SEO-friendly content

What is SEO-friendly content?

SEO- friendly content should be attractive as well as useful for the viewers; also it should be well optimized for search engine spiders, which in turn helps producing high ranking in search results.
Due to the content-centric nature of search engines, the need to write SEO-friendly content has grown immensely in SEO industry. All major search engines have become very smart in identifying the informative and interesting content as compare to the over optimized and senseless content. So in order to write SEO- friendly content you have to think about human being and search engine both and find balance between both. Illogical content having random links to other pages with same words repeated over and over again will never get indexed. Your first priority should be always to write content for the people not for the search engines

Things to consider, while designing SEO-friendly content:

1. How to use keywords

Content should be optimized for client-specific needs: Before creating the content the keywords which drive traffic to a particular website should be researched for a particular client and then intertwined throughout the content of your webpage, so that the overall structure, layout and theme of the website remain unchanged. Also you shouldn’t overdo the stuffing of keywords. Variations of a particular keyword that link to your core subject can be used. Search Engines can now differentiate between different word groups so rather than searching for matching keywords, you can look for relevant keywords. Also while stuffing the keywords we need to keep in mind that the importance of the webpage decreases from top to bottom and from left to right. So the most important keywords should be placed on the top left side of the page. Take care of these points while keyword stuffing:

• Title Tag – The title tag is what visitors will see at the top of the browser window when your site first appears. It is the most important tag to consider when designing your web site. Place your main keywords at the beginning of the title tag, in order to form a meaningful and relevant title of the webpage.
• Meta tag- Make sure you write an attractive description for your description meta tag. This gets listed first to the visitors when search engine find your website relevant for that keyword. If the description does not capture your visitor’s attention immediately you will lose your visitor to a competing web site.
• H1-H6 tags – Heading tags play important role in SEO, specially the H1 and H2 tags, try to incorporate the maximum use of important keywords in h1 and h2 tags. For example we can use keywords in sub-headings of top-para and bottom-para of a webpage as Search engines give a little more weightage to these tags. They also grab your visitor’s attention faster than normal text.
• Keyword density- is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. Google considers keyword density a prime factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines. Take care that the individual keyword density (each keyword/ total words) should be between 1 to 6%. For that you can intertwine the keywords throughout the content like in the paragraphs where the keywords are used in the headings the usage of keywords in the paragraph further supports the relevancy of the heading as well as it increases the keyword density .
• Bold and Italics Keywords –Search engine pays extra attention to bold and Italics text so indexing of the webpage can be improved by bolding and italicizing the keywords in the paragraphs.
• Body Text – Stuff your webpage with the targeted keywords so that the flow of the content looks natural and the content make sense, avoid keyword spamming. It’s always advisable to write the content for the visitor to a particular website and not for the search engines, as visitor-friendly content always get indexed faster.
• Internal and Inbound Links – Keywords which are used in anchor text of internal and inbound links are always indexed faster, but don’t overdo this, try to incorporate the links naturally. For example avoid “click here” for anchor text, instead use some relevant keyword.
• ALT tags – We know that images enhance the readability of any webpage by providing site visitors instant visual stimulation. Always use alt tags with the images to guide the spiders what your images is about, as spiders cannot crawl the images but they can read alt tags.

1. What should be the structure of the Content

• Use short paragraphs with headings, generally long paragraphs are not easily digestible. Better to use Lists instead of paragraphs to enhance the readability.
• Use self explanatory images like charts, graphs or even some diagram which can convey the message as they are always preferred by readers. You can also use cartoons to explain something in a diagram.
• Always Proof-read your page for your spelling and grammar mistakes before publishing the content.
• Stick to the natural flow of the content by staying on a particular topic. Don’t create confusion by moving here and there. Provide relevant and accurate content.

Search engine spiders love unique content, try to incorporate the content which is informative to the users as well as distinct.

Vibrant colors, lot of animations, videos etc cannot impress search engines but the words surely can.

Summary:

Always concentrate on writing unique and informative content with appropriate keywords placed optimally. Avoid unnecessary stuffing the keywords in the content, as it is considered as spam by search engine, and you can get will penalized. So your focus should be to write SEO-friendly content which is designed to create a balance between search engine and human being. The content is optimized in such a way that it is easy to be understood by an average internet user and interesting as well, once this is done various link-building exercises can be performed later in order to increase the page rank.

How do you find this article? Please let me know if anything is remaining which should be considered while designing SEO- friendly content…

RSS is “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, it is a method of distributing links to content in your web site that you would like others to use. In other words RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works for example blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a tandardized format.

Generally RSS feed is applied to those webpages whose content gets updated frequently, so that whenever there is a change in your website those who have subscribed to your rss feed will get to know.

How to manually create rss feed:

Start with creating a new xml file, now add new item in this file by following this architecture

Title
Description
Link
So testing keywords, content and links in mobile websites, local content and social media is a wise move to generate leads in the internet marketing industry.

For example in your website you have an articles webpage which is constantly updated, then you can put rss feed for that page by constructing rss-feed.xml file.

Now in this file suppose you have 10 articles listed, in that the first article is on

Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting

Which is stored at the location

http:// www.himshilp.com / seo-articles / linkbaiting.htm

and whose description is

Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you…

In your xml file the first item could be added like this

< item >

<title> Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting </title>

< link > http://www.himshilp.com/ seo-articles/ linkbaiting.htm < / link >

< description > Linkbaiting is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you… < /description >

< /item >

Similarly the other items of that webpage (other 9 articles with short description and link) could be added as other items. For example if the second article is on search engine optimization, then it could be added as

< item >

< title > Search engine optimization < /title >

< link > http://www.himshilp.com/seo-article/search-engine-optimization.htm < / link >

< description> SEO is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site… < /description>

< /item>

Similarly the other 8 items could be created. Since RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the W3C website. We need to insert this code

< ?xml version=”1.0″?>

In any RSS document at the top level, there should be a element, with a mandatory attribute named version which specifies the version of RSS that the document conforms to. Here we are using the version attribute 2.0.

< rss version=”2.0″>

Subordinate to the element is a single element, that contains information about the channel (metadata) and its contents.

< ? xml version=”1.0″? >

< rss version=”2.0″ >

< channel >

< item>

< title >Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting< /title >

< link > http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/linkbaiting.htm < /link >

< description>Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you… < /description>

< /item >

< item >

< title > Search engine optimization < /title >

< link > http://www.himshilp.com/seo-article/search-engine-optimization.htm < /link >

< description > SEO is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site… < /description >

< /item >

< /channel >

< /rss >

Notice that we have closed the channel and rss tags in the end.

As indicated before since its an xml file it has to be saved as rss-feed.xml.

After defining all the items i.e. all 10 articles in this case we have to define our webpage as a channel.

The same tags title, description and link of your webpage has to be inserted. Now the complete file will be like this

< ? xml version=”1.0″?>

< rss version=”2.0″ >

< channel >

< title >SEO Article, SEO Blog, SEM Tips, PPC Article, Blog, Internet Marketing< /title >
< link > http:// www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/seo-articles.htm < /link >
< description>Himshilp: Best SEO Company in India. Learn more about ethical search engine optimization techniques from our SEO Article, PPC Blog & Internet Marketing Tips Section. Contact for further details.< /description >

< item >

< title >Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting< /title >

< link >http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/linkbaiting.htm < /link >

< description >Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you… < /description >

< /item >

< item >

< title > Search engine optimization < /title >

< link > http://www.himshilp.com/seo-article/search-engine-optimization.htm < /link >

< description > SEO is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site… < /description >

< /item >

< /channel >

< /rss >

After doing this make hyperlink (rss-feed) articles page and link that hyperlink to the xml file(rss-feed.xml).

Validating The File

Once you are done with this process, it is the time to check whether your file is valid or not. Either you can use feed validator service or just type the url of this particular feed in the address box, if everything is fine you will get to see the xml file otherwise you have to fix the errors.

Now its time to get Syndicated

Since your file is validated you can now submit your feed to various rss directories to get your feed listed. Which will help you to get more leverage of your articles in this case.

Summary:
RSS Feed is one of the best ways to market the information on a website without putting much effort. So it could also be used as one of the internet marketing strategy. Once the feeds on your website are updated, every subscriber automatically gets the update of new information on the site.

Also with rss you can also circulate your content to your networks of social networking websites. Its works amazingly, as rss helps you generate traffic to your website, which in turn helps you getting good backlinks, which helps in getting good ranking in Search engines, which is the major aspect of SEO.

RSS feed is just a link created on any webpage whose content gets updated frequently, so that whosoever subscribed to your rss feed will get notified whenever there is a change in that particular webpage. So obviously by providing RSS feed in your webpage you are increasing your webpage’s visibility among others and in turn traffic of your website which is the key aspect of any SEO program.

According to Wikipedia Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the followers. That’s why information on Twitter is short, to the point and effective. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. You can access Twitter via Web, Desktop Applications and even SMS. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees

I started using tweeter some time ago. Surprisingly after few days of posting some tweets it started getting indexed in Google. While Google continues to dominate the world of “search”, it has a long way to go in offering real-time search capabilities. Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now. Google has also started paying attention and it is indexing Tweets. Many Twitter pages and individual tweets can be seen on the first page of Google. Then I started learning more about it. Rather than using it just as a social networking platform, if used properly, it can benefit you in so many ways including by boosting your personal brand and enhancing website traffic.

I want to list down some of the methods by which Twitter can benefit us:

• A Powerful Tool for Obtaining Information / news.

Twitter users often link to useful sites or articles and can be a source of scoops and alternative news. This is very useful for active social news participants as they can subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific websites/conferences, which allows them to receive and view content quickly. Twitter can be quite an effective search tool for researching any kind of information. The results can complement other methods or sources of information. Twitter has a wide range of users, who constantly update Twitter with new information on different niches.

• To reinforce Personal Brand and awareness.

Twitter is a social media platform which has the primary advantage of developing a social brand that is well-connected and accessible. Due its vast usage, Twitter can be a used for promoting your products and services and establish your brand. If you have established business you can use Twitter to enhance your brand image. On the other hand if you have a smaller business with limited brand awareness then Twitter can be excellent for promoting and establishing your brand among enormous audience.

• Get Feedback.


Twitter provides you with an opportunity to join a group of interest by following others who are influential within your niche. Twitter also allows businesses to communicate with customers and receive feedback in a casual and cost effective manner. It can prove useful in understanding and obtaining consumer opinion about new products or services or new ideas. You can also use Twitter to communicate new ideas with people and test public opinion. Bloggers sometimes use Twitter to discuss ideas for new posts.

• Use it as HR tool to Recruit People.

Want to hire a good web analyst, web designer, or programmer? Send out a tweet asking for recommendations. This is a very quick and easy way to hire freelancers or even companies based on familiar recommendations.

• Internet Marketing Opportunities.

Twitter can be used in promoting your products and services. It is a cost effective method to increase awareness about your products or services. You can use it to inform customers about any new announcement or special offers. Twitter offers all the advantages of traditional text message marketing and more. It can prove to be a useful tool for conducting market research by better understanding of potential or existing customers.

• Boost your website traffic.

Twitter can be used to direct traffic to your websites. If you tweet about your website, the message will spread faster and further as other active users pick it up and re-tweet it. Bloggers often use Twitter to inform their audience of any new posts on their blog by posting links on Twitter. Thus Twitter can be seen as a traffic generation tool. The placement of links within profiles and conversations can direct visitors to a specific website and is especially powerful if you pitch to early adopters and influencers.

• Make new friends.

Twitter has a built-in function for you to befriend and track the messages of other users. This is a simple way for you connect with like minded people outside of your usual circle. A Twitter association can be developed into a long term acquaintance.

• Spreading Social Network.

Twitter is an excellent tool to help bloggers share links to content which is of mutual interest to like minded people. On a personal level Twitter allows one to communicate with friends and family or close network of connections. On an organizational level Twitter allows colleagues who are not co-located to communicate with each other or businesses to communicate with their customers. With Twitter it is also possible to target a specific niche or audience by following others from your industry. It can thus allow a business to build contacts within the industry. Communities have developed around many of Twitter groups or niches. Twitter can be used to establish reliable and long term relationships for future benefits such as testimonials or peer recommendations.

• Get Votes.

Send a link to your stories you’ve submitted in other social news sites like Digg. Your followers might vote up the stories if they agree with it. This allows you to acquire more support for your efforts on other social media websites.

• Event Updates.

Twitter can be used as a means to inform event participants and latest event happenings/changes by entrepreneurs. This is a stress-free way to broadcast information. Businesses have also used Twitter effectively to measure the performance of campaigns.

• Promotion.

Twitter can be used as a promotional tool to announce offline endeavors or upcoming online events (webinars, virtual tradeshows etc). If you are an e-commerce site, perhaps you have a deal of the day or seasonal offers where you can promote these deals. The fact is you do not want to be too promotional, but Twitter does present the opportunity to promote your products or service and brand to your friends.

• SEO Boost.

If you have good content on your website and you want to drive additional traffic to this content on your website, you can use Twitter to do so. A quick tweet with the URL can help drive additional traffic to a preferred landing page on your site to help persuade the conversion on your site.

• Find future Prospects online.

Twitter allows you to interact with potential prospects and your target audience. While you do not want to be in direct touch all of the time, Twitter does allow you to engage with your prospects by re-tweeting their posts or responding to something that they may have tweeted about. Discretion and tact is needed in this area.

• Twitter and Mobile.

Since Twitter is very simple to use and is limited to 140 characters, mobile use with Twitter is also easy. You can both send and receive updates what you and your friends are doing on the go using a simple SMS. Twitter can be a great mobile communication tool. As we know in business, this can be a pretty powerful thing.

• Offer live exposure.

Twitter’s message size limit prevents detailed coverage of events but it can allow you to provide real-time commentary which may help to spark further discussion or interest on the event as other Twitter users spread the message. Very useful for citizen journalism.

In short, Twitter allows you to monitor how influencers think or feel, you can also get into their attention zone via active networking. For businesses, Twitter is another channel which connects current and potential customers with your product or brand. It allows deeply infiltration into the lifestyles of interested participants, which helps to build brand persistence/loyalty. So twitter can be used a tool to achieve simple aim of tracking and directing attention from various groups of your interest and in turn drive business.


]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/benefits-of-using-twitter/feed/ 0 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/will-smo-take-over-seo/ http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/will-smo-take-over-seo/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:04:07 +0000 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/?p=29 Continue reading →]]> Nowadays there is a speculation in the internet industry that SEO is going to be dead and social networking websites will take over SEO.

Since inbound links are the main criteria to generate traffic to any website, and social networking websites are providing enough backlinks to increase the visibility of the website and helps achieving positioning in top 10 search results, So it is a common belief among the top internet marketers also that SEO is going to be dead.

But there is a problem with this method of gaining backlinks, any person can open an account in social media websites without doing any real investment and then gets the authority to give feedback about any product/ service, whether he has much knowledge in that particular domain or not. Even sometimes it happens so that brand names of big companies are misused by various people through social networking websites. So if search engine will start giving much importance to these types of posts then it will surely affect their search result and in turn the user satisfaction. This would not be desirable by the major search engines as Google and Microsoft earn quite a lot from providing significant results from these search engines, so they need to keep their algorithm up-to-date in-order to deliver the best quality results. So as long as Google and Microsoft like big players are in business, SMO will not have much impact on the search results and SEO will remain in the internet industry.

85% of people still use search engine to satisfy their primary business or personal need. Now let us imagine a situation in which someone is using social media to promote his website without optimizing his website. Surely no one would like to believe on that as Social media is generally used to take second opinion about the product/ service. So if your website is not optimized and you straightaway want to market it through social media then your efforts will go in vain.

With out SEO the internet will be full of spam. Can you imagine a situation in which search engine is replaced by some of the social networking website like twitter or facebook and people start getting the results on the bases of their total number of followers? So the brand which has the highest number of followers will get listed first in that social networking website. Then the whole creditability of search engine will be lost and people will have no faith in search engine. I think they will no longer use the search engines for any of their needs.

Social Media will surely affect Google’s real-time search results but high Page Rank websites will dominate the search results.

We need to understand that the role of SEO is not restricted only to provide quality backlinks but also

• SEO is used to promote websites in such a way that they can be easily understood by search engines.
• SEO helps increasing the visibility of the website for the defined keywords
• SEO also helps your website to achieve higher rank in the search engine.

 So according to my experience, SEO is not going to die any time in near future, but its going to further evolve and provide us better results. Do let me know about your viewpoints related to this topic.


]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/will-smo-take-over-seo/feed/ 0 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/content-management-system-an-overview/ http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/content-management-system-an-overview/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:06:20 +0000 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/?p=26 Continue reading →]]> Content Management System (CMS) – An Overview

Why CMS?

Content plays an important role in determining any website’s popularity, that’s why it is known as “King of the web”. So it is very important for us to keep our website updated with the latest happenings of the company. Everyone is nowadays struggling to keep their websites up-to-date. Gone are the days when static websites were used. As more people are becoming familiar with internet, it has become very essential for us to revise our websites around the clock. To design the content for the website, we need to employ website designers and for further modification also we need to rely on them. As human-being always have some limitations. So it is not a good idea to rely on human being for something which can be easily done with the help of software (CMS).

With the advent of content management system it has become very easy to build and manage the content of our website without having any technical knowledge, which is otherwise a big task. CMS is equipped with lots of in-build libraries of graphics, affiliate program links, which can be utilized even by common man to build and manage the websites.

What is CMS?

According to Wikipedia CMS is a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text. CMS are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files, electronic documents, and web content. 

What are the benefits of using CMS?

CMS provides flexibility and convenience for any person to design and manage their website on their own without actually relying on any technical people with ease. Content management system can be a great help for those consumers (school/ college pupil or housewives) turned into publishers also, who are trying to find out ways to manage their content output. These people don’t have time and money to spend for website designers or programmers but they want to publish their thoughts as soon as it strikes them and customize their websites frequently on their own.
There are various other advantages of CMS, some of them are:

• Saves time: CMS greatly saves the time to publish the content; it makes you to publish content faster, which is very necessary in order to create value to the content in modern days.
   
• Simple & affordable to deploy : Many CMS like Joomla is open source CMS are coming for free and its portability between lots of versions and its scalability on different platforms makes it very simple to use.
   
• The CMS service can be delivered through internet. It doesn’t require any hardware to manage or software to install separately only for CMS.
   
• Easy to use and publish content online even without any technical knowledge.
   
• The handling and controlling of errors makes it very simple to use.
   
• It is equipped with lots of customizable templates which are ready to use and can be easily applied to the content.
   
• It can speed up the creation and maintenance of websites using web components and plugins.
   
• CMS can also keep you in touch with the social media by using blogs, message boards, RSS etc.
   
• It can be shared by multiple people having different user and administration rights in an organization because it establishes defined publishing processes.
   
• Reconstruct/Reuse the content: CMS is equipped with the feature of reusability of the content since the content is stored in database. It generates completely new output with the available content.
   
• Content scheduling: Content publication can be scheduled using CMS to keep track of who is publishing what, how quickly content is getting published, whether the publication schedule is being stuck to, whether out-of-date, content is being removed quickly enough, etc. In this way using CMS one can easily measure the success of your publishing efforts.
   
• CMS allows you to consistently manage the metadata through content template structures. Metadata plays an important role in SEO. Eventually it helps you to get good rankings in Search engines.
   
• Using CMS one can secure its intranet privacy of content, which is really an important thing as different people of an organization could have allocated different rights to view, edit and publish the content.
   
• Distributed maintenance: One can easily edit the content from anywhere, anytime using a common web browser which removes lots of bottlenecks.

 


Summary: CMS provides great comfort to the user to manage the content effectively and lucratively. CMS can also be helpful to those publishers who want to publish lots of content but don’t have technical knowledge. CMS also allows you to design common and consistent web content architecture, which is very essential to have a competent website. By using CMS user can get updated with the latest technologies of the world with ease. But before selecting any CMS, be mindful, as bad CMS can worsen your life.


]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/content-management-system-an-overview/feed/ 0 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/how-smo-interacts-with-seo/ http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/how-smo-interacts-with-seo/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:26:55 +0000 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/?p=21 Continue reading →]]> Nowadays everyone is talking about Social media networking / social media optimization(SMO). Most of the people have joined these social networking communities. Recently I was reading an article: Companies planning to increase their social media spend. Having a profile in social networking websites is becoming necessity nowadays which also helps spreading word of mouth publicity about your brand… No doubt SMO is a great tool to spread brand awareness, seek advice and get noticed in the social media. But one thing which really bothers me is how SEO and SMO interact with each other. Let’s find out what they are and how are they related:

Search Engine optimization (SEO) is the process of analyzing a website and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site.
Social media optimization (SMO) consists of a set of methods for generating traffic on any website through social networking websites, business networking websites, online communities and blogs (macro blogging as well as micro blogging).

1. SEO and SMO both can be used to drive traffic to your website which in turn generate substantial leads your business
2. SMO is done to impress human being and SEO is done to impress search engine spiders. So in SMO we need to write impressive content to seek the attention of social media, whereas in SEO we write content for the website with proper usage of keywords grab the attention of search engine spiders.
3. For SEO we need to change the titles, metas headers etc of a website so the website gets modified whereas for SMO we use social networking websites to spread the brand of our website.
4. SEO has been emerged long time back whereas SMO has come into existence recently after 2005.
5. Any person with a little bit of knowledge of internet can do SMO whereas quality SEO can only be performed by SEO expert. Google really gives importance to Search engine optimization as it is directly associated with the page rank, which demonstrates the importance of the webpage in search engines whereas SMO is not at all related to the importance of the webpage.
6. The structure of the website is not so important when doing SMO, which is an essential aspect of SEO.
7. There are certain rules (which keep changing by Google) to perform SEO (example title, meta description, meta keywords, headers, alt tags etc), whereas for SMO there are no rules laid as such. Only thing one should keep in mind while doing SMO is that SMO is done to interest human being so one should never use social networking websites to directly sell something rather it should be utilized to make relationships with the prospective clients. Make it personal and interesting for others so that people would like to connect to you. So the key point is while doing SMO “keep it human”
8. SMO costs you nothing or it costs you very less whereas to get effective SEO services requires a lot of in-depth study as well as hard work so one should be ready to pay a fairly good amount for SEO of their website. Even though there are many cheap SEO companies have appeared recently in the market who barely knows anything about SEO but they provide cheap SEO services. They would just write metas and title and metas for their client’s website without doing any competitive analysis of keywords. Whereas expert SEO companies search out profitable keywords for the webpage. Profitable keywords are keywords that have a more amount of searches, but slight competition. This requires experience, lots of in-depth studies and analysis.
9. SEO is a long term strategy. Initially to get the results of SEO will take some time , but once you start getting visibility of set of keywords in the first page of search results, even after you stop taking the SEO services the results will stay there. Whereas SMO is an ongoing process you need to stay connected using social networking websites and keep doing macro blogging in order to be in search results.
10. Search engine gives you instant result on any query whereas if you are asking some question through Social networking websites it will take some time, so if your website is well optimized you will get noticed quickly through search engine which is an added advantage of doing SEO.

When to initiate SEO and SMO:
The basic aim of both SMO & SEO is to enhance traffic to the website which will help you grow your business. But the basic question which arises in one’s mind is when to start what? The answer is simple. One should start SEO first to ensure the first page visibility and then slowly dig into SMO, so that when your SMO users start looking for you have strong web presence in the search engines.

How to increase the web presence
There are various methods to increase visibility in Social media websites (Linkedin, facebook) like one can join various groups of common interests and then part take Q and A and discussions board etc. Or you can start following other people in social networking websites like tweeter and regularly post the tweets. By doing this you can establish yourself as a brand and personalize their relationship with their prospective clients.

What is important SMO or SEO
In today’s age search engine has become bare necessity to find information on products, services or any other information. Still common man generally goes to search engine to find information on anything and then further refer Social networking websites to get feedback from different people. So Social networking websites can be used for brand monitoring, you can use social networking websites to keep track of what has been said about your company and so you can respond those feedbacks to give a personal touch to your customers and their opinions could be further used for discussions in your company. Now we can say that the importance of SEO will remain there. Social networking websites can be used to as a backup to get opinions, spread contacts which can get converted into business in future. Basically using SMO you can create a personal feel which is otherwise very difficult for you to create using SEO alone. SMO gives you opportunity to personally talk to your prospective clients and solve their queries as human being, which is really essential to get business but at the same time strong visibility in search engines is also essential.

Combine SEO and SMO to grow your online business
So we can conclude that optimizing your social media presence can positively trigger organic/natural search engine listings as search engines are paying attention to social networking websites. But without doing SEO the webpage doesn’t seek importance in search engine spiders. So my view is to combine SEO with SMO is the smarter way to grow your business. Do let me know your views, information about how SEO and SMO can be linked together in order to gain maximum output.


]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/how-smo-interacts-with-seo/feed/ 0 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/joomla-cms-an-award-winning-software/ http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/joomla-cms-an-award-winning-software/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:35:18 +0000 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/?p=16 Continue reading →]]> Joomla – An Overview

Why CMS?

Content is the most crucial part of any website. It is the things of past where the websites were consisted of mostly static pages. Web portals and web communities have to update their content not just daily but a few times a day. All sorts of businesses need to provide up-to-date information about their products and services on their web sites. So managing and organizing this growth in content has become very critical nowadays.
Development and maintenance of website is a technical task, and if your website is dynamic then constant up-gradation is required. You need to recruit qualified technical people to keep track of your content and website up-gradation. This is a very tedious job and human is error prone, so to overcome this difficulty software called content management systems (CMS) is launched, of which Joomla, a free award winning software.

What is Joomla?

According to Wikipedia, Joomla is a content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available.

Features of Joomla:

• Flexible and easy to use: Many web designers wish for a CMS that provides a lot of flexibility while designing a website. Joomla gives them more scope while working on a website. Functions like editing, deleting, adding, updating texts, photos, images, and pages on their website should not be very complicated. Joomla CMS is the answer to all their needs.
   
• User friendly: Basically a CMS enables you to manage and control the presentation of the contents of the website. The contents of a website may include texts, images, music or documents. To manage these contents in a professional manner, the website needs to be designed with a competent CMS. Joomla is a fantastic CMS which is very user-friendly. You needn’t to be an HTML expert or some kind of technical nerd to design any website using Joomla.
   
• Absolutely free: Joomla is absolutely free. It is a free open source CMS, so you do not have to pay a single penny to use this system.
   
• Easy to Install: Many web hosting packages now include the Joomla software and it is very easy to install. Initial customization of Joomla may require some help from a technical person and includes setting up the basic template. The template includes the web site design and navigation system. This template contains a few editable areas but the overall look and flow of the site remains consistent throughout the site. All you need to start using Joomla and become familiar with its features which are similar to any word processing software.
• Easy to maintain and update: A website designed using Joomla is also very easy to maintain and update. You do not have to depend on any professional to maintain or update your website. You can do it yourself by learning from the Joomla video courses that are available online.
   
• Automated templates: Joomla uses a simple browser-based user interface for managing various aspects of the site. Through easy-to-use web based forms, you can update image or text content, set it up to take sales orders, create new content sections or pages, manage your employee listings as well as contact information, or even regularly update your product catalog. When you want to change the appearance of the entire site, all you need to do is make changes in one template file to have it reflected throughout the site.
   
• Add-on’s and plug-ins to facilitate the use of even more features: Joomla has the ability to provide your clients with ample of free plugins, modules and components for their sites. These things all extend the basic functionality of Joomla, allowing you to create anything from a small business website to a fully functioning corporate website with an integrated backend. Most of them can be downloaded for free, offering your clients feature rich and interactive tools for their site bound to keep their customers engaged and coming back for more. Some of them do have a fee but are more reliable as well as more feature rich than other CMS plug-ins.
   
• SEO and joomla: SEO(Search engine optimization) is the key of success of any website, so if you are creating a website that is not accessible to search engines, then you exist nowhere. Since 90% of the traffic comes through search engines only, that’s why web developers were constantly forced to weigh the ease and organization of a Content Management System with the priority of search engine presence. Joomla provides many features which makes your website familiar with search engines like search engine friendly urls that end with .html or .htm and don’t have a ‘?’ or other special characters, using Joomla each page can be easily customized for Title and Meta tags that prevent duplication, which is a negative seo-factor. With Joomla, you can customize 404 error page and also keep track of the broken links people are using to surf your site. Since blogs offer a unique personalized tone to your approach towards your target traffic. Joomla offers user-friendly tools to post your blogs online without much effort. Submission of sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and other popular Search Engines will help to index your site quickly, with Joomla, a sitemap(component or extension)of your website, html or xml based can be automatically generated. Newsletter forms a vital ingredient of a successful commercial website. You can remain in touch with your customers and prospects with this feature, which can be integrated through a customized newsletter extension in your Joomla.
   
• Simple to add new features: Joomla also makes it very simple to add new powerful features to your web site with just a click of a button. You can choose from any of the hundreds of extensions available – document management which allows you to index the kinds of documents on your web site, track the changes in them and make them easily searchable; image and multimedia galleries; forums and chat software; blogging software; mailing list management; shopping cart and complete e-commerce software; Web standards upgrades; Workflow management and many more. 
   
  Summary: In all, Joomla is a very powerful software that allows users to develop and maintain dynamic web sites. If you’re building a new web site or renovating your existing site, you can take the help of Joomla CMS software. While non-technical users can use Joomla to manage various aspects of the site including the content very easily, more technical users can use add-ons to make the site more powerful and actually build large-scale online applications. Joomla is being used to power all kinds of web sites – simple, personal or family sites; small business web sites as well as more complex corporate intranets and extranets; community portals; magazines and newspapers; government applications and so on.

]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/joomla-cms-an-award-winning-software/feed/ 0 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/landing-page-development-tips/ http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/landing-page-development-tips/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:53:04 +0000 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/?p=13 Continue reading →]]> And here you are, spending precious dollars in persuading potential customers to come to your website and over time you discover to your horror that the traffic is not converting into inquiries.

I have had numerous conversations with clients who invariably had the same story to narrate….”I have spent thousand of dollars over the last few months… and the end result.. No inquiries, No sales. This Google Adwords is not working for me….”

The problem is not with Google Adwords, rather, the problem is with your methodology. Specifically, the fact that your campaign is being routed to either the Home Page of your website or one of the ‘product-specific’ pages, which is more of an “information provider” and not a “hard-sell” document.

Fundamental to the development of any PPC campaign is developing a focused and persuasive landing page. Why? Because if the users are not able to quickly connect with your product/service offering and more importantly, are not ‘sold’ on the value offering, they will just click out of your site and may never return again.

Remember, you are paying for every click. So I have put down some of the most important factors that have to be taken into consideration, while developing a landing page.

1. Focused Headline – Have a clear and direct headline which serves as a point of reference for the keyword/ad copy that drove the click.
2. Value Proposition Upfront – Ensure that the visitor is able to easily grasp the value proposition, without having to scroll down the page
3. No-Frills Message – Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity or ability to turn a clever phrase
4. Personalize – Always write in second person – You and Your
5. Keep it Crisp – Avoid long, verbose copy. Keep it short and crisp.
6. Call to Action- Have prominent “call to action” buttons with a persuasive message directly above the button
7. Remove Navigation – Yes, don’t let them meander through the site. Keep them there on that page and get them to click on that all important ‘call to action’ button.
8. Clientele, Case- Studies, Testimonials – Will always act as the vital reassurance factor
9. Value Whitespace – Do not succumb to the impulse to cram the page with information. Ensure that the page layout is simple and is easy on the eye.

I am sharing my experience gained over the development of numerous landing pages in the hope that you can benefit from our experience and make every click count.

For any landing page development or Internet marketing services related queries, please contact:
S.R.CHANDRASHEKAR
Director
Himshilp: Internet Marketing Consultants / Rainmaker Interactive Pvt. Ltd.
www.himshilp.com


]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/landing-page-development-tips/feed/ 0 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/google-analytics-individual-qualification-test/ http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/google-analytics-individual-qualification-test/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:17:13 +0000 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/google-analytics-individual-qualification-test/ Continue reading →]]> Google has launched its Google Analytics Individual Qualification. This has been started with a view to provide a way so that one can show that he/she is certified for the proper use of Analytics.

To participate, go to http://google.starttest.com/
Click on purchase now link.
Google is charging $50 for single candidate.
They will provide you a voucher code.
Use this code while login to http://google.starttest.com/

Once you are through with the test, google will provide you a link which will show the test result.
You can use this link on your website, your signature, your blog to show and to gain trust.
Do let me know if you have more details about this, or what you think about this test.

Rainmaker Interactive Pvt. Ltd.
http://www.himshilp.com/


]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/google-analytics-individual-qualification-test/feed/ 0 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/use-meta-tags-effectively-for-your-advantage/ http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/use-meta-tags-effectively-for-your-advantage/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:56:44 +0000 himshilp http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/?p=3 Continue reading →]]> Meta Tags: Meta tags are the HTML tags which are used on a HTML page to provide information about the content of the web page where they are used. Commonly used Meta tags are Title tag, Description tag, Keyword tag.

Meta tags are critical part of the SEO process. One needs to use them effectively. Selecting the right tag can make or break your entire SEO exercise to get listed in top search results.

During the initial days of internet, search engines were solely relying on meta tags about the information regarding the page on which meta tags were placed. This was misused by the webmasters to get their website rank higher and hence post 2000 era, search engines have reduced the dependency on these tags. The tags are still relevant as they provide the basic information to search engine crawlers about the nature of the web page. Majority of search engines have evolved their own algorithms to crawl the web pages and they have their own mechanism where they use the combination of Meta tags and the page content to arrive at certain weight age which is used to place a particular web page in search results.

What you should do with Meta tags

• Use Meta tags on each and every page you wish to get indexed.
• Select content of meta tags in a manner that it is relevant to the web page content.
• Format tags properly and then use.
• Keep the frequency of keywords checked, do not overuse in meta tags.

There are many tools available online which will tell you whether you are using the tags effectively or not. Choosing Meta tags is NO rocket science, it just need a little common sense. Effectively used, it can do wonders.

Rainmaker Interactive Pvt. Ltd.
http://www.himshilp.com
Source for blog – http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/meta-tags.htm


]]> http://getseosolution.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/use-meta-tags-effectively-for-your-advantage/feed/ 1 himshilp