January 3rd, 2010 by Vishal Panchal

As you work toward a program of building links to your site, one important factor to consider is “who” will be doing the work.Correct suggests dropping the term “link building” because it implies “quantity over quality.” It’s important to focus instead on the idea of reaching out to others and building quality connections that make sense.

Concentrate on offering something of value to the online community/industry to demonstrate why they should visit your site. Would you leave that job to an intern? Keep this in mind as you read these other link building ideas.

Write an Insightful Article

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can be a great way to get links back to your Web site. Identify something of value you can contribute to your industry, then write a detailed article and submit it to a few article directories like Ezine Articles, Article City, and Go Articles. The opportunity to get backlinks comes from the author bio that goes with the article, so don’t forget to add keyword-rich anchor text links pointing back to your Web site when writing your bio.

Link Building with Social Media

Social media sites can be a good source for developing good quality links. As you participate in the many conversations online, you have the opportunity to place links in appropriate places.

Here are a few places that offer link juice to stories that are submitted:

• Twitter: Your tweets can include links back to your site, and often these links are picked up and added to sites that monitor twitter conversations.

• Digg: Links to your site are featured in Digg stories. If you end up on a top page, the link to your site will be considered higher quality (i.e. more link juice).

• Reddit: Links to your site are also featured in Reddit stories. Again, if you make it to the top pages, you’ll get a great boost to your incoming link power.

There are many other similar sites out there, including Mixx, Backflip, and Mister Wong. An important feature of these sites: they allow search engines to follow their links to your site. Always be aware that some sites will provide you with “link juice” while others won’t due to nofollow.

Generating Links with Twitter

We’ll elaborate a little more on Twitter because of its popularity and potential for building quality links. This may not be the first thing you think of when you think about Twitter, but it can be one of the best tools to gain targeted, relevant, and natural links to your site. However, like any link building strategy, it must be done properly, or you’ll end up wasting a lot of time with poor results.

Here are some general guidelines for building quality links with Twitter:

* Build a profile around a specific topic and stick to it. The more focused your profile is, the better your chances of attracting relevant followers and links.

* Provide relevant, focused, and valuable tweets. Focus on news, content, and links that are of high interest to your intended audience. The more valuable the information/link is to the reader, the more likely they are to follow you and ultimately provide you with links from their own blogs/sites. Avoid too many tweets about your personal life or other content unrelated to your specific niche.

* Tweet often and consistently. Be consistent in your use of Twitter. The more active you are in the conversations pertaining to a specific topic, the better your results will be.

* Identify the major players in your topic/industry. Twitter is a great resource for identifying the heavy hitters of a specific topic. A simple Twitter search on targeted keywords will reveal the movers and shakers of a specific niche. Once you’ve identified these people, network with them via Twitter and through other channels if appropriate.

* Integrate Twitter into your Web site. This will greatly improve your chances of finding good, targeted followers. A simple “Follow Me on Twitter” link/button can be added to your site quite easily. More advanced options include widgets that show your latest tweets and your followers on your site.

Again, if you think of link building as more about making quality connections rather than just placing links, you’ll come out stronger in the long run. Also remember to think in terms of offering something of value to others.

Search engine maketing, Search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, SEO Expert, SEO GURU, SEO Tactics

January 3rd, 2010 by Vishal Panchal

Picking the right goals is key to the success of any SEO effort. A surprising number of companies focus on what they think are the right goals.When the wrong goal is selected, SEO energy gets invested in the wrong ways and the ROI on the SEO project ends up being lower. Let’s look at a few examples of non-optimal goals.

Rankings

This remains a popular goal for many businesses. People frequently contact us and let us know that their goal is to rank number one for a particular search term. The problem with this goal: new businesses generally don’t get top rankings.

Imagine that they succeed at their goal of ranking number one for their term. Perhaps they increase their Web site sales by 10 percent as a result. This is indeed a good result, right?

But, what if they could have taken the same SEO energy and increased relevant traffic to the site by 20 percent, and grown sales by 20 percent? With 70 percent of the relevant traffic to a site generally coming from long tail terms, this scenario is actually pretty likely.

The SEO strategy to drive relevant long tail traffic isn’t the same as it is to drive a single term to the number one position. So would you prefer a 20 percent increase in business or a 10 percent increase? Granted, we shouldn’t discount the branding value of being number one, but most businesses would rather get the extra cash.

Traffic

A lot of companies focus on increasing their traffic. This is closer to the right goal, but many companies can also run into problems here. The problems with it were outlined very nicely by Market Motive’s John Marshall in “Don’t Buy Traffic, Buy Intent.”

Imagine that you could double the traffic to your Web site. Sounds good, right?

Well, if the traffic isn’t relevant, it might not be so good. Maybe you end up with only a 10 percent increase in sales. Whereas if you bring in 20 percent more traffic that has strong buying intent, you might be able to increase sales by 20 percent. Which would you choose?

“X” New Links Per Month

This is a popular goal. Some people believe that they need 50 new links per month. The cousin of this is seeking out a target cost per link, which I covered in “Cost Per Link is a Bad Metric.”

If someone tells me that they will be happy if we give them 50 links per month, I can contract that work out to India for $500 or so, give them 100 links per month, do no work at all (because our contractors doubled their goal), and look like a hero (for a while).

The problem is that those 100 links may have marginal results on their business, and really do little to grow it. Also bear in mind that in the world of link building that one link can easily be worth 10,000 times more than another link, if it’s from an authoritative and relevant site.

Summary

The problem with poorly selected goals is that it focuses your energy in the wrong directions. Sadly, we have a grim example unfolding in front of us of how a poorly selected set of goals can come back haunt you. I’m referring to the current recession, which was clearly driven by sales-at-any-cost goals, resulting in a lot of financial institutions taking on bad debt (because it increased sales), which looked great until they couldn’t collect on the debt.

This idea of picking the right goals applies almost anywhere you look in life. In the world of SEO, you need to tie your SEO goals as tightly as you can to the broader goals of your business.

If your goal is to increase sales, leads, or impressions (for advertising-based sites), tie your SEO goals to those metrics. You’ll be glad that you did.

Search engine maketing, Search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, SEO Expert, SEO GURU, SEO Tactics

October 18th, 2009 by Vishal Panchal

If you’re new to Twitter, the whole thing can be a mind-boggling experience, when first you start trying to follow, tweet, and join the Social Networking revolution via Twitter. Here are some basic functions every effective Twitter user should know.

1.Profiles in Twittering. Before you even attempt to dive into the Tweet pool, take a moment or three to set up your profile. It’s easy and effective for letting others know that you are a serious Twitter user. Profiles with no personal info kind of scream SPAMMER! Make sure you add a picture of yourself, or at least something you like. Leaving the Brown Avatar up for display screams Twitter BOT! Type lists something interesting about yourself or a favorite quote. Add a link to your blog, your website-anything that can connect others to you will bring about positive results!

2. Do you have an agenda? Why are you taking the Twitter plunge? Do you want to meet and connect with others on a social or business level? Do you want to find those who work in the same field as you? People who live in your city or state? These are important things to consider, when beginning with Twitter, and can help you locate others to follow and with whom to connect.

3.When joining Twitter, no matter your age, you may want to consider how you behave in public. Don’t be rude. Don’t tweet utterly useless, degrading or incendiary things, unless of course your sole purpose is to be ignored. Follow the adage: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything”

4.Once you begin to tweet, you’ll see tweets that you’d like to comment on, directly to the person who spoke. When doing so, you need to use the Reply arrow, located to the right of that person’s tweet. This brings up a symbol, plus their username in your Tweet Box. Use this space to reply directly to what they said. When doing this, it connects your response to theirs, and lets them know exactly what you are responding to, because they can then click on the link included in your response that says “in reply to Username”. This keeps conversation flowing, and eliminates lots of “Huh, what do you mean” or “What are you talking about” tweets!

5.As for other spiffy tricks, you can use the # symbol + a keyword, if you want people to find your tweets when they are using the search function. You can also conduct Twitter searches yourself, using the Search link at the bottom of your page. Type in the # symbol and keyword you are looking for, hit search, and you will be provided with a list of Tweets that match your terms. See Helen Bradley’s Tags in Twitter article in the resource section for more in depth guidance on tags.

6.When you find tweets with links or info that you don’t have time to visit right then, you can add them to your favorites for later reference. Simply click on the blank star above the Reply arrow. The star turns yellow, and when you’re ready to review, just visit your Favorites folder on your navigation menu.

SEO GURU

October 11th, 2009 by Vishal Panchal

A customer walks into the store, browses through products and shelves, picks up items, inspects, considers the prices, chooses a product and takes it to the cash register to pay. Now if you want to sell your products online, then your site must be enabled for e-commerce, where you must have the following features:

•  You need to provide plenty of content and product description like sizes, dimensions, colors and comparisons with other similar products. It must allow the customer to choose a product, get a clear pricing and shipping costs on the product, complete the transaction and get an order number, and/or invoice confirmation via email. Allow your customer to choose a shipping method.
•  You must tell the customer if the item is in stock or delivered against order. Ideally, you should have an email contact or live help if the customer has a question. Most importantly you must respond immediately! If you want to provide your own live chat and help desk services on your website, specialized softwares are available for purchase.
•  Be sure your customer service links are large and clearly marked, so your client does not have to dig around to find information.
•  Provide an ‘about us’ section or a section about your policies. If you have privacy statements and customer satisfaction policies, your customer will feel better about shopping in your store.
•  You probably want to have customer quotes and references on the storefront page, as well, to let your prospective client know that others are happy with your service.
•  Provide an FAQ with information about your return-back policies, guarantees, shipping prices and insurance charges if any.
•  If you are so inclined, you can offer a print catalogue if the customer prefers to order one from your storefront and shop in the privacy of their homes.
•  Do not annoy your customers by presenting products that are marked ‘sold’ or pages that say ‘under construction’ or ‘coming soon’.
•  Do add new content frequently, so your returning customers will not be bored by seeing the same products they saw four months ago.
•  If your site has got a date tag or has current references, be careful to change these references frequently so you don’t give the perception that nobody is attending or reading your site.

SEO Expert, SEO GURU

October 11th, 2009 by Vishal Panchal

If one can implement the tips as suggested, there would be a definite increase in PR and SERPs. Find the tips as suggested below.

1. Good On Page Optimization – Adding targeted keywords relevant to the content in the web page with good search volume, keyword rich titles and description would make the On Page optimized.

2. Website Design and Navigation – Good user friendly template, internal linking within the website would make the website rank well in search engines. Appealing user friendly look of the website and the easy navigation would make the visitor visit the website repeatedly. Due to this, there would be an increase in the word of mouth which would indirectly lead to increase in the viral traffic. If the website is gaining good traffic, the website would be ranked well in SERPs as traffic is one of the parameters in the analysis.

3. Building Unique content – Updating new content in a website twice a week would make the spider crawl the website repeatedly and index the pages. Due to the continuous updates in the keyword rich content, spider would rank the website well in search engines.

4. Building Back Links – Building relevant high PR back links with consistency on a daily basis would rank the website top in SEs. Make sure to follow a specific strategy in building links. Reason, if there is no steady graph of back links has been maintained in building back links, SEbots would recognize the website as a low profile website due to the poor performance. Also, if you’ve added more back links all of a sudden, SEbots would recognize the website as a spammer and penalize the website by dropping the SERPs.

5. RSS Feed Submissions – Subscribing relevant RSS Feed and submitting it various Feed website once in a week would allow new content to be updated in the website and build more popularity as well. Due to RSS Submissions, SEbots would recognize the website as more user friendly and allot a good rank.

6. Building authorized back links – Building .edu, .gov, .org etc back links would improve the website’s link popularity and helpful in improving the PR.

SEO GURU