blogs and establish your site’s link community. There are people within your web neighborhood with opinions and good information. Contact them to invite submissions to your blog and your site in general.
39. Vary topics, content length, relevancy and posting times. However, be consistent, as well. Keep blogging. It can take time for a blog to catch the notice of a search engine spider.
40. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don’t forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year’s “next big thing” is this year’s hackneyed cliché.
41. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a “site hosting” or “site design” blog.
42. Submit your URL to blog directories. There are “best of the web,” and paid directories, like Yahoo, and free directories like the Open Directory project at www.dmoz.org. Every directory listing is another link to your site and another way visitors can find you. Just google them to find more.
43. Don’t stuff blog post titles with keywords. It’s a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be 40% keywords, 60% non-keywords.
44. Remember SEO basics. Use provocative, keyword-rich title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and only link to high-quality sites. Never over do it. Keep your posts relevant, natural, accurate and, above all, current.
45. Study the competition. They’re studying you. Check out spyfu.com to do a little undercover work on search analytics employed by competitor sites and their visitors. You can’t touch the content but you can’t copyright an idea, either, so pick up some new paths of thought from others in your site’s arena.
46. Provide a “Tell Your Friends” link on your blog. Birds of a feather do, indeed, flock together. So, if one of your regulars shares an interest in philately, chances are s/he has other friends with an interest in stamp collecting.
47. Use a conversational tone. Dry, starchy academic writing is strictly for the textbooks. Write words that people “hear” instead of read.
48. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground.
49. Don’t worry about page rank. PR is highly over-rated as a yardstick of online success. Connectivity within a web community and expansion through content syndication and guest blogging are more critical to building site credibility than page rank. PR will take care of itself over time if you do it right.
50. Build a blog or move to Wordpress. Wordpress is a blog platform that’s open source (free), robust, extensible and easy to use. Add Feedburner, which equips site owners to broadcast RSS feeds and develop user metrics. Next, synch up Google Analytics and a sitemap plug-in to simplify populating the blog and developing useful, actionable metrics. Also, make sure your blog is pinging www.technoratti.com and other social-ranking sites like www.digg.com.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Basics of Online Marketing
This is a basic insight for all those who are new in Online Marketing or want to pursue their career in internet marketing. This blog will help you understand the basic terminologies and concepts you need to understand to start with online marketing.
Online Marketing also known as internet marketing or EMarketing is marketing over the internet. Internet has brought unique benefits marketing including low costs in distributing information and media to a global audience. Internet marketing helps an organization to grow and promote an organization using online media.
The organization before involving into any internet marketing activities need to clear the focus on what they are expecting from going online. There are two major concepts that they need to differentiate while doing online marketing which acts as a foundation for their company’s growth. The difference between STRATEGY and TACTICS. Let me pose some differences of them. Any Company needs to focus on the strategy before investing online. Strategy helps save time and money. This is like a focus on the plans or the long term plan which requires commitment. Whereas Tactics are short term action, tool or resource. Tactics are ongoing and requires regular exercise. Strategies on the other hand are the roadmap for the overall plan and tactics are the vehicle for the trip. Only if you understand the difference between the two helps to step ahead with marketing online.
Below you can find the video Of Tim Berry MD, where he speaks on the concept of strategy and tactics in detail or can you go online to check out the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=380Wiw3uAvM
Online Marketing also known as internet marketing or EMarketing is marketing over the internet. Internet has brought unique benefits marketing including low costs in distributing information and media to a global audience. Internet marketing helps an organization to grow and promote an organization using online media.
The organization before involving into any internet marketing activities need to clear the focus on what they are expecting from going online. There are two major concepts that they need to differentiate while doing online marketing which acts as a foundation for their company’s growth. The difference between STRATEGY and TACTICS. Let me pose some differences of them. Any Company needs to focus on the strategy before investing online. Strategy helps save time and money. This is like a focus on the plans or the long term plan which requires commitment. Whereas Tactics are short term action, tool or resource. Tactics are ongoing and requires regular exercise. Strategies on the other hand are the roadmap for the overall plan and tactics are the vehicle for the trip. Only if you understand the difference between the two helps to step ahead with marketing online.
Below you can find the video Of Tim Berry MD, where he speaks on the concept of strategy and tactics in detail or can you go online to check out the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=380Wiw3uAvM
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