SEO Interview Questions

Technical / Tactics

Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.

1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience?

2. Can you write HTML code by hand?

3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?

4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?

5. What do you think of PageRank?

6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?

7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?

8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?

9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?

10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?

12. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?

13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.

14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?

15. If the company whose site you've been workind for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?

16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements?

17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.

18. What do you think about link buying?

19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?

20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?

23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?

24. What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?

25. What's the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

Analysis

A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competiting sites.

1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic
search results vs. a type-in user?

3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?

4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?

5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?

6. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?

7. How many target keywords should a site have?

8. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?

9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?

10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Industry Involvement

Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.

1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?

2. In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?

3. Have you attended any search related conferences?

4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).

5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

6. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?

7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?

8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

9. Who are the two key people - who started Google?

10. Who is Matt Cutts?

11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?

Open-Ended
These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.

1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project?

2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?

3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?

4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?

5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?

6. Can you get “xyz� company listed for the keyword “Google� in the first page?

7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?

8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

Contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Optimization, Over-Optimization or SEO Overkill?

The fight to top search engines' results knows no limits – neither ethical, nor technical. There are often reports of sites that have been temporarily or permanently excluded from Google and the other search engines because of malpractice and using “black hat” SEO optimization techniques. The reaction of search engines is easy to understand – with so many tricks and cheats that SEO experts include in their arsenal, the relevancy of returned results is seriously compromised to the point where search engines start to deliver completely irrelevant and manipulated search results. And even if search engines do not discover your scams right away, your competitors might report you.

Keyword Density or Keyword Stuffing?
Sometimes SEO experts go too far in their desire to push their clients' sites to top positions and resort to questionable practices, like keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical practice because what you actually do is use the keyword in question throughout the text suspiciously often. Having in mind that the recommended keyword density is from 3 to 7%, anything above this, say 10% density starts to look very much like keyword stuffing and it is likely that will not get unnoticed by search engines. A text with 10% keyword density can hardly make sense, if read by a human. Some time ago Google implemented the so called “Florida Update” and essentially imposed a penalty for pages that are keyword-stuffed and over-optimized in general.

Generally, keyword density in the title, the headings, and the first paragraphs matters more. Needless to say that you should be especially careful not to stuff these areas. Try the Keyword Density Cloud tool to check if your keyword density is in the acceptable limits, especially in the above-mentioned places. If you have a high density percentage for a frequently used keyword, then consider replacing some of the occurrences of the keyword with synonyms. Also, generally words that are in bold and/or italic are considered important by search engines but if any occurrence of the target keywords is in bold and italic, this also looks unnatural and in the best case it will not push your page up.

Doorway Pages and Hidden Text
Another common keyword scam is doorway pages. Before Google introduced the PageRank algorithm, doorways were a common practice and there were times when they were not considered an illegal optimization. A doorway page is a page that is made especially for the search engines and that has no meaning for humans but is used to get high positions in search engines and to trick users to come to the site. Although keywords are still very important, today keywords alone have less effect in determining the position of a site in search results, so doorway pages do not get so much traffic to a site but if you use them, don't ask why Google punished you.

Very similar to doorway pages was a scam called hidden text. This is text, which is invisible to humans (e.g. the text color is the same as the page background) but is included in the HTML source of the page, trying to fool search engines that the particular page is keyword-rich. Needless to say, both doorway pages and hidden text can hardly be qualified as optimization techniques, there are more manipulation than everything else.

Duplicate Content
It is a basic SEO rule that content is king. But not duplicate content. In terms of Google, duplicate content means text that is the same as the text on a different page on the SAME site (or on a sister-site, or on a site that is heavily linked to the site in question and it can be presumed that the two sites are related) – i.e. when you copy and paste the same paragraphs from one page on your site to another, then you might expect to see your site's rank drop. Most SEO experts believe that syndicated content is not treated as duplicate content and there are many examples of this. If syndicated content were duplicate content, that the sites of news agencies would have been the first to drop out of search results. Still, it does not hurt to check from time if your site has duplicate content with another, at least because somebody might be illegally copying your content and you do not know.

Links Spam
Links are another major SEO tool and like the other SEO tools it can be used or misused. While backlinks are certainly important (for Yahoo backlinks are important as quantity, while for Google it is more important what sites backlinks come from), getting tons of backlinks from a link farm or a blacklisted site is begging to be penalized. Also, if outbound links (links from your site to other sites) considerably outnumber your inbound links (links from other sites to your site), then you have put too much effort in creating useless links because this will not improve your ranking. You can use the Domain Stats Tool to see the number of backlinks (inbound links) to your site and the Site Link Analyzer to see how many outbound links you have.

Using keywords in links (the anchor text), domain names, folder and file names does boost your search engine rankings but again, the precise measure is the boundary between topping the search results and being kicked out of them. For instance, if you are optimizing for the keyword “cat”, which is a frequently chosen keyword and as with all popular keywords and phrases, competition is fierce, you might not see other alternative for reaching the top but getting a domain name like http://www.cat-cats-kittens-kitty.com, which no doubt is packed with keywords to the maximum but is first – difficult to remember, and second – if the contents does not correspond to the plenitude of cats in the domain name, you will never top the search results.

Although file and folder names are less important than domain names, now and then (but definitely not all the time) you can include “cat” (and synonyms) in them and in the anchor text of the links. This counts well, provided that anchors are not artificially stuffed (for instance if you use “cat_cats_kitten” as anchor for internal site links this anchor certainly is stuffed). While you have no control over third sides that link to you and use anchors that you don't like, it is up to you to perform periodic checks what anchors do other sites use to link to you. A handy tool for this task is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis, where you enter the URL and get a listing of the sites that link to you and the anchor text they use.

Finally, to Google and the other search engines it makes no difference if a site is intentionally over-optimized to cheat them or over-optimization is the result of good intentions, so no matter what your motives are, always try to keep to reasonable practices and remember that do not overstep the line.
contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs

There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site's database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database.

But there is a risk when using dynamic URLs: search engines don't like them. For those at most risk of losing search engine positioning due to dynamic URLs are e-commerce stores, forums, sites utilizing content management systems and blogs like Mambo or WordPress, or any other database-driven website. Many times the URL that is generated for the content in a dynamic site looks something like this:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

A static URL on the other hand, is a URL that doesn't change, and doesn't have variable strings. It looks like this:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/the-challenges-of-dynamic-urls.htm

Static URLs are typically ranked better in search engine results pages, and they are indexed more quickly than dynamic URLs, if dynamic URLs get indexed at all. Static URLs are also easier for the end-user to view and understand what the page is about. If a user sees a URL in a search engine query that matches the title and description, they are more likely to click on that URL than one that doesn't make sense to them.

A search engine wants to only list pages its index that are unique. Search engines decide to combat this issue by cutting off the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =).

For example, let's look at three URLs:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date
http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=67890&sort=date
http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=13579&sort=date

All three of these URLs point to three different pages. But if the search engine purges the information after the first offending character, the question mark (?), now all three pages look the same:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php
http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php
http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php

Now, you don't have unique pages, and consequently, the duplicate URLs won't be indexed.

Another issue is that dynamic pages generally do not have any keywords in the URL. It is very important to have keyword rich URLs. Highly relevant keywords should appear in the domain name or the page URL. This became clear in a recent study on how the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, rank websites.

The study involved taking hundreds of highly competitive keyword queries, like travel, cars, and computer software, and comparing factors involving the top ten results. The statistics show that of those top ten, Google has 40-50% of those with the keyword either in the URL or the domain; Yahoo shows 60%; and MSN has an astonishing 85%! What that means is that to these search engines, having your keywords in your URL or domain name could mean the difference between a top ten ranking, and a ranking far down in the results pages.

The Solution
So what can you do about this difficult problem? You certainly don't want to have to go back and recode every single dynamic URL into a static URL. This would be too much work for any website owner.

If you are hosted on a Linux server, then you will want to make the most of the Apache Mod Rewrite Rule, which is gives you the ability to inconspicuously redirect one URL to another, without the user's (or a search engine's) knowledge. You will need to have this module installed in Apache; for more information, you can view the documentation for this module here. This module saves you from having to rewrite your static URLs manually.

How does this module work? When a request comes in to a server for the new static URL, the Apache module redirects the URL internally to the old, dynamic URL, while still looking like the new static URL. The web server compares the URL requested by the client with the search pattern in the individual rules.

For example, when someone requests this URL:
http://www.somesites.com/forums/the-challenges-of-dynamic-urls.html

The server looks for and compares this static-looking URL to what information is listed in the .htaccess file, such as:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule thread-threadid-(.*)\.htm$ thread.php?threadid=$1

It then converts the static URL to the old dynamic URL that looks like this, with no one the wiser:
http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345

You now have a URL that only will rank better in the search engines, but your end-users can definitely understand by glancing at the URL what the page will be about, while allowing Apache's Mod Rewrite Rule to handle to conversion for you, and still keeping the dynamic URL.

If you are not particularly technical, you may not wish to attempt to figure out the complex Mod Rewrite code and how to use it, or you simply may not have the time to embark upon a new learning curve. Therefore, it would be extremely beneficial to have something to do it for you. This URL Rewriting Tool can definitely help you. What this tool does is implement the Mod Rewrite Rule in your .htaccess file to secretly convert a URL to another, such as with dynamic and static ones.

With the URL Rewriting Tool, you can opt to rewrite single pages or entire directories. Simply enter the URL into the box, press submit, and copy and paste the generated code into your .htaccess file on the root of your website. You must remember to place any additional rewrite commands in your .htaccess file for each dynamic URL you want Apache to rewrite. Now, you can give out the static URL links on your website without having to alter all of your dynamic URLs manually because you are letting the Mod Rewrite Rule do the conversion for you, without JavaScript, cloaking, or any sneaky tactics.

Another thing you must remember to do is to change all of your links in your website to the static URLs in order to avoid penalties by search engines due to having duplicate URLs. You could even add your dynamic URLs to your Robots Exclusion Standard File (robots.txt) to keep the search engines from spidering the duplicate URLs. Regardless of your methods, after using the URL Rewrite Tool, you should ideally have no links pointing to any of your old dynamic URLs.

You have multiple reasons to utilize static URLs in your website whenever possible. When it's not possible, and you need to keep your database-driven content as those old dynamic URLs, you can still give end-users and search engine a static URL to navigate, and all the while, they are still your dynamic URLs in disguise. When a search engine engineer was asked if this method was considered "cloaking", he responded that it indeed was not, and that in fact, search engines prefer you do it this way. The URL Rewrite Tool not only saves you time and energy by helping you use static URLs by converting them transparently to your dynamic URLs, but it will also save your rankings in the search engines.

contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Spiders Explained

Basically all search engine spiders function on the same principle – they crawl the Web and index pages, which are stored in a database and later use various algorithms to determine page ranking, relevancy, etc of the collected pages. While the algorithms of calculating ranking and relevancy widely differ among search engines, the way they index sites is more or less uniform and it is very important that you know what spiders are interested in and what they neglect.

Search engine spiders are robots and they do not read your pages the way a human does. Instead, they tend to see only particular stuff and are blind for many extras (Flash, JavaScript) that are intended for humans. Since spiders determine if humans will find your site, it is worth to consider what spiders like and what don't.

Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames?
Flash, JavaScript and image text are NOT visible to search engines. Frames are a real disaster in terms of SEO ranking. All of them might be great in terms of design and usability but for search engines they are absolutely wrong. An incredible mistake one can make is to have a Flash intro page (frames or no frames, this will hardly make the situation worse) with the keywords buried in the animation. Check with the Search Engine Spider Simulator tool a page with Flash and images (and preferably no text or inbound or outbound hyperlinks) and you will see that to search engines this page appears almost blank.

Running your site through this simulator will show you more than the fact that Flash and JavaScript are not SEO favorites. In a way, spiders are like text browsers and they don't see anything that is not a piece of text. So having an image with text in it means nothing to a spider and it will ignore it. A workaround (recommended as a SEO best practice) is to include meaningful description of the image in the ALT attribute of the tag but be careful not to use too many keywords in it because you risk penalties for keyword stuffing. ALT attribute is especially essential, when you use links rather than text for links. You can use ALT text for describing what a Flash movie is about but again, be careful not to trespass the line between optimization and over-optimization.

Are Your Hyperlinks Spiderable?

The search engine spider simulator can be of great help when trying to figure out if the hyperlinks lead to the right place. For instance, link exchange websites often put fake links to your site with _javascript (using mouse over events and stuff to make the link look genuine) but actually this is not a link that search engines will see and follow. Since the spider simulator would not display such links, you'll know that something with the link is wrong.

It is highly recommended to use the <'noscript'> tag, as opposed to _javascript based menus. The reason is that _javascript based menus are not spiderable and all the links in them will be ignored as page text. The solution to this problem is to put all menu item links in the <'noscript'> tag. The <'noscript'> tag can hold a lot but please avoid using it for link stuffing or any other kind of SEO manipulation.

If you happen to have tons of hyperlinks on your pages (although it is highly recommended to have less than 100 hyperlinks on a page), then you might have hard times checking if they are OK. For instance, if you have pages that display “403 Forbidden”, “404 Page Not Found” or similar errors that prevent the spider from accessing the page, then it is certain that this page will not be indexed. It is necessary to mention that a spider simulator does not deal with 403 and 404 errors because it is checking where links lead to not if the target of the link is in place, so you need to use other tools for checking if the targets of hyperlinks are the intended ones.

Meta Keywords and Meta Description

Meta keywords and meta description, as the name implies, are to be found in the <'META'> tag of a HTML page. Once meta keywords and meta descriptions were the single most important criterion for determining relevance of a page but now search engines employ alternative mechanisms for determining relevancy, so you can safely skip listing keywords and description in Meta tags (unless you want to add there instructions for the spider what to index and what not but apart from that meta tags are not very useful anymore).
contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Web Directories and Specialized Search Engines

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is the lion's share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you do, topping Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not literally but in terms of effort and time) to top Google and keep there is too high. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate SEO nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can't use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about possible alternatives.

What are Google Alternatives
The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for the other major search engines, if you have not done it already. Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors, though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, do not expect much.

Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.

Naming all Google alternatives would be a long list and it is outside the scope of this article but just to be a little more precise about what alternatives exist, we cannot skip SEO instruments like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

"Web Directories"
What is a Web Directory?
Web directories (or as they are better known – search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop directories, where you gather files in a directory based on some criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind (otherwise it will be impossible to browse thousands of pages for let's say Computers), search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore) and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search directory.

The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Examples of Web Directories
There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites. Other popular general-purpose search directories are Google Directory and Yahoo! Directory. The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites.
Besides general-purpose Web directories, there are incredibly many topical ones. For instance, the The Environment Directory
lists links to environmental sites only, while The Radio Directory lists thousands of radio stations worldwide, arranged by country, format, etc. There are also many local and national Web directories, which accept links to sites about a particular region or country only and which can be great if your site is targeted at local and national audience only. You see, it is not possible to mention even the topics of specialized search directories only because the list will get incredibly long. Using Google and specialized search resources like The Search Engines Directory, you can find on your own many directories that are related to your area of interest.

Specialized Search Engines
What is a Specialized Search Engine?
Specialized search engines are one more tool to include in your SEO arsenal. Unlike general-purpose search engines, specialized search engines index pages for particular topics only and very often there are many pages that cannot be found in general-purpose search engines but only in specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for every imaginable topic and it is always wise to be aware of the specialized search engines for your niche. The examples in the next section are by no means a full list of specialized search engines but are aimed to give you the idea of what is available. If you search harder on the Web, you will find many more resources.

Examples of Specialized Search Engines
Probably specialized search engines are not that numeric as Web directories but still certainly there is no shortage of them either, especially if one counts password-protected sites with database accessible only from within the site as a specialized search engine. As with Web directories, if there were a list of specialized search engines it would be really, really long (and constantly changing), so instead, here are some links to lists of search engines: Pandia Powersearch, Webquest, Virtual Search Engines the already mentioned The Search Engines Directory, etc. What is common for these lists is that they offer a selection of specialized search engines, arranged by topic, so it is a good starting point for the hunt of specialized search engines.
contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

Why Use a Sitemap?
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.

Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).

If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.

Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.

Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.

Generating and Submitting the Sitemap
The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.

Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.
The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.

After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.

Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

Difference between HTML sitemap and XML sitemap:-
HTML Sitemap-
HTML sitemap is used to list all hyperlinks or the link of all pages of website into a single page. These hyperlinks are normally listed hierarchically and they may provide description for each link. To adding HTML sitemap to your website will help your visitors navigate and find information easily. So HTML sitemap is mainly created for humans. Although a HTML sitemap is created for your visitors, indexing bot such as Googlebot might have a better chance to crawl your first-time-missed links again since all the files are well put together in your sitemap page.

XML Sitemap-
XML sitemap lists URLs (world wide web addresses) for your website in a xml code. See below the example of an url in xml.
IMPORTANT NOTE PLEASE READ FIRST:
follow ( and ) as <> respectively IN BELOW XML CODE because my blogs is not supporting this bracket tag . but u have to change them when u will use.

( means <>) means > ok please correct them.

(?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?)

(urlset xmlns="”http://www.sitemaps.com/schemas/sitemap/0.9″")
(url)
(loc)http://www.yoursdomain.com (/loc)
(lastmod)2009-01-20 (/lastmod)
(changefreq)monthly (/changefreq)
(priority) 0.6 (/priority)
(/url)
(/urlset)
XML site map is mainly for search engine crawler not for visitor. It allows webmasters to inform search engines about URLs in your website for easy indexing. Submitting a XML sitemap to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN will not only help your website being indexing rapidly and proficiently but also increase your website’s visibilities in search engines as well.

contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Jumping Over the Google Sandbox

Sandbox and Aging Delay
While it might be considered unfair to stop new sites by artificial means like keeping them at the bottom of search results, there is a fair amount of reasoning why search engines, and above all Google, have resorted to such measures. With blackhat practices like bulk buying of links, creation of duplicate content or simply keyword stuffing to get to the coveted top, it is no surprise that Google chose to penalize new sites, which overnight get tons of backlinks, or which are used as a source of backlinks to support an older site (possibly owned by the same company). Needless to say, when such fake sites are indexed and admitted to top positions, this deteriorates search results, so Google had to take measures for ensuring that such practices will not be tolerated. The sandbox effect works like a probation period for new sites and by making the practice of farming fake sites a long-term, rather than a short-term payoff for site owners, it is supposed to decrease its use.

Sandbox and aging delay are similar in meaning and many SEO experts use them interchangeably. Aging delay is more self-explanatory – sites are “delayed” till they come of age. Well, unlike in legislation, with search engines this age is not defined and it differs. There are cases when several sites were launched in the same day, were indexed within a week from each other but the aging delay for each of them expired in different months. As you see, the sandbox is something beyond your control and you cannot avoid it but still there are steps you can undertake to minimize the damage for new sites with new domains.

Minimizing Sandbox Damages
While Google sandbox is not something you can control, there are certain steps you can take in order to make the sandbox effect less destructive for your new site. As with many aspects of SEO, there are ethical and unethical tips and tricks and unethical tricks can get you additional penalties or a complete ban from Google, so think twice before resorting to them. The unethical approaches will not be discussed in this article because they don comply with our policy.

Before we delve into more detail about particular techniques to minimize sandbox damage, it is necessary to clarify the general rule: you cannot fight the sandbox. The only thing you can do is to adapt to it and patiently wait for time to pass. Any attempts to fool Google – starting from writing melodramatic letters to Google, to using “sandbox tools” to bypass the filter – can only make your situation worse. There are many initiatives you can take, while in the sandbox, for as example:

Actively Gather content and Good Links__
As time passes by, relevant and fresh content and good links will take you to the top. When getting links, have in mind that they need to be from trusted sources – like DMOZ, CNN, Fortune 500 sites, or other reputable places. Also, links from .edu, .gov, and .mil domains might help because these domains are usually exempt from the sandbox filter. Don't get 500 links a month – this will kill your site! Instead, build links slowly and steadily.

Plan Ahead__ Contrary to the general practice of launching a site when it is absolutely complete, launch a couple of pages, when you have them. This will start the clock and time will be running parallel to your site development efforts.

Buy old or expired domains__ The sandbox effect is more serious for new sites on new domains, so if you buy old or expired domains and launch your new site there, you'll experience less problems.

Host on a well- established host__ Another solution is to host your new site on a subdomain of a well-established host (however, free hosts are generally not a good idea in terms of SEO ranking). The sandbox effect is not so severe for new subdomains (unless the domain itself is blacklisted). You can also host the main site on a subdomain and on a separate domain host just some contents, linked with the main site. You can also use redirects from the subdomained site to the new one, although the effect of this practice is also questionable because it can also be viewed as an attempt to fool Google.

Concentrate on less popular keywords__ The fact that your site is sandboxed does not mean that it is not indexed by Google at all. On the contrary, you could be able to top the search results from the very beginning! Looking like a contradiction with the rest of the article? Not at all! You could top the results for less popular keywords – sure, it is better than nothing. And while you wait to get to the top for the most lucrative keywords, you can discover that even less popular keywords are enough to keep the ball rolling, so you may want to make some optimization for them.

Rely more on non-Google ways to increase traffic__ It is often reminded that Google is not the only search engine or marketing tool out there. So if you plan your SEO efforts to include other search engines, which either have no sandbox at all or the period of stay there is relatively short, this will also minimize the damages of the sandbox effect.

contributed by, Abhishek SEO

What is Robots.txt ?

Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of password protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door – e.g. you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will not open to door and enter. That is why we say that if you have really sen sitive data, it is too naïve to rely on robots.txt to protect it from being indexed and displayed in search results.

The location of robots.txt is very important. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory (i.e. http://mydomain.com/robots.txt) and if they don't find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything they find along the way. So, if you don't put robots.txt in the right place, do not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

The concept and structure of robots.txt has been developed more than a decade ago and if you are interested to learn more about it, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/ or you can go straight to the Standard for Robot Exclusion because in this article we will deal only with the most important aspects of a robots.txt file. Next we will continue with the structure a robots.txt file.

Robots.txt
It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you'd rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search engines do not index these pages (although in this case the only sure way for not indexing sensitive data is to keep it offline on a separate machine). Additionally, if you want to save some bandwidth by excluding images, stylesheets and javascript from indexing, you also need a way to tell spiders to keep away from these items.

One way to tell search engines which files and folders on your Web site to avoid is with the use of the Robots metatag. But since not all search engines read metatags, the Robots matatag can simply go unnoticed. A better way to inform search engines about your will is to use a robots.txt file.

Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

User-agent:

Disallow:

“User-agent” are search engines' crawlers and disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded from indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at the beginning of the line:

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

The Traps of a Robots.txt File
When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to find but in some cases validation tools help.

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except the /temp directory. Up to here it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user agents (including Googlebot itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ - including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made easily.

Tools to Generate and Validate a Robots.txt File
Having in mind the simple syntax of a robots.txt file, you can always read it to see if everything is OK but it is much easier to use a validator, like this one: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml. These tools report about common mistakes like missing slashes or colons, which if not detected compromise your efforts. For instance, if you have typed:

User agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

this is wrong because there is no slash between “user” and “agent” and the syntax is incorrect.

In those cases, when you have a complex robots.txt file – i.e. you give different instructions to different user agents or you have a long list of directories and subdirectories to exclude, writing the file manually can be a real pain. But do not worry – there are tools that will generate the file for you. What is more, there are visual tools that allow to point and select which files and folders are to be excluded. But even if you do not feel like buying a graphical tool for robots.txt generation, there are online tools to assist you. For instance, the Server-Side Robots Generator offers a dropdown list of user agents and a text box for you to list the files you don't want indexed. Honestly, it is not much of a help, unless you want to set specific rules for different search engines because in any case it is up to you to type the list of directories but is more than nothing.
contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Optimizing Flash Sites

If there is a really hot potato that divides SEO expert and Web designers, this is Flash. Undoubtedly a great technology to include sounds and picture on a Web site, Flash movies are a real nightmare for SEO experts. The reason is pretty prosaic – search engines cannot index (or at least not easily) the contents inside a Flash file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of course, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were plain text, these workarounds are just a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, although certainly they are better than nothing.

Why Search Engines Dislike Flash Sites?
Search engines dislike Flash Web sites not because of their artistic qualities (or the lack of these) but because Flash movies are too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly, as they do with a plain page of text. Spiders index filenames (and you can find tons of these on the Web), but not the contents inside.

Flash movies come in a proprietary binary format (.swf) and spiders cannot read the insides of a Flash file, at least not without assistance. And even with assistance, do not count that spiders will crawl and index all your Flash content. And this is true for all search engines. There might be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time beings, search engines are really united – they hate it but they index portions of it.

What (Not) to Use Flash For?

Despite the fact that Flash movies are not spider favorites, there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. But as a general rule, keep Flash movies at a minimum. In this case less is definitely better and search engines are not the only reason. First, Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them. Second, Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection or better is still not the standard one.

Basically, designers should keep to the statement that Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it – i.e. you have some text with the main points of the story (and the keywords that you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie to add further detail or just a visual representation of the story. In that connection, the greatest SEO sin is to have the whole site made in Flash! This is is simply unforgivable and do not even dream of high rankings!

Another “No” is to use Flash for navigation. This applies not only to the starting page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie but external links as well. Although it is a more common mistake to use images and/or javascript for navigation, Flash banners and movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.
Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites
Although a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be optimized. There are several approaches to this:

Provide Alternative Pages
For a good site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages.

Input metadata
This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.

Flash Search Engine SDK
This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. As it name implies, this tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious job to do it manually.
However, you still need to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if necessary. For example, the order in which the text and links is arranged might need a little restructuring in order to put the keyword-rich content in the title and headings or in the beginning of the page.
Also, you need to check if there is no duplicate content among the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color of the extracted text is also another issue. If the font color of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will run into hidden text territory.


SE-Flash.com
Here is a tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is visible to search engines and what is not. This tool is very useful, even if you already have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed because it provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Besides, it is not certain that Google and the other search engines use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so this tool might give completely different results from those that the SDK will produce.

These approaches are just some of the most important examples of how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well. However, not all of them are brilliant and clear, or they can be classified on the boundary of ethical SEO – e.g. creating invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the Flash movie itself. Although this technique is not wrong – i.e. there is no duplicate or fake content, it is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages and it is better to avoid it.


contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Keyword Difficulty

Dreaming High - Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?
After you have made a long and detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have chosen popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have chosen keywords for which top positioning is achievable with reasonable effort. If you have many competitors for the keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every SEO knows, if you can't be on the first page (or on the second and in the worst case on the third one) of the organic search results, you'd better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those particular words is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can't count on that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the good results?

You can feel discouraged that all lucrative keywords are already occupied but it is too early to give up. Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition.
The SEO expert "Abhishek SEO" confirm that it is possible with less effort and within budget to achieve much better results with low-volume search keywords than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.
You may also want to check for several keywords or keyword phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance, if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly with credits and loans, and some of your keywords are finance, money, credit, loan, and mortgage, running a check with the seochat's Keyword Difficulty Toolproduces results like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the idea): finance - 89%, money - 76% credit - 74% loan - 66% mortgage - 65%.
It seems that the keyword finance is very tough and since your site is targeted at credits and loans and not on stock exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance, there is no need to cry over the fact that it is very difficult to compete for the finance keyword.

The results were similar with the second tool, though it does not give percentages but uses a scale starting from Very Easy to Very Difficult. I did not check all the results with the third tool, because it seems that the seomoz report on keyword difficulty for a particular word needs ages to be compiled but the results were similar, so it becomes clear that it is more feasible to optimize for mortgage and loan, rather than for the broader term finance.

You may want to bookmark some of these tools for future use as well. They will be very useful to monitor possible changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have optimized your site for the keywords you have selected, occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you are already optimizing for because the percentages are changing over time and if you discover that the competition for your keywords has increased, make some more efforts to retain the gained positions.
contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Bing Optimization & Conversion Rate Optimization

Is Bing Really That Different?
The first impression you get when you go to Bing.com is that it is different – the background makes it cute but sure, there have been many other cases of search engines with tons of graphical frills to disguise their irrelevant search algorithms. However, when you type a search term, the results you get are a pleasant surprise because they are relevant.

It is this relevance of search results that worries SEO experts. The results you get when you search with Bing are relevant, yet they are very different from Google's. Actually, no matter if you search with Google or with Bing you get relevant results and the two sets are very different from one another.
One of the most important things SEO experts are curious to know about Bing is its algorithm. Obviously, Bing's algorithm is different from Google's because when the search term is the same but the set of results is different, a difference in the algorithm is the obvious answer. Actually, the question is exactly what is different between the two algorithms and if the difference is so drastic that it makes it mandatory to reoptimize a site for Bing.

What Do I Need to Do In Order to Optimize My Site for Bing?
Wait. This is the first thing you need to do. Right now it is too early to say what steps (if any) are required in order to optimize your site for Bing.

Additionally, no matter how promising Bing looks, it is still early to predict if it will become a real competitor to Google or if it will become one more failed attempt to dethrone Google. Let's see how users react – will they start Binging more or will they stick to Google. When it becomes clear that Bing will be able to make it, then it will make sense to optimize for it as well. So for now the best you can do is wait.

Which Factors Make a Site Rank Well With Bing?
As you probably guess, the exact algorithm of Bing is not publicly available and because of that there is a lot of speculation about what weighs more for Bing (in comparison to Google) and what weighs less. Many SEO experts test different search queries, analyze the results, and based on that try to figure out what of the known SEO tactics works with Bing. For instance, these tests are quite interesting.

Some SEO experts even think that Bing is actually Live Search in new clothes (i.e. user interface), while others say that there are noticeable differences between Live Search and Bing. But there is no doubt that for now Bing is a significant improvement over Live Search in terms of relevance of search results.

Bing is hardly the first time when there is no agreement in the SEO community about the intricacies of the algorithm but if we can summarize, here are some factors, which are (or at least are strongly believed to be) of importance when Bing optimization is concerned:
Backlinks are of less importance: If you compare the first 10 results in Bing and Google, it is noticeable that all equal, the winners in Bing have less backlinks than the winners in Google. It is unclear if nofollow matters with Bing.
Inbound Anchor Text Matters More: The quantity of quality inbound links might be of less importance for Bing but the anchor text certainly matters more. Actually, since anchor text is one of the measurements of the quality of inbound links, it isn't much different. Get quality anchor text and you will do well in both Bing and Google.
Link spamming won't do much for you on Bing: Since the quantity of backinks (even if they are of supreme quality) seems to be of less importance to Bing, link spamming will be even less effective than with Google.
Onpage factors matter more than with Google: This is one of the most controversial points. Many SEO experts disagree but many also think that onpage factors matter more with Bing than with Google. Still, it has nothing to do with the 90s, when onpage factors were definitive.
Bing pays more attention to the authority of the site: If this is true, this is bad news for bloggers and small sites because it means that search results are distorted in favor of older sites and/or sites of authoritative organizations. Age of domain is also very important with Bing – even more than with Google.
PR matters less: When you perform a search for a competitive keyword and you see a couple of PR2 or even PR1 sites among the top 10 results, this might make you wonder. On Google this is hardly possible but on Bing it looks quite normal.
Fresh content matters less: Bing looks a bit conservative – or maybe it just can't index sites that quickly – but it seems that fresh content is not so vital as with Google. This is related to the age of domain specifics and as a result you will see ancient pages rank high (but these ancient pages are relevant to the search query).
Bing is more Flash-friendly: Optimizing a Flash site for Google is a bit of a SEO nightmare. It is too early to say but it looks like Bing is more Flash-friendly, which is good news to all sites where Flash is (still) heavily employed.
For now it is too early to say which factors are of primary importance with Bing. But the fact that their search results are relevant means that their algorithm is really precise. Well, maybe the relevant results in Bing are due to the fact that web masters were taken by surprise and they haven't had the time to optimize for Bing. As a result, the content is authentic, there are no SEO gimmicks and artificial pumping. We'll see if this will stay so in the future, when web masters learn how to optimize for Bing as well!!!




Conversion Rate Optimization
What is Conversion rate optimization ? what makes it much wider in scope then search engine optimization and social media optimization?

Social Media optimization and Search Engine Optimization helps any online business to get instant and target traffic. After getting instant traffic next step is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) which is the practice of converting visitors into customers.

Conversion of real time visitor to customer is the most important task to do it require lots of analytics skills , user behavior monitoring , successful landing page optimization etc. conversion is something like monitoring real time visitor action on your website by analytics professionals. Real time visitor perform any action like making an enquiry, filling web form, subscribing e-newsletter, download whitepaper etc. when you personally involve in your website monitoring then you will see that more than 70% of your visitors will hit the BACK button immediately on arriving at your website, and only about 30 of every 1000 visitors will actually convert into a customer. CRO(converstion rate optimization) will help you turn more visitors into customers.

Conversion Rate Optimisation is one of the most important. After all, why spend time and money with Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Optimisation just to find that the first thing your visitor does on arriving at your website is press the BACK button.

The best way to understand your visitors desires is by looking at your website statistics provided by your Hosting company, or by other website performance monitoring tools such as Google Analytics, aw stats, Omniture, HBX (WebSideStory), WebTrends, CoreMetrics, ClickTracks, IndexTools, Unica NetInsight. These statistics tools can provide a wealth of information to find out why and where visitors are leaving your website.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Bounce Rates for any website is defined as visitors who press the BACK button immediately on arriving at your website. You may be surprised to find that Bounce Rates of 50% are quite typical for small websites. This means that half of your visitors either doesn’t like, or more importantly, DO NOT SEE what you are offering in your site. One of the best ways to help your real time visitors is to find the information you want them to find is by removing things like unnecessary advertising, images and links.

Conversion Rate Optimisation helps visitors to find what they are looking for. Visitors scan your web page from top-left to top-right and then down to bottom-left, all being done within a fraction of a second. This is called the Golden Triangle. This is enough time to decide whether this web site offers the information they are searching for. Help your visitors find what they are looking for by putting your content here and making it as clear as you can.

Static Optimisation is good as it improves the usability of your website with the use of clear navigation to your Landing Pages (targeted pages where you want your visitors to go) and the reduction of distracting links, images and text. Similar to Home Staging, Conversion rate optimization should clear the clutter from your website and leave your visitors looking at the message you want them to see.

Dynamic Optimization is all about improving the stickiness of your website, i.e. getting visitors to want to return again. Visitors need a reason to bookmark a website or add it to their favourites, and just by the fact that your website has been found, just isn’t enough. Visitors want to interact, share information, and they also want content on demand. There are many ways to help keep your visitors returning and these include offering a Forum, Newsletter and live RSS Feeds to name a few.

All of these simple techniques add functionality to your website, bringing it alive and giving your visitors a much more enjoyable Internet experience.
contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Top 10 SEO Mistakes...!

1: Targetting the wrong keywords
This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2: Ignoring the Title Tag
Leaving the <"title"> tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <"title"> tag shows in the search results as your page title.

3: A Flash website without a html alternative
Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

4: JavaScript Menu's
Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

5: Lack of consistency and maintenance
If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6: Concentrating too much on meta tags
A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.

7: Using only Images for Headings
Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet.

8: Ignoring URLs
Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

9: Backlink spamming
It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. Here are some more information on The Importance of Backlinks

10: Lack of Keywords in The Content
Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.
contributed by, Abhishek SEO

How to Build Backlinks?

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

contributed by, Abhishek SEO

Search Engine Optimized Content

We have all heard the phrase "content is king," and unique content indeed reigns supreme. However, beyond the mantra of writing highly unique content, exists additional SEO copywriting secrets. Some of these "secrets" are simply SEO guidelines that simply get neglected from being applied to the art of copywriting. Let’s look at some applications of SEO in generating search engine optimized content.

1. Including Target Keyphrases

Apart from achieving a moderate keyword density for your target keywords, you should be including your target keyphrases as well. (You should be doing this concurrently). Your title and header tags need to include your main keyphrase, which should also be sprinkled throughout your content. Other ingredients to your search engine optimized content cake are variations to the main keyphrase, along with secondary target keyphrases.

Note: It’s perfectly alright to deviate slightly to secondary keyphrases, as well as overlap keyphrases between pages on your website. If anything, this will make your entire website more relevant and help maintain authority.

2. Optimal Content Length

Writing search engine optimized content also involves having an optimal content length (word count). There should be enough textual content there for spiders to crawl and find useful, but not to the point of losing usability to your visitors. A rule-of-thumb is to have about 250 words per page, which is approximately half a page of text.

I personally believe that a few paragraphs up to a page is sufficient, and the nature of the page needs to be accounted for too.

For example, certain online commerce pages should only have two paragraphs max (if even that). On the other hand, it would be appropriate for more technical or literature-based websites to be lengthier. This common sense mindset plays into the "usability" factor mentioned earlier.


3. High Quality Content

If content is king, then great content would make for a great king. Quality writers who can actually write at a high level will be in demand, and this ability will become essential to the success of next-gen SEOs. The basis for high quality content (other than the betterment to user experience) is the likability factor.

Whether search engine optimized in the traditional sense or not, well-written content lends itself to being respected and thus linked to from other sources.

4. Clickable Titles

Remember that our endgame is to get visitors onto our website and following through with our call to actions. Getting to this point will require searchers to click our titles. This means that the title and content snippet (description) that shows up in SERPs should be considered as advertising copy.

We can apply this consideration by also thinking of our ad copy as a call-to-action in itself! Include benefit statements around your content and in the title. Give a sense of urgency through time-sensitive messages. The key is to get that click-through to your web pages. Unique titles for each product page helps as well.
contributed by, Abhishek