Why SEO in All the Right Places Doesn't Cut It Anymore

When I teach my "how to" SEO classes, I begin by telling the students all the things that SEO isn't. I've always felt that it was important because they're often expecting to hear some secret formula for SEO success. And why wouldn't they, with all the myths and outright wrong/bad information that constantly swirls through the SEOsphere? When I finish telling them that everything they thought was SEO really isn't, they stare at me with their mouths hanging open. So I tell them what SEO actually is:

Making your website the best it can be for the search engines and your site visitors.

Unfortunately, that doesn't do much to alter their blank stares. After all, it's an incredibly open-ended definition of SEO. Still, it's the only one that truly encompasses what good SEO is all about, as well as why you need to do it. While my method of how to SEO has always been based on that principle, more people are coming around to it in the wake of Google's Panda Algorithm.

Pre-Panda, many people built thriving businesses using the following basic how to SEO process:

• Buy a keyword-rich domain name that encompasses the products you want to sell.
• Build a templated website around it.
• Link internally to the product pages with descriptive anchor text.
• Use those same keyword phrases in the Title and H tags.
• Submit the website URL to lots of directories.
• Drop links to the website in other people's blogs and forums.

Voila! Instant Google success!

They'd repeat the process hundreds of times with different types of products, and then run on autopilot. While it might not have worked on every site they created, the sheer volume of websites they ran would be enough to make them a decent living.

So maybe there was a secret formula after all?

Perhaps, but after Google's Panda Algorithm was implemented, many (but not all) who followed and succeeded with that formula for years suddenly lost a good chunk of their revenue.

What changed?

My own speculation, based on numerous websites that I've reviewed where this happened, is that Google finally decided that there needed to be more to a website than having "SEO in all the right places." And it makes sense. Why should one site do better than another just because they read up on how to SEO and knew the best places to stick their keywords? It shouldn't. And by allowing exactly that to happen, Google was enabling sites with old-fashioned, by-the-book SEO to beat out potentially higher quality websites.

The result was that Google not always giving their own users (the searchers) the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand. Don't get me wrong, I'm not totally blaming Google here. It has to be a daunting task for a machine to know the difference between an okay (but great with SEO) site and a great (but perhaps not so great with SEO) one. Especially when so much of how Google tried to determine relevancy and quality was based on links – and even more on anchor text. It simply became too easy to game that system.

Giving Google What They Wanted

I certainly understand and even empathize with those site owners who've lost a significant portion of their income. They were just giving Google what it wanted. And because it worked so well, they had no reason to go above and beyond their basic formula. Why build a brand for your company when a keyword-rich domain would provide a better return on investment? Why spend time becoming an expert in your industry and educating your target market on the intricacies of your products when you could hire someone to write low-quality "SEO articles" and submit them to article directory sites instead?

Interestingly enough, many of the business owners I've talked to who have been getting by with formula SEO all these years have told me that they have tons of happy customers. Yet there are no obvious signs of this online, such as glowing reviews on Google Places or other online review sites (there aren't bad ones either). How are customers even supposed to remember the name of a company called something like WoodAndMetalDiningRoomChairs.com? (I just made that one up.)

Mainly, customers found these websites through Google, made their purchase and received their merchandise. There's nothing wrong with that, but there was also no personal connection made. This is further illustrated by the fact that if you look at social media sites, you won't see much chatter about these companies. In fact, many of them don't even use social media, or simply have cursory accounts. Again, they didn't need to.

No Marketing Budget

A marketing person, plan, or budget was never necessary nor even a consideration. Sadly, for those companies, they don't have much choice anymore if they want to stay in business. But ironically, now that they really need a marketing budget, there's no money in the till to go toward it.

If I've just described your business and websites – even if you haven't lost a portion of your revenue (yet), you may have thought you could hire a new SEO company to mix in a little extra SEO mojo and fix up your Google problems. But while they might find some on-page or off-page things you could be doing better, I wouldn't count on that to bring back your lost traffic and sales.

So what should you do?

You need to seriously rethink your online strategy. You need to stop saying, "Well, it always worked for me in the past." You need to build a brand and you need to market the heck out of it. You may even need to consolidate all your related keyword-rich domain websites into one big brand website. (Don't do that last one without consulting a professional.) You need to learn everything you can about social media marketing and start doing it. You need to get in contact with your happy customers and ask them to write reviews online as well as to evangelize about you to everyone they come in contact with. You need to also keep in contact with them in a variety of ways.

All of those things are going to make a much bigger difference over the long haul than rewriting your title tags or adjusting your keyword density. The big takeaway here is that while your website may already be the best it can be technically for search engines, it's time to make it the best it can be for your users. Both parts of that equation are equally important. It's not going to be quick or easy, but if you want to stay in business, it's probably going to be necessary.

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SEO Audit

The first step in any new SEO relationship is to conduct an audit. Imagine the poor client who has changed SEO providers several times. If the providers were all on their toes, they each conducted audits. Some businesses may dread the SEO audit process because, if done properly, it will be thorough and exhaustive. In fact, whether a company changes SEO providers or not, it’s a good idea to conduct a thorough SEO audit at least once a year, especially if the business is drawing significant revenue from search traffic.

The SEO audit should produce a snapshot of the state of health of a Website (and the publisher’s SEO practices) at the time of the audit. The audit may identify problems but the problems should not be fixed during the audit (because the fixes change the sate of the Website’s health). Inevitably someone comes up with some drastic the-world-will-end-if-we-don’t-fix-this-now scenario that “justifies” making changes during the audit. Such radical changes should be well and carefully documented but it would be best to defer them until after the audit.

Why defer making changes until after an SEO audit? Because if you change stuff while you’re auditing you end up with an audit that doesn’t tell you what the current state of the Website’s health is.

What follows are some high-level suggestions for how to do an SEO audit. Ultimately you have to come up with the details yourself because if you don’t understand how to conduct some audit practices you’re better off not trying. Of course, that raises the question: if an SEO doesn’t know how to check for “X”, should that SEO be doing an audit?

There is no right or wrong answer for that question, but if I were in the position of not knowing how to examine something I would recommend to the client that they bring in someone to check that part of the system. I am sure I have done that on more than one occasion. You can be expert enough to know where you are NOT expert, and you should be professional enough to give your client the best recommendations to protect THEIR interests.

Step 1 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Define the Statement of Purpose

Learn what the purpose of the Website is. It’s purpose is NOT to make money, create visibility, or build brand value. If the publisher doesn’t understand why they have a Website, you can pretty much bet your best practices that their SEO audit is going to look pretty bad.

You don’t need a 5-page explanation of what the Web business is all about. 1-4 sentences should be sufficient. If the client gives you 1-4 sentences of vague description about what they are trying to accomplish with the Website, you will need to gently guide them through the process of figuring out what the site is really trying to accomplish for their business.

Without that initial Statement of Purpose, everything that follows is a waste of time.

Step 2 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Document the Publisher’s Search Lexicon

What keywords does the client think he should be drawing traffic for? Don’t let the client talk about rankings. You want to know what keywords they are targeting or think they should be targeting. Ask them to justify each keyword with a 1-sentence explanation of why people should be using that keyword to find their products or services. Don’t be condescending. You may need to gently prod them with some questions about what the value they offer through those search terms may be. A good client will pick up on what you’re doing and help you; an eager client may unwittingly derail the process by trying to second-guess you and give you “what you want”.

This part of the audit is designed to help you talk about all the client’s search priorities, not just the ones that “so-and-so” thinks are important. The Big Boss often thinks in terms of industry jargon. Get down to the people taking the orders and talking with the customers and see if they know why clients are signing up through the site.

The Search Lexicon will provide you with invaluable insight into how close (or far from) the mark the site’s keyword targeting is, so DO NOT LOOK AT THE WEBSITE when building the Search Lexicon. This part of the audit is intended to help you learn how the client thinks about their vertical.

Step 3 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Review the Client’s SEO Tools and Practices

Are they using analytics? If so, this is where you get access to the reports and data.

Are they using outside providers? If so, this is where you get access to the outside providers’ reports — and if you’re lucky, you can even review the contracts (which you should do in an audit). Are the providers meeting their contractual obligations? Don’t fall into an advisory role here — just document what IS and what IS NOT being done.

Are they using SEO tools? If so, which ones? Who in the business has access to the tools? How were they trained? How often do they use the tools? Observe them when they are using the tools during their normal jobs (demonstrations are not informative — you want to observe the gorilla in its natural environment).

Step 4 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Analyze the Site’s Architecture

Now is a good time to see what they are doing with the site. Look at the keywords they are using in their URLs, the folder structures, the relationships between leaf nodes and the root URL, the age of the content, the rate at which content is added, modified, or deleted, who creates the content, how unique the content is, what the site looks like visually, etc.

Page architecture or construction is just as important as the toponymy and taxonomy the site uses. Toponymy defines how things are named. Taxonomy defines how things are organized. Toponymy tells you what keywords are used in the URL and page names. Taxonomy tells you how the folders and sub-domains are sorted and arranged in the site’s hierarchy. Navigation tells you which pages and sections are most important to any page.

So you want to document all of a site’s toponymies (there can be more than one), taxonomies (there can be more than one), and navigational widgets (there can be more than one). There may be too many for you to really document. It’s okay if you document the pattern without being exhaustive but the audit should make it painfully obvious there are multiple whatevers on the site.

This is also where you identify (but don’t fix) any internal linking nonsense such as PageRank Sculpting, use of mixed link formats (absolute and relative), cross-linking between secure and unsecure versions of the domain, non-canonical link references (including and excluding the www. randomly in links), broken meta declarations, etc.

If the client has a URL map you should determine how accurate and up-to-date it is. If they don’t have a URL map, you should see if you can build one for them. But I would hesitate to just run Xenu Link Sleuth on the site. If the client is running analytics that will screw up their analytics. Discuss the options with them before doing something like this. Xenu can also crash a server. Make sure they understand the risks.

If they can give you the source files, that would be less obtrusive and risky. It makes your task harder, but you’re not there to relax and enjoy the sun.

Step 5 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Classify the Content

What sort of content is the site publishing? Is the content striving for optimization? Is it keyword-rich? Is it rambling? What does the grammar look like? How well does it match the Search Lexicon? Is it articulating (explicitly or implicitly) the business purpose of the site? Does the content relate to the business purpose of the site?

Where does the content come from? What is the process for creating the content? What is the process for publishing the content? How much editorial review is involved? What sort of checks and balances are in place? Who fixes the content if a problem is identified?

This part of the audit should tell you how much responsibility is in any one person’s hands. In a small organization, you’re locked into working with one or a few people who have to wear multiple hats. But the audit needs to identify the risks that are entailed by who is participating in the content creation and maintenance and how those risks are being mitigated (if at all).

Step 6 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Keyword Analysis

Now that you have looked at the content, you need to look at the hard data to see what keywords are actually bringing traffic in from search and to which pages that traffic is flowing. This usually won’t be easy because most analytics packages are not designed to provide you with this kind of information. They’ll report which pages are getting traffic, they’ll report which keywords are bringing traffic, but geting those reports to line up is often impossible.

A keyword analysis should include at least four columns of data:

The source of the search referral traffic

Search referral term

Page receiving traffic from the search referral term

The keywords that the page is actually emphasizing in TITLE, Hx headers, and through on-page repetition

Can you include other data in that analysis? Sure. You may have other keyword-related KPIs that I’m not covering here. But the ultimate goal of this step in the SEO auditing process is to benchmark how well the content-driven keyword goals are matching up with the keyword activity in search referral traffic.

Many clients won’t have this data. Don’t try to fix the problem during the audit. Just note that the necessary data is not being captured.

If the client isn’t tracking analytics, you can still try to get some data by authenticating their site (through THEIR email address) with Google and Bing. Use the Webmaster reporting tools the major search engines provide to at least give the client a birds’ eye view of what the data can show them. It will also be helpful after the audit when you teach the client about how to use analytics to develop good SEO practices.

Now that you have captured at least SOME keyword data for the audit, go use a keyword trending tool and do some benchmarking on their query spaces. Are these healthy query spaces? Are they dying? Are they still growing? If a client’s business goals are aligned with a query space that was 10 times more active 3 years ago, the audit should note this.

If you have access to PPC data, you should look at this too. How much do they rely on PPC? Are their PPC keyword goals related to their organic goals? How much coordination is involved in pursuing both paid and organic search goals?

If for some reason you could not get a URL map earlier in the process, this step SHOULD provide you with at least a partial URL map. That URL map is your bible.

Step 7 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Review the Reporting Process

What key performance indicators is the client using? What steps do they take to report on their KPI progress? Who produces the reports? Who sees the reports? What do the reports look like? Are they cross-referencing data to make sure their reports are accurate and informative?

Look at the vendor reports. How often do they come in? What sort of checks and balances is the client using to ensure the vendors are being honest and thorough? Are there clear KPI definitions for the vendor reports? Are the reports matching the contractual KPI tracking?

The reporting process should identify which keywords are bringing in the most traffic, the most conversions, etc. It should also identify which pages and/or sections of a site are performing best and least.

Larger companies tend to have a clearly defined reporting process more often than smaller companies. But every now and then you run into a small company that really understands the power of cross-checking claims and statements, as well as tracking KPIs for search. Still, this is the part of the audit that should identify any major weaknesses in the client’s SEO best practices.

Often, I find that a lack of reporting leads to all sorts of incorrect application of SEO techniques and practices.

Step 8 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Review the Site’s Back links

By now you should know if the client is acquiring links and if they are using an outside source for links. Be careful what link checking tools you use. Document for the client that the tools can only tell you what is in THEIR databases, not in any particular search engine’s database.

Yahoo! only knows what Yahoo! has discovered. It cannot tell you what Google or Bing know about or value (and, yes, I know Yahoo! serves Bang’s search results).

Links cape only knows what Landscape has discovered. It cannot tell you what Google or Bing know about or value.

Majestic SEO only knows what Majestic SEO has discovered. It cannot tell you what Google or Bing know about or value.

Shoot yourself if you tell a client, “Here is your Links cape report for your Google backlinks.” Shoot yourself and cut out your tongue and shoot your tongue if you say that after reading this blog.

Every tool has its limits. Every tool can still be useful. You don’t need to put these tools on pedestals and act like they are infallible.

In this process, you should also try to document how many references to the site’s domain or base URL you can find in search results for Google and Bing. Simply note these references as “In-Text Citations”. Don’t agonize over whether they represent links or not. That’s not important.

There are some SEO tools that will tell you what anchor text links are pointing at a site. Technically, any link vendor should be providing the client with this information but if you have the budget to get into some of the higher end tools, it will help you to know how much targeting the client is doing with their link building.

Clients often may not know who built which links, when, or how, but dishonest clients will burn you without any sense of remorse if they break the rules and get caught. This is one part of the audit process that should be sending off alarm klaxons because, frankly, no client is worth the high risk of being sacrificed to Google and Bing to cover someone else’s screwup.

I believe that fewer than 1% of SEO clients would do this, but I believe that more than 0 fall into that small group.

Step 9 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Make Recommendations

Some people make recommendations throughout the audit report. Some people leave their recommendations for the end of the audit report. That’s a matter of style but make sure you go through all those recommendations with the client.

Step 10 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Create An Action Plan

People sometimes confuse recommendations for an action plan. You can get away with that if you have only a very small number of recommendations to make. In my experience, the more recommendations you make the more glassy-eyed the client becomes.

After you have walked through all the recommendations you should present the client with an action plan that prioritizes what specific actions they should take next. They may need to negotiate with you so be flexible, but you should have a complete action plan ready to discuss before the negotiation begins.

Other Stuff You May Want To Include

Some people may look at the risks that are entailed by existing client SEO practices. If you see a lot of risky behavior in the earlier stages of the audit, it might be a good idea to summarize and evaluate those risks in a separate section.

Some people may capture enough data to provide the client with a historical performance report. If the client has never seen an SEO KPI report before (or a good one), then it may be a good idea to create a report that looks at their past month, quarter, year, or two years (if you can). They may learn to help you and themselves more quickly if you can show them how much they have accomplished already. It helps to have a confident client who feels empowered (and who respects your knowledge and experience).

Some people (maybe most of you) would include a competitive analysis in the audit. That’s fine, I suppose. I view competitive analysis as a very different kind of service. You have to make that decision for yourself.

A good audit will break out and expand upon information that assumes an unusual significance or importance. You can have a standard audit template you apply for every client, but be flexible. You never know what you’ll run into.

I hope this has been helpful.

About the Author

Manish Singh SEO Expert is currently working as a Sr. SEO Executive in the Internet Marketing field associated with Indian SEO Link Building Company India and doing deep research on the current Internet Marketing World Strategies, SEO Services India and having a strong Analyzing Power with Troubleshooting Attitude.

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Best Tips for SEO Optimization

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are Best quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.


1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.


2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.


3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.


4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.


5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.


7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.


8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.


9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.


10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.


11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.


12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.


Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.


14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.


15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.


16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.


17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.


18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.


19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.


20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.


21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.


22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.


23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.


24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.


25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.


26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.


27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.


28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.


29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.


30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.


31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.


33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.


34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.


35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.


36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!


37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.


39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.


40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:


(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar


42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.


43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.


45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.


49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.


50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.


51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.


52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.


53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.


54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.


55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Manish Singh SEO Expert India is currently working as a Sr. SEO Executive in the Internet Marketing field associated with Indian SEO Link Building Company and doing deep research on the current Internet Marketing World Strategies, Link Building India and having a strong Analyzing Power with Troubleshooting Attitude.

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Why Links are the Keys to Success

How Links Affect Rankings

Search engines currently base relevancy primarily on linkage patterns. Who links to you and how they link to you are what determines where your site will rank for competitive search queries.

How Not to Move a Web Site

If I did this with a client site, I’d deserve to be shot. Back in 2004 I changed my DNS and moved one of my sites at about the same time. The DNS change quickly propagated through, but my site took a while to load to the new server. Google happened to spider my URL when there was no site on the new web server:

In spite of the site not being there, my then-blank site (Search-Marketing.info) still ranked at number six for search engine marketing out of 15 million results.

So don’t repeat my error—the proper way to move hosts is to set up the new site, point the DNS at the new location, and then take the old site down after a few days to a week. But seeing how well the site ranked even when it was not there shows how powerful links are.

Why are Links so Powerful?

When we write stuff about ourselves, we have a tendency to lie. It is human nature to boost your own worth. This is why meta tags and page copy are nowhere near as powerful as they once were. They have been used and abused.
Links from other webmasters are viewed by search engines as unbiased (or at least less biased), third party votes. While Yahoo! tends to put more weight on page copy than Google does, links are the #1 ranking criteria for competitive phrases in all major search engines.

Links Represent Relationships

Many people who look for links just think “link,” but often, this is not the most effective way to do link building. If you think of the web as a huge social network and think of links as relationships, you have a huge advantage over your competition.
You can do many manipulative things to make your site appear better than it is, but if you can find more natural ways to build your credibility and embed yourself in the social structure of the web, you will likely become extremely successful without risking getting penalized by search engines for having an artificial link
profile.

About the Author




Manish Singh is currently working as an SEO Exceptive in the Internet Marketing field associated with Indian SEO Link Building Services India Best Solution of IT and doing deep research on the current Internet Marketing World Strategies, Contextual Link Building Services and SEO Services India having a strong Analyzing Power with Troubleshooting Attitude.

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Contextual Link Building Services will let your Website Rule on the Internet

To rule on Internet, your website must have good traffic and effective link building service is the guarantee to increase traffic to your website. Link building is a part of search engine optimization process that drives traffic to your website by creating back links. High placement of a website in search engine is very essential. Websites that appear on the top page of search engine get the good chance to do business. So, if you are dealing in online business, then your website must appear on the top pages of search engine.



To ensure visibility of a website on top page of search engine, contextual link building services are very essential. Effective link building strategy will generate traffic to your website, increase the page rank, improve the placement of website on different search engine, and gain the credibility on Internet. Rely on a search engine organization that is ready to provide high valued and quality links to your website. For your information, generating links from major websites, high ranked website, directories and social sites are part of contextual link building services. Find a company that is ready to provide organic one way link building to your website.


It is to note that content based link building is of great use. It is great method to promote your business and brand along with increasing traffic to your website. Contextual link building includes creating content about the related business of your website and submits in top directories along with the embedded url of your website. It is the effective link building method that generates targeted and high links to your website. In this methodology, most searched keywords related to your website are selected and contents are created accordingly. Those keywords are url embedded in the content to attract traffic.

Content based process of link building is the biological and healthiest method for attractive traffic to website. Just recognize the right methods of one way link building and rule on the Internet. Seeing the reliable methodologies adopted by search engine practitioners in India, link building outsource has become popular globally. Indian and international market players are looking for India SEO based firms for link building outsource. These companies are providing ultimate and effective solutions to your web business. They ensure to generate high volume of traffic to your valuable and reliable website. So, one can loudly say that effective process of link building will let your website rule on the Internet.







Manish Singh is currently working as an SEO Exceptive in the Internet Marketing field associated with Indian SEO Link Building Services India Best Solution of IT and doing deep research on the current Internet Marketing World Strategies, Contextual Link Building Services and SEO Services India having a strong Analyzing Power with Troubleshooting Attitude.

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What Is SEO

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

This SEO tutorial covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

1. How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

2. Differences Between the Major Search Engines

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.

About the Author

Manish Singh is currently working as an SEO in the Internet Marketing field associated with India SEO Experts Community Delhi and doing deep research on the current Internet Marketing World Strategies and having a strong Analyzing Power with Troubleshooting Attitude.Apart from all this Manish is doing job at Best Solution of IT aSEO Link Building Services Company India as a Sr. SEO

                      

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Link building services – A Perfect Method to Increase Traffic to your Website

Link building is one of the good methods to increase traffic to a website. This is an important part of search engine optimization process and ensures to establish good presence of a website on Internet. In this Internet-driven age, link building services have become very crucial. People of this generation rely on Internet for most of their needs. They surf the web for shopping products, banking, booking cab, hiring services and many other activities. All these activities are dependent on website and a website must have top position on search engine. To ensure good position on search engine, SEO link building services will is very essential. Right link building companies will help you generate enough traffic to your website and increase the visibility of your website on search engine.

If you are dealing your business on Internet through a website, your website must get enough traffic. Link building company India will generate high volume of traffic to your website and help you boost your business. Link building services are the ultimate solution to increase the popularity of a website. To get targeted and quality traffic to your website, you just need to find a reliable link building farm. Dedicated link building companies have professional search engine optimizer to work on your website and generate back links.

A good web based firm provides quality Link building Services. Good SEO companies with professional staffs ensure to increase traffic to your website. They set up campaign to drive highest possible traffic to your website in minimal time span. SEO link building services not only increase traffic to your website but also improve search engine placement, page ranking and credibility of your website and business on Internet. There are thousands and thousands link building companies India. Spend little time on find a genuine and reliable company and assign the task of increasing traffic to your Internet zone.

The process of building back links, also called as incoming links, inbound links, in-links, and inward links is the cheapest and successful method of sponsoring a website on Internet. It is to know that organic method of generating links to a website is always helpful in long run. One should not rely on a company that provides software based link building services. Link building India companies have gained acknowledged recognition on Internet. Today, not only Indian business players on web but international Internet business players are rely on link building Services India to give an impetus to their business.

Manish Singh is currently working as an SEO Exceptive in the Internet Marketing field associated with Indian SEO Link Building Services India Best Solution of IT and doing deep research on the current Internet Marketing World Strategies, Link Building India and having a strong Analyzing Power with Troubleshooting Attitude.

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