Anchor text boosts Google Rankings

Recently one of my colleagues showed me that if one searches for the phrase ‘miserable failure’ in Google, the page that shows at the top in the search results is the biography page of George W. Bush at the White House website. If you check the content of the page, there is no phrase ‘miserable failure’ anywhere. First I thought maybe some Google engineer must have played some mischief to rank the page high in Google.
However, after doing backlink analysis for the page, I realized that it was the anchor text (link text) which was doing the magic; hundreds of bloggers have linked to Bush’s page using the phrase ‘miserable failure’ as the anchor text. This is a good example of how anchor text can boost Google rankings.
Since anchor text can be used by spammers to trick the search engines, Google’s algorithm also gives importance to other factors such as domain age, link aging and link authority. It is advised not to have the same exact anchor text for all the incoming links to your site; it will be treated as link spamming. You should keep your link profile natural by varying the anchor text.
Postscript: Google has finally defused the Googlebomb which returned the biography page of US President George W. Bush at the top of search results for a search on ‘miserable failure’. For detailed background of Googlebomb, check article by Danny Sullivan.

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Choosing Keywords for better Google Ranking

Keywords are the words average people will search for to find your website. Both on-site optimization as well as off-site optimization SEO efforts start with selecting and targeting the right keywords. It is my experience, however, that many website owners are very unrealistic about the keywords they would like to target.

For example, a used car exporter from Japan wanted me to get his website on the top page of Google for keywords like car, Toyota and Honda. Such keywords are too general and an average person who is looking for importing a Japanese used car will never use these keywords to search for such services. Such single word keywords also have too much competition, and are not likely to convert. It is, therefore, better to start your SEO campaign with longer, specific keyword phrases such as ‘import Japanese used car’ or ‘Japanese used car exporter UK’ – which are easier to rank well in search engines and are also likely to convert better. It makes sense to optimize each page of your website for a variety of keyword phrases. Once you start ranking well for long tail keywords, you can start a SEO campaign for shorter keyword phrases.

There are many keyword research tools like WordTracker available on the web. ‘Google suggest’ is a free tool from Google which you can use to find specific keyword phrases by entering your broad keyword.

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Social Media Websites and Viral Marketing

For those who are new to social media websites, these are sites that enable the readers to vote on popular news/stories, or allow users to bookmark and share interesting web pages and media such as photos, videos and journals. Some of the most popular social media sites are Digg, Reddit, Netscape, Del.icio.us, Furl, Shadows, StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, and Ma.gnolia.com.

These social media websites focus around social topics of discussion, which may or may not have any commercial side. One thing these sites have in common is the desire to share. And, that is what makes them ideal for viral marketing. In the SEO world, viral media creation and marketing – often called link baiting – is increasingly becoming popular. If you can write stories/articles which arouse readers’ curiosity or offer them something that they want, the readers will share your story with others – resulting in a viral effect.

Social media sites thus offer a place for putting your ‘quality content’ where others can notice it; if your content (story) becomes popular with the community users, it will appear high on the lists these social media sites produce. Appearing on the top page of these lists is fast becoming the new search engine marketing (SEM).

Though viral marketing using social media websites can attract lot of direct traffic to your website, such traffic rarely makes any sales or results into subscribers. This is because the profile of the community users who vote for your story may not always match with that of your ideal customers. However, this kind of linkbaiting can create amazing indirect benefits as follows.

1) If your story goes to the top of such social media websites, it can give you hundreds or thousands of valuable inbound links in a few days.

2) Increased inbound link popularity will help your site to rank high in search engines.

3) People will remember your site and thus it can help you in building your brand.

4) Google will make your site more authoritative because of the natural link profile of such inbound links.

Thus, viral marketing using social media websites can be the fastest, cheapest and effective way of building incoming links.

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How to succeed in Digg?

Digg is a community news site where users contribute stories which are voted upon by others. The stories with most votes climb to the top of the list.

Though Digg is popular with a specific niche of tech geeks, it still rules the world of SEO and Viral Marketing. SEO companies charge thousands of dollars to get content to the top of Digg. If a story becomes popular on Digg, the hundreds or thousands of backlinks it can generate can not compare with the links from other social media sites like Reddit or Netscape. Improved search engine rankings due to these inbound links can save thousands of dollars which the website owners otherwise have to pay on search advertising.

Digg is, however, notorious as many diggers are known to gang up and bury down stories from industries they don’t like. So, if you are in niches like automobiles, real estate, finance, travel etc., Digg may not be the right platform for you.

Here are some guidelines to succeed in Digg.

i) Creating compelling headline and description
Digg has a voting mechanism that does not even require the diggers to read the article to vote. Thus, the headline and description of your story is far more important than your content. Headline and description can make or break a Digg submission. You should, therefore, write your headlines with the intent of spreading them – focusing more on arousing curiosity or evoking self-interest of the users.

ii)

<!--[endif]-->Timing your submission to Digg
The key to succeed in social media sites is timeliness, and Digg is no exception. You should submit your story at the right time. If you post your content on your website, but delay submitting your story to Digg, someone else may submit the story using not-so-attractive title and description – thus, ruining your chance to make it to the top.

iii) <!--[endif]-->Never link story to your main landing pagesLinking a story to the main landing pages of your site could be perceived as a form of spamming and may get your site banned. It is, therefore, better to create an article or blog post with link-worthy content and link it to the story you would submit to Digg.

iv) Add Digg button to your siteThis will allow your regular readers to vote for your story easily.

There is no 100% fool proof way to get your content Dugg to the top; however, if you can make it to the top page of Digg, it could do a wonderful job for your publicity and search engine rankings.

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SEO Tips for Title Tags

The title tag is one of the most important tags on a web page for on-page optimization. It is also the first thing that appears within the search results on which the site visitors click to go to the site. Simple SEO stuff like the title tag can make a great difference to how well a site does in the search results. However, many website owners are not even aware about the HTML title tag; they confuse it with the big bold text on the page. Here are some important SEO tips for writing title tags.

1. Title lengths should be limited to 65 characters including the spaces.
2. Use your keyword phrases in the title tag, taking care that the title looks natural and does not appear keyword stuffed.
3. If you wish to use your site name for branding, use your brand or site name at the end of the title tag on every page of your site.
4. Each page of your site should have a unique, descriptive title tag which should match with your page content. It also makes sense to reuse the text in title tag of each page in H1 header tag too – from the viewpoint of on-page optimization as well as for enhancing user experience.
5. Shorter page titles are usually better than long ones. However, longer titles make sense when you don’t want to lose traffic from long tail keywords. You may also combine or overlap many keyword phrases in the page title. For example, a title such as ‘Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Tips’ can help you to rank for keyword phrases such as ‘Search Engine Marketing’, ‘Search Engine Optimization Tips’, etc.
6. A compelling title can attract more eyeballs and clicks when your page appears in search results. You should therefore focus on the art of writing headlines and titles for improving your conversion rate.

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Downside of Linkbaiting

As social media websites like Digg are becoming popular and influential, more and more SEO companies are using ‘linkbaiting’ to get attention on these sites. Digg is the most popular of these social media websites. If a story makes to the top page of Digg, apart from the direct traffic, it can generate thousands of valuable backlinks to the marketer’s website in a few days. Link building using ‘link baits’ is considered as a legitimate technique by search engines including Google; so many SEO companies are adopting Digging as a new SEM strategy. Linkbaiting, however, has a limited downside in spite of its huge potential upside.

Social media websites share topics which are of social nature, so such sites may not suit all kinds of companies, products or services. Ideally a link bait should be a ‘content’ which could help, inform, or create self-interest to the user community; such content is worth remarking on based on its utility to users.

If your product or service is not suitable as a social topic of discussion, and if you create a link bait just to get noticed, your link bait would certainly appear manipulative. Such stunts simply created to attract attention will affect the reputation and credibility of your website. If you are unknown player in the market, you can take this risk; however, manipulative link baits designed to get attention can harm the brand reputation of premier companies. The traffic generated by such attention getting stunts will most likely not convert. And, if your site is remarked on by the wrong crowd – such as tech oriented Diggers, your ideal customers may take you less seriously.

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SEO Tips for launching a new website

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo have become intelligent in the past 4-5 years. It is very difficult to game search engines nowadays by manipulating tags and keyword stuffing. For a new site it may take 6 to 9 months to achieve competitive rankings at Google. From SEO point of view, I recommend the following steps for launching a new website.

i) Registering a domain name
Pick a domain name which either has keywords associated with your product/service or your brand name. It is better to go for short domain names which are easy to remember. If your target market is global, go for a .com domain. If you are targeting a particular country or language, it is better to register a domain name in TLD of that country. For example, go for a .jp or .co.jp domain, if you are targeting Japan. I recommend you to register the domain for at least 2 years; more the better to gain the trust of search engines.

ii) Domain Hosting
Host your site with a reliable hosting company. Stay away from companies which allow hosting of pharmacy, gambling and adult sites, or have a history of serving spam. If you are targeting a particular country/language, it is advised to host your site in that country to boost your rankings in the local search engines for that country/language.

iii) Registering with Search Engines
Since search engines give important to domain aging and can track parameters like the registration date & first crawled date, you better register your site with search engines as early as possible. Even if your site is not fully ready, it is better to make a temporary one-two page site and register with the search engines at the earliest. Getting indexed in MSN may take only 3-4 days, whereas it may take 2-3 months to get indexed in Google and Yahoo. To speed up this process, you should build incoming links from authority websites. More the links a site receives, the less it is ignored by the search engines. It also reduces the Google sandboxing time for new sites. Submitting your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central also ensures that your site would get crawled and indexed regularly.

iv) Build trust with Search Engines
To build trust with the search engines, you should build your incoming links and content at a regular pace. Keep your content unique and relevant to your products/services. Building links from relevant websites will boost your rankings.

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Tips for successful Internet Based Business

SEO alone can not help in making an internet based business successful. Though there are many successful internet millionaires, most web-based businesses fail. Here are some proven tips for building and growing an internet based business.

1. Target a unique niche
If you are creative enough, you can virtually sell anything on the internet. However, you should apply the basic principles of marketing before you decide what product or service you plan to sell on the web. It is better to go for niche segments which do not have many players in the field. If you go for a product for which the market is saturated, it would be difficult and expensive to rank your site high in search engines. You should be able to differentiate your product/services in such a way that the web community would get interested in your site and send you referrals too.

2. Skills and Passion
You should have special skills for the product/service you plan to sell, and have a functional business model to support your internet business. You and the people around you should have passion for the job. So, if you plan to sell used cars on the web, you need to know everything about used cars, and have the right people who can help you in fulfilling the orders. Many internet businesses fail because people do not have the passion for the products/services they sell.

3. Building Trust
Testimonials and referrals play an important role in making your website trustworthy. If you can write a blog on your site where you can show off your work and make efforts to make your business transparent, it could build a feeling of instant trust with the site visitors. Making your site useful with an array of features not available elsewhere also makes a good first impression.

4. Prevent duplication
Though it is very easy to duplicate content, if you can offer features which are difficult to duplicate, it will give you a definite competitive advantage.

5. Control Costs
To keep your internet business profitable, you need to cut costs ruthlessly. Working from home, outsourcing, part-time staff can help you control costs especially in the beginning.

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Google Filter: Minus 30 penalty

Google is harder to manipulate compared to other search engines because of various filters it incorporates in its algorithm to prevent spam. Minus 30 penalty is one such filter for handling spam in Google algorithm.

So, what is this minus 30 penalty? If your site was previously ranking high in Google search results, and suddenly its ranking drops by 30 positions, there is a chance that the minus 30 penalty is applied to your site. Normally, if you do a search on your domain name, you would expect to see your site at the first position; but if you see your site at 31st position, it is very likely that the minus 30 penalty is in force.

Most likely candidates to experience this penalty are affiliate sites which do not add much value for the site visitors. However, many non-affiliate sites also have reported this penalty. Though there is no proven theory which can identify sites which are likely to face this penalty, sites with excessive low quality inbound or outbound links and lots of non-unique content may have a minus 30 ranking penalty applied.

The only solution to avoid this penalty is to have unique content on your site, to get links from well trusted sites and to link to high quality sites. For detailed information, please refer to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

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Multi-lingual websites and Search Engines

Most of my clients in Japan have multi-lingual websites targeted at Japan as well as other foreign countries. So, I always keep looking for techniques which can help to rank well in different local search engines. Recently, I came across a software which claims to improve rankings in Google and other search engines in different languages. Essentially the software creates automatically translated pages of your website in 8 languages. I tested the software and found the automatic translation to be of horrible quality. By merely creating more pages, you can not create quality content. By using such software, you will not only lose your money, but you’ll also lose your prospective customers.

In my experience, it is very difficult to rank a multi-lingual website to rank high across different local search engines. If you really want to target different countries/languages, it is better to have a separate site for each language, and have its content translated by a native speaker of that language. Also, your site will rank better in local search engines if you have domain extension for that country (e.g. .jp for Japan) and you have your site hosted in that country. And, of course, you have to register your site in local search engines. It also makes sense to get links from sites from that country/language.

The additional cost in terms of time, effort and money will definitely bring tons of traffic that converts your prospects well.

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Single Canonical URL for better Google ranking

A Common SEO mistake made by many webmasters is that they are not consistent when it comes to linking to their URLs across their site.

If some of your links go to the URL http://yoursite.com, and the rest go to http://www.yoursite.com/, your link popularity gets divided among these two URLs – thus affecting the pagerank as well as the ranking for that URL. So, it is better to pick the URL that you want and use it consistently across your entire website, as well as for your incoming links. One cannot, however, control how other sites would link to his website. So you have to inform Google which URL you prefer to be canonical. Google calls Canonicalization as the process for picking the best URL when there are many alternatives.

‘Google Sitemaps’ offers an option to select a canonical URL for your site. Another way to achieve canonicalization is by adding a 301 redirect (permanent redirect). So, if you want your default URL to be the www version, then you can 301 redirect your non-www version to the www version. Having a single, canonical version of every URL on your site will improve your site rankings as well as the pagerank.

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Outbound links and Search Engine Rankings

Many webmasters give importance to inbound links, but are reluctant to link out to other sites – trying to hoard the pagerank. However, many search engines including Google grade your pages based on the sites you link to, apart from the content and inbound links.

Linking out if done properly can improve your ranking in many search engines. If you link out to other related sites, search engines may start perceiving your site as an authority site in your niche. When you link out to other sites – especially blogs, the other bloggers may reciprocate by linking back to content on your site. Also, if you provide good information to your site visitors through outbound links, it will enhance the usability and user experience; and you may end up in getting valuable referrals and citations to your site from these users. Thus, outbound links to other related sites can boost your search engine rankings.

You should, however, be careful of who you link to. Bad outbound links can drastically affect your website authority and rankings. The ideal rule to follow is – Do not link to any site which you would not like to associate with. If your site has many random links which are not related to your niche, search engines may start perceiving your site as a link farm or spam site. Some search engines may penalize your site by scoring it low on the perceived authority. Your outbound links may lose their value and may not be able to pass any pagerank juice to the linked sites.

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What is Quality Content for Search Engines?

We often hear the SEO advice that ‘Content is the King’, and search engines like Google favor good quality content. Many people confuse it with creating more pages, and they often end up in buying software like spam site generators, automated content generators and scrapping tools. Many others buy cheap articles and stuff their websites with copies of the articles. However, search engines are not lookinig for such useless garbage which hardly offers any value to the site visitors.

Quality content in short is link-worthy content which is original, conceptually unique and serves as a useful resource for information. And, it refers to the text part of your website. Though keywords matter in your page copy, your page should not look like a keyword stuffed page for search engine robots; you should write for your site visitors focusing on readability and usefulness.

Good quality content has other rewards, too. If people find your content useful and spreading information, they will naturally want to link to your site, and give referrals. Thus, useful pages meant for people can attract links which are very valuable for your ranking in the search engines.

If your pages are copies of pages on other sites, search engines like Google will perceive your site to be of poor quality offering no value. You should therefore create content which people will find useful in your niche. It is better to have few pages with quality content than having thousands of pages filled with garbage. Good content will attract referrals and citations to your site and boost your ranking naturally.

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Site-wide links can hurt your rankings

If a site links to another site from every page, those links are called site-wide links. If you are buying links, it may look as a good option to receive hundreds of incoming backlinks for the price of one link, however, most search engines would count only the most powerful link which is relevant. Site-wide links also make your link profile to look artificial, as you’d have hundreds of incoming links with the sama anchor text. Many SEO forums have reported that side-wide links can actually hurt your ranking in search engines like Google, especially when site-wide links constitute a large percentage of the incoming links.

If most of your link popularity comes from purchased site-wide links, Google will eventually find and eliminate the value of these links. So it is advisable to buy few single links that would fly under the radar.

However, it makes me wonder how Google treats blogroll links. Most blogroll links, by default, are site-wide links – Going by the logic of anchor text, it would mean that it is better not to receive blogroll links from huge blogs having hundreds of pages.

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Matt Cutts announces NoFollow Google Help Center

07 Jun

Posted by Google Success as Google News, Google Search Engine, SEO Tips

Google’s Spam fighting captain, Matt Cutts announced the launch of NoFollow Google Help Center in a video interview today with Mike McDonald of WebProWorld at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Washington, USA.

I wonder why Google has launched the help center for NoFollow. About 99% of the world does not even know what NoFollow links are, and the rest 1% are not going to deliberately ask Google about it. I hope this news will not send another PageRank hoarding panic among the SEOs

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SEO Guide for Beginners from Google

Is Google getting into SEO business? Well, such a move from Google would lead to a potential conflict of interest.  But even Google is telling us that there’s nothing wrong with SEO, and Google’s official Webmaster Central Blog is now formally offering a free “SEO Starter Guide” with practical search engine optimization tips for new webmasters about how to improve their website’s performance in Google.

This search engine optimization guide comes in a  22-page, pdf format. Google uses the same principles inside Google for optimizing its own sites such as YouTube. This starter SEO guide from Google covers dozens of topics such as

• Title tag
• Description Meta Tag
• URL Structure
• Site Navigation
• Content CreationÂ
• Anchor Text
• Heading Tags (H1, H2, etc.)
• Optimizing ImagesÂ
• Effective of Robots.txt
• Rel=”nofollow”
• Website Promotion
• Webmaster Tools
• Web Analytics
• More Helpful Resources

The guide is well written and is aimed at new webmasters and website owners who are looking for basic training in SEO techniques. I feel it is a good guide for newbies, to cover the basics of SEO before they go for more advanced stuff.

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Changing Title Meta Tag can hurt Google Rankings

It is no secret that the title meta-tag is one of the most important factors when it comes to on-page search engine optimization. Search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN give quite a bit of importance to the title and description metatags in their algorithms. What many people, however, do not know that the same title tag could actually hurt your rankings, if you try to change it abruptly with a hope to improve your search engine rankings.

If you are currently ranking well with your page title, you should not risk with changing it to improve your rankings. You may often see your current Google rankings go down with such a change. I myself have experienced negative results when I tried to change the title tag for a site which was already ranking well. In fact, Google slammed the site with a -950 penalty.

Your page title is the main entry gate of search engines. Changing the title meta-tag could easily make your Google rankings fluctuate. If you change your title, Google and other search engines will take some time to reflect rankings for new titles. Especially, it would definitely look suspicious in the eyes of Google and other search engines if you have made the changes in the main title and description tags after a long time.

In short, changing the main title of your site, although it’s already ranking well is not a good idea. Instead of changing the page title to try to have improvements on certain keywords, it is better to work on adding content about those keyword phrases on your page, and add links with appropriate anchor text from sites with relevant content. Google always penalized over-optimization. Now it seems as if it frowns normal search engine optimization too. So the best policy is to optimize the website at the time of creation – Do it once, and do it right !

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What are Google supplemental results ?

Google uses two indexes for its search results. The normal index and the supplemental results index.  Unlike the main index, from which the top results of any query comes from, supplemental search results will only show up if there are very few or no results at all in the main index.

Google prevents questionable pages from being found in the main index by putting them in the supplemental index. Supplemental results are usually shown after the main search results. Pages in supplemental index are crawled less and not trusted by Google. As per Google’s definition of suppemental results

A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

So if your pages end up in the supplemental index, it is very unlikely that your pages will show up in top ranked results for a query. 

１． How to find out if your web pages are in the supplemental results?

An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google’s supplemental results is to search for the following phrase on Google.com

site:www.yoururl.com ***

and proceed to the last result pages to find the supplemental results. Supplemental results will be indicated as ’supplemental’ next to the URL.

2. What kind of pages end up in Google’s supplemental results?

Any of the following factors or a combination of them can cause your pages to be in
the supplemental index.  

• Pages with very little text content.
• Pages with duplicate content.
• Pages with too many query strings in the URL (Dynamic URLs)
• Pages with same meta tags, title and description on every page.
• Pages with very few backlinks.
• Pages with very long file names with lots of dashes.
• Orphaned pages which not linked to any other pages in your site
• Pages with reciprocal links possibly to bad neighbors

Keeping these factors in mind when creating pages will help you avoid getting them in the supplemental index. Very often we see that e-commerce sites with dynamically generated URLs with many parameters often get in the supplemental index.

3. How we can get these pages out of Google’s supplemental index ?

Get some new incoming linksut some fresh content on your pages. Google indexes supplemental pages less, so the backlinks may help.

Rewrite your page title and description tags so that they are descriptive and relevant to your site, taking care that they are not too long or contain repetitive keywords.

You may need to rewrite your PHP code for e-commerce websites using mod-rewrite to simplify the cryptic URLs and also add unique meta tgs to each page.

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SEO Benefits of CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is an external style sheet which gives flexibility to web designers for styling their content within the html documents. CSS is basically used to separate the layout and style code from the main content of the page. In short, CSS is collection of rules which can help you to control appearance of your web page. CSS websites have many benefits over normal html websites, such as consistency in design, faster loading and ease of maintenance. And, if CSS is properly used, it can also benefit the website in on-page SEO(search engine optimization).

The benefit of using CSS is that all the layout and style is removed from the html file, so the size of html file becomes smaller. The Browser downloads the CSS file just once when the visitor visits the site and it is re-used for all other pages on a web site. The reduced file size helps your website to load fast and also be easily crawled by the search engines. Thus, CSS helps to decrease the code-to-content ratio, can make your entire site easier and more efficient to crawl, leading to more and better indexing of your site’s content.

As maintenance of website becomes easy with CSS, you can concentrate on adding fresher SEO content from time to time and make your website rank well in search engine.

Search Engine bots always give priority for content in the website. Search engine bots visit the site for a short duration; they do not like to go through long design codes to find the content for indexing. Tables and font styling tags which are used for designing, makes HTML code little bit difficult to read and reduces the accuracy of indexed content; whereas, with CSS, your HTML code will become cleaner, which improve your search engine rankings.

Also, with the help of CSS, you can move the elements which are important from search engine’s viewpoint to the top of the HTML file. Moving your important content to the top of the html file will help search engines to find your content and index it properly. For example, with little bit of CSS knowledge, you can change the position of your code for menu or header and make it appear below the main content in your website code, thus giving a boost to your search engine ranking.

Looking at all these advantages of CSS for SEO, you can see that use of CSS in website design is definitely useful from SEO point of view.

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Generating Unique Content for SEO

There are millions of websites out there in the cyberspace. However, only a few get really popular. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing rank sites higher in the SERPs (search engine result pages), if the site has fresh and unique content, apart from other factors such as link popularity. Good content is thus very important for search engine rankings and web traffic. That’s why it is often said that the ‘Content is king.

If you have a e-commerce or online business website, you would need regular new content matching the theme of your website. Only if your site has fresh and unique content, the search engine spiders would keep coming back to your site – indexing it on a regular basis, and increasing the site authority – which would ultimately help you in better rankings and increased organic traffic.

One of the best ways to promote your blog or website without spending much time is article marketing. This effective SEO technique can help your website to get many backlinks to your site with the desired ‘anchor text’; these backlinks are essential for getting top search engine rankings. However, you would need to create meaningful articles to get attention of other people towards your website.

You can hire someone or outsource the job to the writer to write website content or articles for you. While this is good way, you have to make sure that the content is unique, readable and has good quality. And, of course, you will have to spend lot of money to get the content written.

You can also purchase PLR articles matching the theme of your website. These are less expensive, but you will have to rewrite some parts of those articles to make them unique. You can use software like DupeFree Pro or online websites like Copyscape.com to assist you in making the rewritten articles unique.

Article directories are also a good source for content. However, if each and every one starts take their articles from these directories and put them on their own blogs or websites then ultimately, duplicate content is going to be an issue. So, again you would need to rewrite the articles for using them on your website.

The content of your website is actually meant for your visitors who come to look for information. You have to think from the perspective of visitors and then write the content – and not just for search engine bots. So avoid using software like article spinners which churn out unique text which may pass Copyscape, but is utter garbage when it comes to human readers.

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Hiring the right SEO expert

01 Oct

Posted by Google Success as SEO Tips, Search Engine

As an online business owner, you need to understand how to drive huge targeted traffic to your website. Without traffic, you can’t get business, and certainly can’t make any sales. There are many different traffic generation methods, and search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the proven methods to get targeted traffic to your website.. If you are new to the Web and just starting out, you would either need to learn SEO or hire an SEO expert in order to promote your website.
SEO technology changes at a rapid pace and you’d need to spend lot of time to keep yourself updated to the latest techniques in SEO. SEO can be a time consuming process. As a businessman, you need to spend your time in developing and growing your business. That’s why it makes sense to hire an SEO consultant to do the work for you. Outsourcing SEO work to a SEO company in countries like India is also a cost effective option to get your SEO job done. However, there are so many self-proclaimed SEO experts that offer tall claims but end up doing your site more harm than good, so you need to take care in selecting the right SEO firm.

Here are few tips for hiring an SEO expert

1. First you’d need to go through some SEO books and get familiar with search engine optimization
2. Sign up to Google’s YouTube channels and watch the some informative videos about search engine optimization
3. Ask for referrals for SEO experts in your professional network. Testimonials and recommendations from your network will filter the fly-by-night SEO experts.

A good SEO expert would have a proven track record. Before you hire any SEO professional, ask him about his previous projects done on other client websites. Ask him what keywords the sites are ranking for, and verify everything yourself. You should also ask him for a proof that the work was done by him and not some other company. Another good test is to check the Google pagerank of the SEO company’s website. You should evaluate each candidate on these criteria or proven rankings and previous results. Find the right SEO expert to work for you, and you will be closer to success.
If you decide to do SEO yourself for your own site, then you must understand that it is very time taking process especially when you are new to this field. And, if SEO is done improperly, your website can actually get penalized by the search engines.
The main goal of any SEO strategy should be to get your website ranked for the keywords your customers will be using to find your products and services, driving traffic to your website and increasing the amount of sales. An expert SEO ensures you that your website will rank high in spite of the constant updates of search engine algorithms.

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How to Add AdSense to Blogger and Make Money from Your Blog?

make account google adsense and they will accept you fast by this  tips

Before You Start

Click on Add a Page Element

Select the AdSense Element

Sign up for AdSense

Configure AdSense

Adjust Your Template

Complete Your AdSense Application and Wait for Verifcation

AdSense will start appearing on your blog, but they will be ads for Google products and public service announcements. These do not pay money.

You will receive an email with a link to the second half of the application for AdSense. You will need to fill out your tax and business information and agree to AdSense terms and conditions. Google will verify that your blog is eligible for AdSense.

Once your application is approved, your ads will change from public service ads to paying contextual ads, if any are available for the keywords within your blog.

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How to put google adsense block in the middle of the post

In normal cases all blogger users can put the adsense block at the top of the post or at the bottom Only.
but the problem here is that alot of bloggers don’t get high CTR ( clicks ) by this placement,
so they should play with the ads placement,
the best solution here is to put you google ads blocks in the middle of the post in your blogspot blog.

and you have to check out Google AdSense heat map

blogger don’t offer this option by default settings, so you have to be tricky to do it,
here is easy and fast way to do it.

go to your blogger account, and navigate to Layout >> edit html, and check check Expand Widget Templates.

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Insert Adsense Inside Your Blogger Post’s Body

If you prefer to place your Google Adsense inside the body of your post instead of the ones already provided on Blogger’s options, then this tutorial will teach you how to insert the Google Adsense code within the body of your post just like you normally would with a pic.

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Change Gadget Color in Blogger Dynamic Views

Still psyched about Dynamic View's gadget features? Well, here's a way to further personalize the gadget to suit your blog, by changing its color. Currently, the gadget's color is set to black by default, with white font. In this post, I'll show you how you can change your gadget's background color, and the font color as well.

Go to Dashboard --> Template --> Customize --> Advanced --> Add CSS --> paste the following code --> Press enter after the last character of the last line } --> Apply to Blog.

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.gadget-icons, .gadget-title, .gadget-content, #gadget-dock, .gadget-menu, .ss{ background: red !important; color: yellow !important; }

The 'background' attribute represents the main background color, while the 'color' attribute represents the gadget's font color. For more personalization options, see the 'Extras' box below.

 

Extras

1) If you'd like to use a more personalised color, use a hex code instead. You can generate hex code based on your preferred color by clicking here. Once you have your hex code, just place it in the code as such

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.gadget-icons, .gadget-title, .gadget-content, .ss { background: #FF2B2B !important; color: #FCD927 !important; }

2) If you'd like to adjust the gadget's link color as well, add the following code to your CSS:

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.gadget-icons a, .gadget-title a, .gadget-content a, .ss a{ color: white !important; }

3) The gadget is made of three different blocks. You can give individual colors to each one of them.

To change the main gadget color (Red in the screenshot above), use the following CSS:

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.gadget-icons, .ss { background: red !important; color: yellow !important; }

To change the color of the pop-out gadget box (White in the screenshot above), use the following CSS:

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.gadget-content, .ss { background: white !important; color: black !important; }

And to change the title field color of the pop-out gadget box (Black in the screenshot above), use the following CSS:

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.gadget-title, .ss { background: black !important; color: white !important; }

You might also like:

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Google Adsense Optimization Tips

What is Google Adsense?
Google Adsense is a free program run by Google that allows you to display Google adverts on your blog/website and pays you everytime someone clicks on one of these ads. Just submit your blog to Google for approval and after your content has been approved, you are ready to place Adsense ads on your website.  But beware, Google Adsense doesn't approve any sites! According to Adsense policy you are not allowed to do the following things:

1) Do not click on your own Adsense ads by any way.
2) Do not increase Adsense ad impressions with some automating tools.
3) Don’t ask others to click on your ads.
4) Don’t alter the Adsense code other than fonts and colors.
5) Don’t put Adsnese code on adult or prohibited content.

Some basic optimization tips can double your Adsense revenue, so i've added a list of some of the best Google Adsense Tips and Tricks for making more money from the Google Adsense program.

Tips to Increase Google AdSense Earnings

1) Place the Adsense ads above the main fold that user can see your ad units without scrolling down on your site. This will increase your Ads Click Through Rate (CTR)

Because browsers and screen sizes vary, Google has created a nice tool that allows you to enter any URL, and check whether you've implemented your ads above the fold.

2) The best performing ad units for AdSense are:

250×250 Square
160×600 wide skyscraper
336×280 large rectangle
300×250 medium rectangle

Use them wisely. I suggest you to place 250 x 250 size ad units at the top of every post and align it at the right or left side of the post content. The 160×600 ad format can easily fit in the sidebar of your blogger blog.

3) You can use the following “heat map” provided by Google to analyze other top performing ad placement slots. You should concentrate on the areas with darker orange color which represents the hot spots of the ads slots. (see in the image below)




4) Text ads are good for the first Google Ad unit. I also recommend you to place a 300×250 unit in the sidebar (or somewhere below the fold) – these generally serve CPM based ads and will help you monetize visits from places like Digg and StumbleUpon.

5) Ads placed in-between the content can also perform well. If you have small posts then put ads at the top of the page content. If you have big post then ad units placed at the bottom or middle of the post.

6) Do not use borders to your text ads or use them wisely.

7) To blend, choose the colors that match with the colors of your website: for example if your site background is black, you will put the same background for your Adsense ads. If your links are blue, then select the color blue for Adsense links. If your titles are red, then make your Adsense block titles red.

8) To complement, use colors that already exist on your site, but don't match the background and borders exactly where the ads are placed.

9) To contrast, choose colors that stand out against the background of your site. Contrasting is recommended only for sites with dark background, so we suggest using an ad style with white background, white borders, and blue titles. (google hints)

10) Use link units near the site navigation bar. The main advantages of this placement, are that they can perform well and you don't need too much Ad space on your site. This way, your site looks clean and also, your visitors will be annoyed.

11) Study your keywords and the target ads to these keywords. Usually, Google Adsense crawler searches for the first or second paragraph to target ads to that page so don't forget to add your page-targeted keywords at the beginning of your post.

12) MFA (made for AdSense) sites are websites created around AdSense keywords, and often, these are poor quality sites with little or no original content. Use Allow and block ads feature to block low paying or irrelevant ads showing on your site. And be careful when you're doing this, sometimes one ad unit can give you $0.01 in one country and $1 in other country.

13) Use Google Adsense ad preview tool to view what ads are showing on your site.

14) Many times you can earn you more adsense revenue from Image search engines than with the regular web traffic. Upload good quality images and use text captions with alt tags to make sure that blog images rank good in Image Search results.

15) Add a search box at the top left region of your blog and use the word "search" in the submit button otherwise visitors might be confused and might not notice it. If you use a second search box, put it at the bottom of your pages.

If you have any other suggestions, please let me know.
Good luck!

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Make Money with Google Affiliated Ads

Earn money blogging by integrating Google Affiliate Ads with your Blogger posts. It’s easy, and it will show link and image ads which run through your AdSense account. Watch the video to get started.

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Multiple Accounts Integration with Google AdSense

Here’s good news for those who run a single blog and want to have Google AdSense in their site. Now, revenue sharing is made possible by Google through its launch of Multiple Accounts Integration with Google Adsense.

Before, AdSense could only be accessed through a single account so only  sole blog owners were able to benefit from it and it caused some problems for those blogs with multiple owners. The latest AdSense feature can be accessed by your partners by using access levels to control who gets the authority in the account.

There are two access levels that you can assign to others:

1. Standard user. The standard user can view, edit, manage any part of the account but they can’t see the list of users who have access to the account and can’t change another user’s access level.
2. Administrator. Administrators can also edit, view and manage any part of the account. The difference  is that they can see the list of users who hold access to that account and can change their access level.

Here are tips by Qasim Zaib on how to invite a user to your account:

1. Sign in to your AdSense account. Under Home, open Account Settings from left panel.
2. Go to Access and authorization. Indicate email addresses in the Users with sign in access section. Click Invite. They will be added until they accept the invite. Users listed in the sign in access section will get access to your account.

Note: The users you invite should have Google Account to access yours and those who have Google AdSense of their own already can’t access other accounts.

Change/Revoke Access to Your Account:

1. Go to Access and Authorization in Account Settings.
2. Click the (x) button next to each user that you will see in the Users with sign in access section. The user will then be notified of the change through email.

All users are in Standard by default so checking the Administrator box will give them Administrator privileges.

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How To Add Adsense Ads In Blogger Dynamic Views

How To Add Adsense Ads In Blogger Dynamic Views

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blogger’s Dynamic Views template has received mixed reactions since it was finally introduced, while some users love using the new design layouts, some didn’t quite enjoy the fact that you can’t use your current gadgets with it and even add new ones – and that includes the use of Adsense ads. Well, not anymore.

Fortunately, Vijay Prakash from BloggerTrickz.biz came up with a way to add Adsense ads into Blogger Dynamic Views and decided to share a tutorial on how to do it with the rest of the Blogger community. At the moment, the only supported ad sizes are 728x90px and 160x1600px. So how do you accomplish this? Read on below.

• In your Blogger dashboard, head over to the “Earnings” section.

• Here you can apply for a new Adsense account or create a link to your existing Adsense account.

Once you have finished setting up your Adsense account with Blogger blog, you’ll have two options:

• Show ads on blog – choosing this will display the ads on the sidebar, above/below the posts, or on both.

• Show ads on feeds – this will show the ads via feed, which will also have its own set of options like positioning (top, bottom), ad type, etc.

And that’s all there is to it! Check and review your site and you should now see your Adsense ads using Blogger’s Dynamic Views.

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Tips to Increase Your Blog’s Crawl Crate in Google

Tips to Increase Your Blog’s Crawl Crate in Google

Crawl rate refers to the speed of Googlebot’s requests during the crawl process in your blog. If you want to increase your blog’s crawl rate, here are simple tips courtesy of Chandeep of Blog Tips n Tricks.

• Update your blog regularly. You may add an RSS Feed widget and social media widgets as search engine crawlers like blogs with regular updates.
• Optimize load time. Avoid having huge scripts that will make your page load for so long because the crawler works on limited time. If it spends too much time crawling your Javascripts, the tendency is there will be no time left to visit the other pages of your blog.
• Get a good page rank by having more backlinks. To get a good page rank, you need to have more backlinks because as you increase your blog’s ranking, the more your page is crawled.
• Text content. Having a lot of images won’t get a good ranking in search engines as Google bots love textual content.
• Don’t duplicate content. Avoid duplicate content as the New Google Algorithm is very strict on plagiarism.
• Add a sitemap. A sitemap is a great solution to have your posts and pages crawled faster.

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Lugas

Features:

Instructions:	Template Settings / How to use this template
Template author:	Iksandi
Description:	Lugas is a free blogger template with 2 columns, right sidebar, gallery-styled, perfect for photologs, footer columns, social icons, neutral colors and posts thumbnails. Excellent layout for blogs about photography. Download Lugas for free in BTemplates.
Rating	3.8 out of 5 based on 88 bloggers.

download

https://rapidshare.com/files/1060685471/Lugas.zip

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iTech

Features:

Instructions:	Template Settings / How to use this template
Template author:	PBTemplates
Designer:	FThemes
Description:	iTech is a free blogger template adapted from WordPress with 3 columns, sidebar on the right and left, space for ads, footer columns, slideshow, abstract, geometric motifs, posts thumbnails, tabs and drop down menu. Download iTech for free in BTemplates.
Rating	4.5 out of 5 based on 84 bloggers.

download

https://rapidshare.com/files/4279829894/iTech.zip

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blogger templates

Wordpress template for blogger

Template author:	PBTemplates
Designer:	New WP Themes
Description:	Modern Cars is a free blogger template adapted from WordPress with 2 columns, right sidebar, space for ads, slideshow, social icons, posts thumbnails, tabs and drop down menu.

download

https://rapidshare.com/files/3857555127/ModernCars.zip

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