Category: SEO

Tumblr vs. Pinterest for Web Designers

April 20, 2012

The hottest social networking site right surely is Pinterest and it is known to drive a lot of traffic to websites. Tumblr on the other hand is a popular microblogging platform, which has been around for quite a while. There are similarities among both the services, and each works for different purposes, users and situations. Differences between Tumblr and Pinterest Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform that can behave like Twitter, act as a simplified version of WordPress and is a place to engage in discussion. Pinterest on the other hand is a visual bookmarking tool, that allows you to collect images and videos (and the links therein) on various categorized boards. Both of them depend more on media than text, but are fundamentally different. However, people do use Tumblr to collect pictures and images much like Pinterest. Both the tools can be astonishingly useful to web designers and developers. Let us compare the two services in order to understand which one could be better than the other. Team Collaboration Pinterest allows users to add contributors, which means collaborative collection of images found on the Internet or images that are originally taken can be easy. Pinterest can allow web designing companies to allow several designers to pin images that they like, in a form of visual brainstorming. Commenting and liking images, or pinning them back allows for socializing as well. Tumblr on the other hand is a fully functioning blogging platform that allows for lengthier discussions in the form of comments, and also in the form of text posts. As it follows a blogging structure, web designers can easily publish their strategies, ideas, tutorials etc easily. Collaboration in the real sense may be easier on Tumblr if we were to talk about combining blog posts, images, textual content and videos. Pinterest can be used as bookmarking tool or a place to showcase templates and designs you have created, before or after brainstorming. Marketing and Promotion Pinterest discourages self-promotion, whereas Tumblr doesn’t frown upon it. It is easier to promote oneself explicitly on Tumblr than on Pinterest. On Pinterest, you will have to use tricks and covert methods to promote your products or services. It might be a good idea to drive traffic from Pinterest to your Tumblr blog, where you actively promote your products. Pinterest has a majority of female users, where as Tumblr’s target audience is mostly youngsters. It depends who your target audience is before launching a marketing campaign. However, Tumblr seems to have a better marketing traction. SEO and SMO Both Tumblr and Pinterest are valuable SEO tools. They drive traffic to your company website, help you to generate organic traffic, and also achieve better search engine rankings. Interface Tumblr has more freedom to publish content, and doubles up as a blogging platform as well. Pages can be added and a simple website can be created within the Tumblr platform. On Pinterest, one can pin images found anywhere on the website, or upload original images and categorise them under various boards. Pinterest is more visually oriented than Tumblr, where as Tumblr is more of a publishing platform. Engagement, Discussion and Participation Tumblr allows better engagement and discussion. Thanks to its micro-blogging platform, it not only allows likes and re-blogs but lengthy discussions can happen in the comments section. Pinterest on the other hand allows commenting too, and images can be re-pinned or liked, but lengthy discussions are just not great enough. Web designers who need to discuss projects, tricks and tips, cheat sheets would do better on Tumblr. Web designers who need to showcase their templates, and basically offer visual eye-candy would gain more on Pinterest. Handling Design Projects Web designers can collect templates they like on Pinterest and also pin websites, portfolios of other designers and logos that they come across while browsing the web. Pinterest can serve as a place where web designers can find all the images that inspired them to design their own website. Tumblr on the other hand can be used to promote and market one’s own design projects. It could also be used to upload HTML5, CSS and other coding files in order to discuss with clients or team members. It serves as a collaborative, publishing and media sharing platform, all put together in a minimalist environment. It all depends on which part of the designing process one is handling. Both the tools are equally important and are not mutually exclusive.

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Top 10 Tips to Optimize LinkedIn Pages to Drive Traffic

April 10, 2012

If you thought LinkedIn was a place to upload your resume and forget about it until someone contacted, you are missing out on one of the most important social networking tools available today. LinkedIn is a great way to make sure that organic and free traffic is driven to your blog or website with little effort. Let us take a look at how you can optimise your LinkedIn page to drive traffic to your blog. Complete your Profile Most people and companies are usually quick to open accounts and enter a few details in social media sites, and forget about them. An incomplete profile gives a very bad impression to you or your company. LinkedIn allows you to enter as many details as possible and in fact encourages you to fill in 100% of what it believes to be important. One of the most important steps for a complete profile is adding a great picture of yourself or that of your company’s infrastructure or logo. When people search for your company or your name in Google, your LinkedIn profile is one of the first results to show up. It only makes sense to have a complete LinkedIn profile and never incomplete or shabbily filled out profiles. Build your Network LinkedIn allows you to add people that you do not know personally but may have worked with you in the same company. It also allows you to add people who are your friends, colleagues, or just about anyone as long as you know their email address. The more number of people you add on LinkedIn, the more number of clicks you can expect when you share stuff on your company page. Remember to ask for recommendations whenever possible, and return the favor. Optimize Links LinkedIn allows you to share 3 links of your choice, which can also be customised to look in a certain way. For instance, you could have something like ‘My Blog’, My Company’ and ‘My Portfolio’. Instead of typing the domain name of websites, or just name them as your blog or website, it is better to describe what exactly the web link is all about. Custom headlines to these links can be altered to attract more attention of your visitors. Participation Like any other social network, it is important to participate in conversations and engage in discussions. LinkedIn groups allow people to post questions when they need information. Depending on what your area of expertise is, it helps to answer questions and help people genuinely. Not only will the person who asked the question get interested in you, but also other people who are viewing your answer. Update Status It is important to update your status at least twice a day. This helps your updates to appear in the LinkedIn stream, and people might click on the links you share in your updates so that more traffic is driven to your blog or website. Twitter updates can be automatically published over LinkedIn, which actually can be a very smart thing to do, unless you tweet a lot of irrelevant stuff. Join Specific Groups Depending on what your company or blog is all about, you can join similar groups on LinkedIn. People who are within the group you join can be easily added to your contacts, and that again builds your connections. Participating and engaging in conversations in niche LinkedIn groups will almost certainly help drive traffic to your website. Only, you must not spam the group with links to your website. Start your Own Group Starting niche groups is a great way to drive traffic to your websites and blogs. LinkedIn allows you to start a group, which can welcome those who are interested in the niche area. A LinkedIn Group can raise you to an authoritative position. This would automatically encourage group members to click on links that you share. RSS Feeds It is also important to add RSS feeds of your blog or website to the group you start. Each time you publish new content on your blog or website, the feeds show up in the LinkedIn group automatically, which helps people to click on those links. Blog Application There are WordPress and Blog Link applications that post the title and first paragraphs of your most recent articles. These widgets offer a sneak peek to your blog posts and other content, which encourages people to click on the links to read it completely. Again, this helps in driving traffic too. The blog applications can be downloaded from the “applications” link. Importance of Keywords Nothing is more important than adding keyword rich status updates, and filling your profile with keyword rich text. It is important not to stuff your updates and profile text with keywords, as that will definitely put off people. The idea is to intelligently use keywords to reflect what your company or business is all about. LinkedIn can prove to be an extremely useful tool to drive niche traffic to your websites. It is important to note that the demographics of LinkedIn are very different from that of Twitter or Facebook. You get more directed and specific traffic which would be helpful for your business goals.

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What? How? Why? About Pinterest and Some Useful Tips

April 7, 2012

The latest social networking site, Pinterest has attracted a lot of press lately. While many have begun to swear by it, there are many of us who still do not understand this novel tool and how it might help us to drive traffic to websites, organize design projects and add a little colour to an otherwise text-filled world. What is Pinterest? In simple terms, Pinterest is an online space where one could organize pictures that are interesting. These images can either be uploaded originally or shared after running into an image while browsing. Once an image is uploaded or shared on Pinterest, it becomes a ‘pin’. A collection of pins that are related to each other can then be organized under themed Boards. It is up to the user what the boards are going to be named, or what sort of ‘Pins’ the board would consist of. How is Pinterest Used? Pinterest comes with an official ‘Pin It Button’, which is a browser extension. Each time you come across an image you like, you could click on the image and pin it under a board of your choice. Of course, you could accompany the ‘Pin’ with a caption or lengthier text as well. At the moment, it is possible to use your iPhone to Pin original pictures. Images can be categorized for further use, or for inspiration. All the hats that you like may be pinned under a specific board, so that others may see which hat you like. Or, you might want to pin pictures of apartments that you may find interesting, and pin them under a board titled ‘Possible Apartments to Buy’. The possibilities are endless! It is also a great tool to make lists of products that you may find attractive online, which you may choose to buy at a later stage. While you can always pin all day long anything that catches your eye, Pinterest is better used with a specific purpose in mind. Moreover, Pinterest can serve as a collaborative tool, with which you can collect images, brainstorm and work on issues that may be important to you. Pinterest is an open and public network. Anybody can follow anyone, and one is not obliged to follow back. One could categorize pins under hashtags, similar to Twitter hashtags. Who Uses Pinterest? Pinterest’s power users are aged between 25 and 44, and 80% of the users are female. They also earn a lot more than most people and have some level of college education. They tend to be located in the Midwestern states of the United States. However, this demographic is quickly changing to include people from other countries, and a growing number of men who have begun to use Pinterest for design projects. Can Pinterest Drive Traffic? All said and done, Pinterest is an important traffic driver to websites. It is particularly important to retail brands, as their products depend on visual appeal. Pinterest was launched way back in 2010, but it already has more than 10.4 million users. Of course, it can’t be compared with Facebook’s 845 million users or Twitter’s 200 million users. What needs to be understood is that Pinterest targets a certain visually oriented target audience, which could be a great platform to look for niche traffic. If one were to consider referral traffic, Pinterest is almost equal to Twitter, with both driving 3.6% of web traffic. Facebook on the other hand, has a share of 26.4%. LinkedIn and Google+ lag behind at 0.2%. Why Pinterest is Important to Web Designers? Most images that are pinned lead to a source link and as Pins can be ‘liked’ or ‘repinned’, they come with a promising traffic driving potential. This is perhaps what would interest SEO specialists and web admins. When it comes to web designers, it is rather easy to surmise that they would pin templates, images and graphics that they may want to use in certain projects. Pinterest is collaborative and social, which also means that web designers can use it to present design ideas to clients. Again, like we always say with social sites, the possibilities are endless. Pinterest is being increasingly seen as a promising tool for web designers, mostly because of its visual nature. Pinterest allows you to organize links based on images that you see on various websites. These images, which might be websites that inspire you to design similarly, could be clubbed under various categories of boards. Top 10 Tips to Use Pinterest 1) Use Pinterest on Websites It is very important to make your presence on Pinterest known to visitors to your website. Pinterest has a number of goodies, which can help you to add Pinterest buttons, either on the page or on individual products that you display. This would encourage visitors to pin products on your site, and eventually drive traffic back to your website, probably resulting in sales. 2) The Right Etiquette Like any other social media website, it is important to not sound like you are over promoting yourself or your products. It is alright to promote your products, but your boards must include images and links to themes, ideas and interests that can be associated with your business. It is important to be nice, polite and non intrusive. 3) Engagement and Participation Increase the number of pins and boards, and keep them relevant to your business. Follow people who follow you, and engage in conversations about what they like and dislike. The more images you pin, the more traffic you will drive back to your website. 4) Keywords and Hashtags Just like in Twitter, Pinterest allows you to use keywords and hashtags relevant to particular pins. For instance, #Flash, #design, #CSS can be relevant hashtags to your web design projects. It is important to identify which hashtags are most relevant to your business. If you are a developer, you could perhaps link images to your blog posts that describe coding, screenshots of HTML and PHP codes, etc. 5) Interest Groups There

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Top 10 Local Search Optimization Ranking Factors

March 22, 2012

Local Search Ranking Factors depend on a number of things that businesses do online, to promote their products and services. David Mihm, who is a well respected Local Search Ranking expert, released a comprehensive list of factors, which he updates each year. Here is what we think about the top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors that he speaks about. Physical Address in City of Search It is very important to make sure that a business’ physical address matches the city in which the company must be listed. Having an address in London and listing it under New York City may not be a very great SEO technique. However, when a company may have operations in different cities but has only one physical address, mentioning that could be a good idea. Manual Verification of Business Ownership It is now possible to verify that your business belongs to you, by asking Google to send a postcard to the physical address which can later be returned to Google to complete the verification process. This service is available in most countries except a few. In such cases, one might want to contact other search engines like Yandex, if you are in Russia or Baidu if the business is located in China. The driving point is to validate a business’ physical existence in a particular city with the help of a search engine. In most cases, it just happens to be Google. Correct Category Associations While listing your business in Google Places or in yellow pages online, it is important to make sure that it is listed under the right business category. Looking at similar advertisements and listings could help you to decide under which category your business belongs. Traditional Structured Citations It is important to make sure that your business is also listed in traditional and conventional listings which include yellow pages, classifieds and other such listings. Getting listed on local portals and local sites help a lot too, and that adds up to the credibility of your business being important to the place you want to optimize your name under. Listing Company Address Though many companies frown at this idea, it is a very important step to make sure that your business is crawlable. When a business address is listed in a company’s website, it not only adds credibility but becomes easier for search engines to recognize your business is local. Well-ranked Company Website It is of course important to have a website which is search engine ranked. it must be well ranked in order to make sure that it is crawlable and listed high in order of importance. Following SEO techniques of keeping metadata clean and using appropriate keywords, not indulging in unfair SEO practices, and publishing quality content in a consistent and timely manner help to increase a site’s ranking. Moreover, getting links from higher pagerank sites would increase a page’s pagerank as well, ultimately resulting in better search engine ranking. High-quality Inbound Links This is an area that most companies find difficult to understand. Companies need to makes sure that internal links to their own sites are provided appropriately. However the links should be relevant and appropriate to the published matter. Company Phone Number A phone number has psychological implications of immediacy, availability and reliability. Thus, when you list your company’s phone number, it automatically helps people to recognize that your business is reliable in local contexts. The key is to have a local number and listing it in a manner so that it is crawlable. Using 800 numbers may not be advisable as they don’t give the local flavor. Local Area Code on Google Places Of course, any local ranking factor depends on your presence on Google Places. It is important to add a zip code or area code, as that can be searched by web crawlers too. by doing so, your business tends to becomes searchable based on exact location within a city. Location in Page Title It can be very useful to have the city and state in which your business is located in, within the page title of Google Places landing page. While address can always be mentioned within content, it is equally important to mention the city and state within page title. Apart from these 10 factors, there are a few more ways to improve local ranking. It is always prudent to go through all the reviews that your business may have received. More the number of reviews, the better it would be for local ranking. It is not necessary that one must have only positive reviews. Negative reviews could be used to correct what is wrong within the organization. Of course, requesting for reviews isn’t such a bad idea either if done in an acceptable and honest manner. Having a presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is very important. One could invite target audience to like a page or get them to follow you on Twitter. This could be a novel method to let people in your business’ vicinity know if you have discounts and offers. Most people discover local business with the help of their GPS-enabled smartphones and maps. Thus, optimizing your website for mobile devices and making sure that you are available on Foursquare and other check-in services may help people to find you, when they use Google Maps, or any other map service for that matter. All this might sound like work, but there is nothing better than having a strong local presence for the success of your business. It might take a while, but eventually all the handwork will pay off.

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Google Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

March 22, 2012

Web admins and site owners tend to worry about a site’s Google ranking more than anyone else’s. They have reasons to worry so. Google’s ranking factors depend on a number of steps, of which pagerank is just one of them. A pagerank is the importance that Google gives for a particular page. Securing a good pagerank (Google value 0 to 10) depends on getting links from sites which already have a higher Google pagerank. However, Google search engine ranking factors do not solely depend upon pagerank alone and it may not always be the reliable way to approach site optimization. That is because search engines like Google change their algorithms often, based on certain web trends so that web admins do not try to seek higher rankings through unfair means. There are however honest and sensible ways through which one could increase the chances of a particular website appearing in search results often. Here are Top 10 Factors that Lead to a Better Ranking, Not Listed in Any Order of Priority or Importance. It is All About Linking There are certain off-page ranking factors which every web-admin must consider. It is well known by now that backlinks from trustworthy or authority sites are important to boost a site’s SEO rank. New websites may not be able to acquire these backlinks and thus they will have to depend on great content, which is published at regular intervals. One can always include quality inbound links to other sites, as that is favoured by Google as well. Linking to informative ad well established sites is paramount. Importance of Social Signals The Internet has become social, and a site’s importance depends on how much it shared, liked or endorsed by those who visit it. For instance, Google may understand that a certain page or site is more important because it has been liked, shared or tweeted across the social sphere by a number of people. Active engagement of visitors and users lead to a better social media presence. Actively participating and promoting a site or page on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Tumblr may help drive more traffic and also increase social signals. These signals are picked up by search engines like Google, which would then assume that a page or site is particularly important if it’s been shared a lot. Apart from the biggies of social media, newer entrants such as Pinterest, Instagram and others may need attention too, when it comes to web marketing. The Key to Using Keywords Much of search engine optimization takes place while writing content or just before publishing it. Keywords are important, even if many have begun to feel they aren’t quite so. To begin with, a title’s keywords must match the content and search terms. Keywords need to be used in the content as well, but sparingly. Keywords help Google’s spiders to understand what your content is all about. However, stuffing content with keywords has a negative impact on the website. If there is a keyword that particularly tells people what your website is about, it might be a good idea to use it while buying a domain. Moreover, keywords that help to distinguish your business may be used in the webpage URL and in naming images or in the alternate text that WordPress usually provides. All these lead to better recognition of content and help the spiders to visit the website often. It may not be a good idea to have keywords in HTML tags. They used to be popular before 2006, but ever since Google changed its algorithm, such tags may negatively affect your website. Internal Linking One could also link to other websites that you may own, if the content is relevant. Internal linking helps to drive traffic to previous posts even if they are old. You might also want to link to previous posts on the same website, only if they are relevant. However, stuffing a post with internal links may be detrimental to one’s website. Importance of Meta Data Meta descriptions, meta titles and meta keyword tags allow readers to identify the kind of content that a link might lead them towards. It also helps search engines like Google to identify what the site is all about and direct users to the webpage based on their queries. Thus, one might want to be extra careful while drafting meta data. Using and Not Using SEO Tools While it is not a great idea to use tools that claim to help improve search engine ranking, there are a few good tools that make descriptions and titles appear in a clean way when one shares links on Facebook, or when they appear in search results. For this, one could make use of applications such as the All-In-One SEO Pack, which can be used on WordPress. However, apart from a few prominent tools, it is unwise to depend on the multitude of tools available in the big bad world of Internet. Clean URLs The URL structure must be clean, and should not be clogged with symbols, numbers and meaningless alphabets. For this, one would have to change the URL slug in the permalink. Error Free and Clean Webpages that Load Fast Flash and JavaScript aren’t particularly SEO friendly, and using HTML5 may always be more search optimized than using the former two. At the end of the day, great content that makes visitors keep coming back to your site is what is most important. HTML5 loads faster and is more search engine friendly than Flash. Content Quality One must write for human readers, and not search engine robots. Rewriting, plagiarizing or not contributing anything new can affect a webpage negatively. It is important to be as original as possible and publish content that is creative, informative and formatted well. Mentioning references and providing links that direct to other pages with related information can do wonders too. Publishing Frequency It is also important to publish regularly. Web crawlers and spiders visit pages more often when

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Using Link Baiting for SEO

March 19, 2012

Today the Internet Marketing landscape is quite competitive and everyone knows how difficult it is get quality traffic. So Internet marketers and SEO specialists are often employing innovative ways to drive quality traffic and back links to their websites. One such technique of garnering back links is called “Link Baiting”. We can define Link bait as a “technique to garner back links to a website naturally”. In link baiting, we create a compelling piece of content that arouses people’s interest, so they wish to link to that content from their website. In normal link building we approach others to link to our websites or we exchange links with others, but in Link baiting the content that we create attract people and they are compelled to link to the site as they want to share it with their readers too. The goal of perfect link bait is to let people keep sharing it till everyone in the Internet sees it. A Viral link bait is quite useful and give result beyond imagination. Types of Link Bait There are various approaches the professional link baiters follow to create link baiting strategies (hooks). However these strategies can be broadly categorized into the following: News Hook This kind of link baiting strategy is dependent on the freshness of the content. You need to be pretty proactive in publishing the news as and when it happens. The news like a much anticipated product launch or preview of a gadget before it launch gets quite lot of attention in Internet community and can help you in getting lot of backlinks. The unveiling of iPhone 4 by Gizmodo is the best example in using this link bait hook. It has got 244K Facebook shares and more than 4000 back links from diverse domains. Humor Hook Put something in a funny way, make a cartoon of a celebrity or write a funny story or a joke and you will get lot of people talking about it. You can even make fun of yourself or fun of a renowned celebrity or the industry. But make sure your content is unique and special then million of other sites. Resource Hook Infographics, widgets and online gadgets serve as good link bait items. Resource hooks are the best and easiest link baiting strategy. There are lots of opportunities to do some ground breaking research and put your research finding in a nicely done infographics, which is enough to get you a plethora of backlinks. You can even write How-to-guides or an ebook and you will get backlinks for sure. Though this strategy is time consuming, it gives desired result. Attack Hook This strategy relies on negative views and comments to create buzz. But this can lead you to making few enemies for sure. Talking bad about someone or something creates a debate sort of thing and divides people into 2 groups who indulge in fighting among themselves and indirectly help in promoting the content. Political bloggers and critiques are good at this strategy. Incentive Hooks This strategy is employed by almost everyone at some point in time. Running contests on blogs, asking people to write review about your site etc come under this. When you give people something in return, they will never hesitate to write about you. Elements of Link Bait For maximum return from link baiting, the quality of content should be good and unique. It should be well edited and properly formatted. This will let others to skim over the content and decide to link to it. With that in mind, we need to consider following things: Headline: A strong and alluring headline is a must. So the first step is to decide on a catchy headline that will automatically divert people’s attention and they will think of reading. When people will link they may use this headline to link to your site which in turn will serve as an added benefit and will increase traffic inflow. Main Content: Remember that great link bait content cannot be produced in a few hours. The main content should be written thoughtfully and in an easy to understand manner. The information provided in the content should be thoroughly researched. The content should be well formatted and should be free of spelling and grammatical errors. Graphics and Visuals: Pictures speak better than the words. So complement your content with graphics and visuals. If you have an infographics in place for any research based article, do include that and talk about the infographics in brief. Targeted list: Before you publish the article meant for link baiting, build up a list of bloggers and web masters who will be able to help you in promoting by sharing the link bait. This way it will get more visibility and can go viral faster. Launch with a Buzz: Even if you have a great article, complemented with pictures and graphics, you cannot expect people to find it and link to it on their won. You have to put little efforts to make it viral. Social media is the best choice in the regard. Use social media like Facebook and Twitter and social bookmarking service s like Digg, Reddit etc. to submit the content and promote it. Make sure that you are not over promoting it, else it will be regarded as Spam and will be of no use. Factors for Link bait success The ultimate aim of link bait is to gain backlinks which helps in SEO. Because one of the prime requisite in SEO is gaining backlinks. The social media like Facebook and Twitter act as catalyst which trigger the link bait posts to be mentioned in traditional blogs and websites. That is when the actual magic of link bait can be seen. Link baiting is the natural way of building backlinks. Main purpose of any SEO campaign is to bring traffic to a website by employing various methods and link bait serves this purpose effectively. One of the factors for the success of link

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Hiring Your Next SEO Company

March 17, 2012

Gone are the days when only the bigger companies were investing for the online marketing to strengthen their position in World Wide Web. But now the scenario has changed, as Internet is reaching to more and more people, the traditional offline business is rapidly migrating to online business. Hence, small business like restaurants to individuals like doctors and lawyers are embracing Internet to reach to more and more people and spread their business. The primary essence of being successful in online business is driving traffic to your website and converting visitors to customers. The best and the cheapest way to drive traffic to your website is through Search Engines. The Science and Technology involved in this process is called Search Engine Optimization. The power of Search Engine Optimization in online business cannot be underestimated. Hence choosing an efficient SEO agency is a daunting task when every other person in Internet claims as an SEO guru. Choosing the wrong SEO agency for your business can be disastrous and can ruin your business. So proper evaluation as well as thoughtful planning while hiring an SEO agency is required. In your search for the right SEO agency, you need to shortlist a few and then study the shortlisted candidates in and out before finalizing the one who will be working for you. In first phase try to collect as much information about the shortlisted SEO companies/agencies as possible. Go through their website and read about them. Find out for how long they are in business and for how long their domain name exist. You can use web tools like who.is to find domain details. Check their clientele. All these details you can collect on your own without actually talking to them. In this phase you can again reject a few. While you are in the finalizing step you need to check the following things with the SEO company/agency to get a clearer picture about them: Reference: Ask them for reference sites on which they have worked. If possible try to contact the webmaster of that site to collect their feedback on the SEO agency. Also request for case studies on earlier project they have worked on. Proposal: Ask them for a pre-evaluation of your site and a customized proposal. Ask them to find out the issues related to your site. Most of the SEO agencies provide a readymade proposal which they send to all prospective customers. This kind of proposal might not be suited to your business type. Hence insists on a tailor-made proposal. When you go through their proposal, check if they are focusing more on keyword oriented tasks or the proposal is more ROI driven & takes into account resolving various on page & off page issues Work Experience: Verify if they have working experience in SEO related to your business/niche. Every business and niche needs little tweaking in the general SEO practices. So an agency having prior experience in SEO related to your business or niche will be able to do better. Time Frame: Ask for a time frame by when you will be able to see noticeable result. SEO is neither a week or month old project nor it is do once and forget kind of project. It usually takes 3-6 months to see any noticeable result. Business Practice: Ask them the business practices they follow. Some of the SEO service providers use unethical means (black hat methods) to rank your site high and they can boast f the achievement. But the black hat methods are sure to cause greater harm to your site in long run. So stay away from such things. Reporting: What kind of report they provide and what is their reporting frequency. The regular report with comparison on week to week or month to month basis will give you a clear picture of how the SEO campaign is performing. Keyword Analysis: Do they provide keyword suggestion and how many keywords they target? Make sure the keyword election is proper and does not look vague. If the keyword selection is not done wisely then whole SEO campaign will fail. Staffing: Check whether they have adequate staff. Lot of SEO activities like link building, article writing etc require manual work for better result. So the SEO agency should have adequate staffs to full fill the service quality. Also check for the knowledge level of the staffs and ask to interact with them if possible. Tools: Though lot of manual work is involved in SEO, some things like keyword analysis, back link checking requires usage of sophisticated tools. So the SEO agency should be well verged with those tools. SEO is such an Art that if implemented correctly by a knowledgeable consultant it can yield result beyond imagination. But a wrong step in implementation can cost you to lose your rankings and potential leads. The newer players in this field though charges less but most of the time they do not yield result. So hiring them will be of no use. That also does not mean that an older SEO company charging higher may be good. A good and reputed SEO agency will never guarantee and they always under promise and over deliver. So proper evaluation before you zeroed in on the SEO Company is essential.

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SEO Trends in 2012

March 7, 2012

The web has played a major role in expanding business today. And becoming visible to people who matter, is the priority of all business. Search Engine is the key for online visibility as people use Search Engines to find the relevant thing they are looking out for. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the technique using which the visibility of a website can be improved in Search Engine and rank it higher in Search Engine Result there by placing it on the FrontPage for a keyword. SEO helps in putting one website above others so that it will be noticed and the searcher will click on it and visit the website. When we talk of Search Engine Optimization, we keep in mind that we are talking about Google. With 84% market share Google is the leader in Search.  The business of Search Engine Optimization is quite fickle because of the ever-changing methodology Google employs to rank websites. In SEO it is difficult to predict what will work and what will not because of this frequent changes in the backend algorithm. What is working today might not be as relevant tomorrow.  So a good SEO professional should be well acquainted with changing trend in SEO and keep himself/herself updated with what is coming in. With that in mind we present below few of the expected trends in SEO for 2012. Humanized ranking Whatever automated techniques are implemented to rank sites, nothing can beat it when actual readers start ranking the websites. This way only the really relevant sites will be ranked and appear in the front page of Search result. Search engines like Google have realized this and have resorted to this way for ranking sites. So what is the implication? Link buying, swapping and baiting will rest in peace for ever. Social Media Social media in 2012 will have major impact on Search Engine rankings. The Search result page will contain more and more of social media mentions. The Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profiles and brand pages will have bigger roles in search engine rankings. For this the SEO strategy should be inclined towards social media. Your presence in social media should be strengthened and enhanced. Share only relevant information in your social network to catch the attention. Also number of Tweets, Facebook Likes and Plus ones can have impact on the SEO. Posting quality and relevant information will draw the attention and will garner more likes, tweets and plus one. While searching for Abhishek Rungta in Google, the 3 results in top 5 are from social network sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Quality and not Quantity Earlier it was thought that longer articles with lot of keywords help in ranking. So it was a trend to write long articles with keyword stuffing. These are considered spam by Google with the recent Google Panda update. Many content firms have been penalized and are still trying to recover from the effect of Google Panda. Those with quality content saw an increased in traffic and rankings. Google is refining the Panda algorithm more with every updates, so that searchers will be able to reach to sites with quality content. So the SEO strategy should consider having Quality, relevant and informative content. Mobile Search The growth in Mobile usage has been tremendous. Introduction of Smartphone at affordable prices is strengthening it further. People prefer to search for information on mobile devices because it is easier and faster and always at reach and give better result in some cases as it employs localized search. So the mobile search market has huge opportunity in 2012 and in coming year. It’s high time the SEO professionals should start consider optimizing the sites for mobile search and the businesses should relook at their mobile strategy. CRO will be the buzzword CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. This means converting your visitors into customers. If you are running an online business, then you can understand the importance of qualified traffic. These are the actual visitors who actually convert into customers. The site needs to be overhauled to engage customer and spend more time on the site. The call to action buttons need to be placed at proper location. SEO aimed at converting qualified traffic to customers will be the order of the day in 2012. Voice Search With Siri from Apple and Google Voice search it is easier to see where the web search is moving. Instead of browsing through a lot of result people tend to look for a direct answer when they are searching for something. Siri has been able to address that to some extent in its infancy. It usually relies on few sites to find the result. So SEO professionals concentrate on how to optimize the site to be in the purview of those sources. In future this new search technology is definitely going to replace all other kind of search. Personalized Search Most of the search engines are now displaying personalized search result. The search result now shows result recommended by people in social network. This can be tested by searching for something while you are logged in to Google and while you are signed out; you will see 2 different sets of result. With recent release of Google’s Search plus Your World, the personalized search has gone to a higher level. Decline CTR for Top Rank A study shows that In 2006, a no.1 rank in Search result used to enjoy a CTR of more than 42%, which declined to 34.5% in 2010 and in 2011 further down to 18.2%. This decline is due to many factors like organization of Search result page, introduction of search technology like Universal Search and Instant search. SEO should digest this hard fact that the value of top ranking is going to decline further. Rich Snippet Snippets are the 2 lines of text that appear below the site Title on a search result page. This is very important, as it provides a gist

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