Archive for October, 2009

How to Hire a Good SEO

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

Every firm or company, small or big is running behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to carve a niche for itself in the Online marketing world which is the most competitive and ever growing world of marketing. SEO services are on a boom and SEO companies are popping out in every nook and corner. Some of these companies even without looking the client’s website promise to bring it on the top of search engine result pages (SERP). Some fall for these preposterous claims, some do not. I would like to present some guidelines for choosing a genuine SEO analyst so that you will be included in the list of people who do not fall to those preposterous claims.

good SEO

  • You visit a SEO company and it guarantees you a ranking even before analyzing your website. These SEO analysts are either are just interested in extracting money from you and stuffing it in their pocket or they take SEO too lightly. A SEO strategy is different for every website and the optimization strategy depends and changes according to the nature and theme of website.
  • Some just fill in the Meta tags with absurd keywords and create spamming. Your website might end up getting banned by Google. Increasing Meta tags list with irrelevant keywords is no SEO technique.
  • Some SEO people create doorway pages that are held on another server and then they purchase this traffic to shell out more money from you. Make sure the SEO changes you pay for occur on your website only.

Quality of SEO analysts

  • A good SEO analyst is always aware of the fact that the tactics of the search engine algorithms is ever changing and the same old techniques do not work for every website.
  • A good SEO will never guarantee results on SERP because anyone who guarantees is sure to be a Charlatan. A good SEO will guarantee that they ill be driving the traffic on your website which will guarantee sales.
  • They should be able to tell you exactly what they’re doing, and how much the cost is for various parts of the service.

A Few Important Tips

  • A good SEO firm will try to get itself involved in rebuilding of website if it is done. They believe in avoiding the pitfalls like excessive use of Flash, HTML frames or graphics at the early stage because modifying them later on becomes a nuisance and waste of money.
  • Make sure you check the references of the SEO Company on your own and check from the owners whether they are driving more traffic and having more sales.
  • A really good SEO is no joke. By limiting the budget to less than a thousand dollars, you will be indirectly limiting the creative abilities of the SEO analyst. Pay more to get his focus on your site more. Also by finding some one working on much less pay scale is like finding some one who is willing to take your money for doing nothing.
  • It is east to blabber about SEO techniques by reading from book. But when it comes to actual action, no reading helps as SEO environment is ever changing and dynamic. Do not fall for such blabber and research the work done by the SEO Company for other websites.

Search Places for Good SEO Analysts

  • Visit the SEO forums. There you will find many companies posing as SEO experts. But the genuine ones will shine out on own.
  • Search for SEO related articles found on sites such as Clinks, ISEDB, Search Guild, and Search Day
  • You can trust the ones recommended by your friends. But for this you will have to trust your friend first.

Image Credit: Theseonerd.com

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The Why & How of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

Monday, October 26th, 2009

LSI

Image Credit: http://stompernetimages.com

The number of WebPages on the internet is increasing rapidly on the web which is posing a challenge to the search engine crawler. The prime motto of the search engine crawlers is to index the true original content and help the search engine give its users ideal search results. The search engine optimization process started in the nineties and initially the search engine crawlers failed to distinguish between original and copied content. The scenario has changed over the years with the advent of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is a form of artificial intelligence which enhances the search engine’s content analyzing capabilities.

The older search engines failed to distinguish between similar words with different meaning. For example the word Die can be referred in context of a Dice or related to death or clay work.The crawlers also failed to distinguish between words with similar roots like water, watering etc. Singular and plural forms of words like dog and doggies meant the same for old search engines.

Latent Semantic Indexing

The search platforms related with LSI does not just focus on the bunch of keywords. The search engines now days operate on relevance feedback. That is why now days when you search for the keyword tiger woods, you are displayed sites related to golf rather than websites related to tiger conservations and wildlife.

LSI is a concept rather than an algorithm of search engines. The phrase “artificial intelligence “attached to LSI technology echoes its true meaning. LSI is an answer to people who considered themselves smart by writing a meaningless template with rotating synonyms into which any keyword could be inserted innumerable times. LSI analysis is used by Google to detect this kind of spam content where excessive use of irrelevant keywords is used to fool the search engines.

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Major Issues in Optimizing a Content Management System

Friday, October 9th, 2009

CMS troubleImage Credit: www.istockphoto.com

CMS programs available today can have a negative effect on the visibility of the website in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). This makes CMS without Search Engine Optimization (SEO) abilities a big disaster. The major reason cited is that these programs were not designed keeping the search engines in mind.

Systems now days blabber that they are “search engine ready” or “search engine friendly”. What these blabbers mean is that a programmer can modify the system with add-ons (e.g. the Apache “mod-rewrite” extension) to not damage search engine results too badly. So do not fall blindly for such claims and make sure you inspect every aspect of the system to be sure that your website can be optimized. CMS that has the capability to induct common SEO tasks (human/search engine readable URLs, 301 redirects, Meta tags) directly is required.

I would like to specify some common problems that CMS generated contents face in not being indexed by the search engines:

  • Dynamic URLs with query strings

The number of dynamic pages a search engine can index are limited. If at all you use dynamic pages make sure that not every search engine crawl the dynamic and static page. A Dynamic URL like “http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234” might be skipped by a search engine crawler as too many parameters included might clash with webmaster parameters. Inbound links tend to be less on dynamic URLs as any user prefers static URLs as they are easily understandable.

  • Restricted Meta Tags

Due to ever-changing nature of SEO industry, customized Meta tags like Verification Meta tag for Google are in high use. Many CMS do not have access to add such customized Meta tags. This hampers the SEO process as the customized Meta tags have become quite important for search engine crawlers.

  • URLs with poor keyword density

Keyword rich URLs play a major role in optimizing your website on search engine pages. Some systems that use static URLs sometimes do not let you create URLs with desired keywords. A query string without sensible keywords hardly lures traffic to your website.

  • Using third party SEO tools with most CMS systems is time consuming and repetitive

The user desires to be in one tool to create content and another to analyze it. But in some CMS, it is mandatory to view the pages live from a URL on the web to use SEO tools to optimize the content. In such systems until and unless the content is published SEO cannot come into picture. This makes it highly time consuming.

  • Lack of SEO knowledge

Buying a CMS and then hiring SEO professionals to optimize your CMS for SEO needs is wasting lot of time and lot of money. It is better to have a proactive approach to search friendly CMS.

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Posted in CopperBridge Corridor!, Internet marketing, Search Engines | No Comments »