Seo

22/06/2019

16/06/2014

https://www.facebook.com/DigitalMindsSoftwareSolutions/posts/635787026517752?fref=nf

16/06/2014

https://www.facebook.com/DigitalMindsSoftwareSolutions/posts/635787929850995?fref=nf

16/06/2014

https://www.facebook.com/DigitalMindsSoftwareSolutions/posts/635788343184287?fref=nf

22/05/2014

http://seostrategies2014.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/google-begins-rolling-out-panda-4-0-now/

Google’s Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm. Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from work...

22/05/2014

http://seostrategies2014.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/google-panda-4-0-complete-detail-about-panda-4-0/
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Is eBay A Big Loser In Google’s Panda 4.0 Update? — Winners & Losers Data Yesterday, Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed to punch low-quality content. That’s generated both...

07/05/2014

Who says social media doesn’t convert? Seth Godin noted: “You can use social media to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers, and customers into salespeople.

http://seostrategies2014.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/build-a-social-media-marketing-funnel/

Who says social media doesn’t convert? Seth Godin noted: “You can use social media to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers, and customers into salespeople.” You already know that eve...

03/02/2014

Index Your Content Faster With the Fetch as Google Tool

Utilizing the various functions that Google Webmaster Tools has to offer is a surefire way to help keep your website running like a well-oiled machine. Two tools our SEO team uses on a regular basis and finds to be extremely beneficial are the Crawl Errors report and Sitemap submission tool.

Amongst the toolkit is the Fetch as Google option, which also gives users an opportunity to submit their URL to the index. Surprisingly, this tool is often under-utilized by bloggers, webmasters, and SEO strategists. This is a convenient way to speed things up considerably if you have new content that you'd like to be discovered and found in the SERPs.

Website owners and marketers often publish new web pages or blog posts on their website, sit back, and wait for them to show up in the Google search results. But that can take weeks or even months to happen! The more savvy marketers will ensure that any new content is included in their XML sitemap and then resubmit their sitemap to Google and Bing.

Submitting your link to the index using the Fetch as Google tool is like pressing a magic button. Google states that they will crawl the URL using this method usually within a day, however, I've seen web pages and blog posts show up in the SERPs in less than 5 minutes of using this tool.

I was once on a phone call with a marketing consultant who was asking me how long it took for a new page to show up in Google search results. He mentioned that he and his webmaster had built a new web page two months prior and it still wasn't showing up in the search results no matter what he Googled. His webmaster kept telling him it could take weeks and to just wait.

I submitted his web page using the Fetch as Google tool during the conversation and before we hung up, it was showing up in the SERPs. He was blown away, and I came out looking like a hero.

The tool is really easy to use. Give it a try. The steps are provided below.
Step 1: Visit Google Webmaster Tools

Note: If you haven't verified your website with Google Webmaster Tools yet, see Simon Heseltine's article Google Webmaster Tools: An Overview for step-by-step instructions.

From the Google Webmaster Tools home screen, select the domain name, expand the Crawl menu, and then click Fetch as Google menu link.

18/09/2013

30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically


Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.

The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.

They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.

Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.

The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.

OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:


Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullsh*t” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

30/08/2013

5 Horrible Mistakes When Doing SEO

There are a number of things you should avoid doing when hiring a SEO company or doing your search engine optimization yourself. There are countless SEO companies that promise you the world, and even more “goldmine” programs that promise you instant riches. These are to good to be true, though. All to often I will do a consultation with a client on their SEO and find a number of mistakes; the following tips should be kept in mind when considering SEO work.

Keyword Research

Believe it or not people make a huge mistake when doing keyword research. This is one facet of SEO you can NOT overlook. People typically will go for the home run, meaning a keyword that gets a ton of organic hits per day. They don’t understand that for some massively competitive keywords you’re going to use careful and precise planning in order to even compete with the big boys on Google.
From a glance it (big volume keywords) looks promising but they don’t realize they either need to have deep pockets and lots of time where they can afford to spend lots of money with little to no ROI. Sure, I am not going to argue the fact that keywords that get tons of views are enticing, but it’s better to start of slow. Go for the ones that get medium to low searches per month.

For instance, you can go for a keyword that gets less searches (for example 25,000 per month) and then target harder keywords. Ideally you want to search for medium to low keyword searches with relatively low competition. Once you master the easier ones you can then try harder ones.

As a general rule I would target keywords that get 10,000 searches per month and about 10,000 competing sites. You can check the search with the Google Keyword Tool and then go to Google and type in “keyword here” in parenthesis. This will show you the amount of competition that is competing for your keywords.

Lacking Onpage Optimization

Like most things in life you have to have a good solid foundation to build a house and SEO is no different. If you have a poorly optimize site with crappy content all of your search engine optimization efforts are going to be wasted.

Tips For Good Onpage Optimization

Keywords in title tags.
Keywords in description tags.
Keywords in H1, H2, and H3 tags.
Good internal linking structure.
No crawl errors.
Solid content that is very valuable (the longer the better).
Building Links To Quickly
It’s been said that between the turtle and rabbit the turtle wins the race. Why because the turtle paces himself while the rabbit expends all his energy and gasses out. SEO is no different than a marathon. If you try to build your links too quickly Google will raise red flags and you run the risk of getting your site sandboxed or deindexed.

So how should you build backlinks in a way which Google loves? Slow and steady. This could mean building 5 backlinks in a week for 3-5 months. You can gradually increase the number of 5 links to 10,15,20 per week, but make sure you don’t go overboard and build 10,000 in a week and then nothing. This looks awfully spammy in Googles eyes and you don’t want to go down that road. Believe me I am speaking from experience.

Any good SEO consultant will tell you SEO takes time and their is no loophole that is going to allow you to get first page listings on Google quickly. If fact if you see the phrases “get ranked in Google fast” close the window immediately because its simply not going to happen. Sorry to state that but it’s the sad truth. Proper SEO takes time and it’s typical to work on it for 6-12 months. For massively hard keywords I have even worked at it for 3 years!

Bad Backlinks

One of the most controversial topics between SEO’s is; can backlink hurt you? The answer is yes and no. Yes in the fact that if you build a bunch of links from nasty sites Google will view your site as a dirty site. This simply means you’re in a bad neighborhood.

Low value links such as a spam blog, profile links, forum links, stacks of wiki links, spun content, paid links can cause your links to get devalued by Google once they find out about it. Believe me they will in time if you choose to take part of any of the crappy backlink building tactics mentioned above.

Furthermore, you want to be very safe when deciding to link to another site. If it looks somewhat controversial or risky I wouldn’t even bother linking to the website. As a general rule of thumb make sure you avoid backlink building tactics that have a clear footprint.

Overdoing Your SEO

Believe it or not overdoing your SEO can have detrimental effects on your SEO efforts. This would include keyword stuffing, exact anchor text, and aggressive link building velocity.

Keyword stuffing would be considered as the following:

Using your keywords more than once in your title and description.
Bolding and italicizing your keywords only.
Using multiple H1 tags with your keywords.
To high keyword density. (3% or below)
Hidden text covered up by images.
Exact anchor text would include:

Not mixing up your keywords anchors enough.
Using all the same keywords.
Not using your branded url (which is how 70% of your links should be).
Aggressive link building would be:

Building a ton of backlinks and then nothing.
Backlinks with a clear footprint.
Spammy backlinks done with automated programs.
Massive link wheels.
Spun articles blasted to various article directories.
Spam blog guest posting.
The above information on SEO can save you a lot of headaches later on down the road. If you choose to do any of the following non suggested techniques above it’s on you. You have no one to blame but yourself. It makes no difference whether you hire someone to do your SEO or do it yourself, but please just make sure you’re not making any of the above mistakes. I just want to burn it into your brain that there is no fast way around SEO work that will stand the test of time.

In my 2+ years of SEO I have seen people making the following mistakes over and over again. What else can you add to the list of things you should avoid when doing SEO work?

30/05/2013

SEO reporting should answer these questions for your client:

Are our efforts helping us reach our organic search goals?
What SEO tasks were completed last month in relation to ur goals?
What impact did these efforts have on the web presence for organic search?
What new opportunities were identified to optimize for organic search?
Are there any new competitive threats?

So how do you set up your SEO data, metrics and reporting to prove this progress and set the stage for the subsequent month? How do you set up your SEO team for success?

Follow these four steps with month-end reporting in mind for more successful SEO outcomes.

1. Set Expectations

Clarify what SEO is compared to what it isn't.

Most of us know that SEO is not just about ranking first in Google for the preferred set of keywords, but the people you have to report to might not be on the same page. Set the expectation early in the relationship that SEO is more than just rank, and that SEO ranking data isn't the be all and end all of SEO reporting. Setting this expectation is key.

SEO is the on-going process of discovering and uncoveringhighly converting unbranded keyword phrases that are driving organic search traffic and conversion then taking action across the web presence to improve upon impact and create new impact. Impact in the form of increased organic search traffic and conversions, expansion of keywords you are being found for, content footprint index, etc.

Metrics that demonstrate the impact of your SEO efforts include:

Organic traffic/visits
Organic position
Conversions by keyword
On-site and off-site indexed pages
2. Set Goals & Benchmarks

Quantifying the starting point will help clarify the final outcomes.

Agreeing on and setting goals for the SEO project is obviously key and will help maintain focus. Including those goals in the monthly SEO report will remind your client or your boss of what the overall reason for the investment is after the project gets going.

Let's face it, it's easy to forget why we thought SEO was important. To prove impact, setting goals and benchmarking the current web presence is necessary.

A couple examples of realistic goals to work toward are:

"To increase traffic from organic search by 20 percent over the next two months."
"To triple the number of highly converting unbranded keywords."

To help demonstrate progress with these goals, benchmarking certain metrics and including the benchmark values in the monthly report is key.

SEO metrics to benchmark to demonstrate progress and achievement of the agreed upon goals include:

Organic search traffic both as a percentage of overall website traffic and the number of unique visitors.
Backlink diversity.
Unbranded keywords found in anchor text.
Social signals by social channel.
Number of unbranded keywords driving traffic.
Number of unbranded keywords driving conversions.
Number of indexed pages.

3. Set up Goals and Conversions in Analytics

Doing SEO without goals and conversions set up in analytics is a fruitless exercise.

If SEO is about understanding highly converting unbranded keywords that are driving organic search traffic and conversions, then doing SEO without goals and conversions set up in analytics makes this task next to impossible.

Whether you're using Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Omniture, or another analytics system, it is important to set up even some simple goals. Think about the website in question and what you consider a successful visit to be.

More advanced goals can be set up as you get to know the website and the behavior of the visitor, but if you're looking for some simple goals to get started in order to understand successful keywords here are two:

Time on Page: If the time the visitor stays on the page is greater than 2 or 3 minutes then this can be considered a conversion. One can conclude that whichever keyword the visitor searched on to get to the site matched the content on the page plus they stayed a reasonable amount of time to read the content.
2+ Pages Visited: Similarly to Time on Page, number of pages visited can help indicate that the visitor is engaged with the content. Knowing the keyword they searched on to arrive at the page will help to discover new unbranded keywords that ought to be optimized for.

Make time every week to discover and uncover new highly converting keywords. Identify them in your monthly report, discuss them with your client as well as the opportunities you have identified to create on-site and off-site content for these keywords. This is an upsell opportunity for SEO services.
4. Set Metrics & Drive Action Items

Metrics without action items are useless.

SEO is an ongoing process and you want to keep your client engaged, so continuing to discover opportunities through the metrics and demonstrating that more content writing can be done will keep their investment top of mind and ongoing.

Here are some metrics that will help with continuous action items:

Keywords by Position Sorted by Highest to Lowest Converter

Action items:

Perform additional keyword research to identify other related search terms including variations and longer-tail terms. How might these keywords be included into on-site or off-site content to test engagement and understand if the keyword(s) in question will perform well?
Identify other pages on the website that are ranking beyond page one for the keywords in question. What can be done to further optimize these pages to improve rankings?
Obtain additional budget to write content and report on metrics.

New Content Being Indexed and Ranked

Identify new on-site and off-site pages that are being ranked and indexed. Which pages can be optimized further? If conversions increase, then perhaps an entire content campaign can be created around this keyword. Once this is identified, obtain additional budget to create and execute on this content campaign and report on the metrics.

30/05/2013

SEO Reporting & Metrics: How to Prove Progress!

It's the beginning of the month and it's again time to report to your clients or your boss on the SEO progress made last month. It's time to justify your SEO strategy, your efforts and yourself. Sound familiar?

With the challenging landscape of SEO comes the challenging landscape of SEO reporting, and I'm not just talking about merging SEO data sources into one Excel file and adding a logo to try to make it look professional, presentable, and understandable. I'm talking about how to make all the data points and metrics indicate real progress, and more importantly meet your clients' or boss' expectations.
Since the way we do SEO has changed, the way we report on it must change too. Effectively setting up the reporting metrics to prove progress may make the difference between meeting the clients' expectations or not.