Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

Conversion Tips That Guide Your Online Business

badly-drawn-diagramSome basic elements are very essential to the conversion rate of any landing page, and needs to be kept in mind right from the start. Here is a track list that will help you make and maintain a professional landing page in order to optimize conversions.

  • Seek Professional Help

If you really want to make any difference in your landing page conversions, we would need the help of professional experts. Go for specialists contributing to their dedicated area of expertise in order to maximize your landing page exposure, experience and off course conversions.

  • Hire an SEM for SEO and PPC.
  • A social expert for SMM.
  • An expert web copy writer for web writing.
  • A proven web page designer for landing page design.
  • An experienced designer for additional conversion tips & tricks.
  • A qualified web tester to monitor testing
  • Choose the Best Possible Content & Design

Check your contents including design from all angles. The copy, size, colors, the placement of buttons, the functionality of your page, headlines must all be effectively managed. Check the copy for length, grammar and formality; images for type, size, color, variations and placement. Visual click heat-maps are great to gain an understanding of paths of interest, and to effectively make changes in layouts and design. Just make sure to give yourself the best possible content and design in order to optimize your own conversion rate.

  • Compare Pricing Structures

Make it easy for comparison shoppers. Keep abreast with periodical reviews and check pricing on products and services. You need not be the cheapest to sell. You only need to be the most informative, authoritative and should have maintained a good reputation of delivery and performance. Goodwill is an asset no business can do without. Pass on these positive reviews to R&D. Conversion optimization is a combined process, where all units perform equally well.

  • Keep Mandatory Completion Elements at Minimum

If the conversion page includes a form keep the mandatory completion elements at the minimum. Include as much of auto fill wherever possible and make this as easy as you can. Encourage click to subscribe with enticing content, offers and future discounts. Focus on the core objective should no way be lost.

  • Target Your Landing Pages

Each target market demographic is distinctly different in many ways. Younger, or older; employed, or unemployed, or retired; attentive or inattentive, busy or bored, and all relevant parameters must be properly evaluated and effectively targeted.

Usability is all about how fast the essence and functionality of a page are communicated and how quick and effective this is in engaging. Test this on folks and find out. Just give them 6-8 seconds at the most to tell you what they think this page –

  • is about
  • if they liked it
  • if they felt like leaving
  • what stands out
  • if they would like to bookmark it.

This will give you a fairly good idea of where exactly you stand.

  • Learn & Run With Competition

Although online and offline competitors are different, keeping track of what both engage in will come very useful. You would be also wiser to learn from their experiences as well, so that you can save on both, your money and your time. Take their learning’s and make sure to run with them at the same time.

  • 720px-Line_scan-conversion.svgFinish With an Attractive “Add to Cart” button

Color has a deeper impact most often than even the size and shape. Your ‘add to cart’ button has a lot to say than just that. Make sure that the shade of the color, shape and size are not only compatible with your business it should also be elegant and most effectively designed.

You are now perfectly placed. So get going – what are you waiting for. There is no one, no one can stop you now.

SEO – Ranking for Mobile Search

mobile-seoYes Web designers are having a hard time trudging through some serious mobile design and standardizing issues. This easy and accessible mobile web seems to have many roadblocks as the operating levels are of an entirely different quality and standards.
The mobile search engines are also very new, evolving and imperfect. For these very reasons mobile SEO and SEM are also confused, and well, very immature. But for us, this is yet another challenge. We, as SEO enthusiasts still want traffic, and we still want users to find us in search results; and so we just won’t give up, we are born to fight.
Mobile SEO best practices – As of now

On-site mobile SEO
• Using 100% valid XHTML 1.0 code is the best practice as mobile search engines may however have more trouble digesting invalid code.
• It is likely that WML will be phased out in the near future, so play wise and safe. If you validate, the mobile search engines will not have any trouble with you.
• Follow accessibility best practices as they will ensure that your content is accessible to anyone regardless of their platform. This would include mobile users as well as the mobile search engines.
• Follow the traditional on-site SEO best practices, and which by now you know by heart. Major keywords for the title tag, H1’s and body text, keyword rich anchor text for internal links, and allow the link wheels to spin around.
Getting Spidery and Indexed by Mobile Search Engines
If you are wanting, your site to be indexed by the mobile search engines, they must come to know about it first. Make sure to submit your sites to major mobile search engines for some swift recognition. It would be a wise idea to see that each of your pages is having at least one incoming link.
List of mobile search engines
The following search engines are the major players in mobile search at this point of time.
• Google XHTML Mobile Search from Google Mobile
• Yahoo! Mobile
• MSN Mobile Search
• AOL Mobile Search
• Nokia Mobile Search
• Technocratic Mobile
• 4INFO Mobile Search

google-botMy sincere suggestion is, do not wait for the “year of the mobile” to arrive. Google has left us with a hint as early as the beginning of this New Year, 2010, when they decided to launch Nexus One. Get onto it and start creating some meaningful and genuine mobile related content. Apart from the adult stuff, we are having today, there is more that we can now do to make mobile SEO more relevant and effective in the days to come.

Proxy Servers: Are they Useful

Slide2proxyProxy servers have come to rescue the World Wide Web from the growing need of networking. Servers are utilized to the best of their capacity, to provide information to ever increasing number of seekers hitting at lightening speed.

Proxy servers are a computer system or an application that intermediates between the client and the server. It accepts the requests from the client and directs it to the required server that can cater the information or webpage requested.

Utility of proxy servers

A proxy server offers various operational advantages. An ideal proxy server can:

  • Maintain anonymity of the client
  • ‘Cache’ frequently needed information
  • ‘Police’ the traffic
  • Speed up access to servers
  • Scan for malware
  • Maintain the log of activities

It also offers some features that can be disadvantageous, like, it can:

  • Bypass security controls
  • Circumvent regional restrictions
  • Hide identity of culprits

Types of proxy servers

Proxy servers are classified as under into various types depending on the way they function:

Gateway proxy – Its function is to direct the requests to particular server and send the reply to the client without ant interference or modifications.

Reverse proxy – This works mainly for web servers. It protects the main server by features like load balancing, authentication and decryption.

Transparent and non-transparent proxy – Transparent proxy acts like a gateway but does check for identification and authentication. Whereas, non-transparent proxy modifies the request or response in order to provide some added service to the user.

Forced proxy It can be intercepting or non-intercepting forced proxy, mainly to monitor adherence to various transfer protocols.

Suffix proxy – It allows modifying the name of the proxy server to the URL of the requested content. They are easier to use than regular proxies.

image002proxyBecause of the diversity of functions and utility of proxy servers, they are turning out to be a useful tool in networking. By ‘caching’ the required information and providing it whenever needed, they have helped in reducing traffic to and load on the main servers.

Link Architecture Guidelines

internal-linking

Cross Linking or Internal Link Architecture

This refers to how we are managing to interlink various pages within our own web-site. Wikipedia is a good live example of how Cross Linking or Internal Link Architecture can be effectively and efficiently utilized.

  • This is the key to enable the visitor to quickly and easily navigate to the desired content & topics on the web-site. This is easy to create when we are starting a new web-site, provided we have a map charted at the start.
  • If it is an existing web-site, it would only require some old-fashioned patch-work, editing a couple of words on different pages for including these links.
  • The idea is to inter-connect various contents of our site making relative sense. The search engines also appreciate this kind of an architecture where you show a commitment to the user’s experience. Another way for increasing page views from users.
  • Contain this cross linking to relative pages, and do not use these for promotion. Also use them moderately, and do not over link pages, from one to almost every other; since you’d only be destroying the very purpose you desired. Your purpose is to help the user, and not build an internal link – spam.
  • There will be links between a page, to another within any given web-site. The Internal Link Architecture of any site enables cross linking take up a required size. Navigational links take up the other half – however, both are equally important for the success of any web-site. Navigation helps organize content into logical groups, enabling our users find out all the content on our web-site.
  • Although many forms of navigational links are available, and can be utilized. But the best bet for SEO purposes remains the conservative & old plain text links.
  • Linked Images are selectively used by many web-sites. You click on an image or a button, to go to another page or section. These images better be nice, perfectly blending with the design, and when optimized for size – be fast to load. Image links wont pass the same value to a page as the text link, but out-weighs by the look and feel images are able to give to any web-site. However when using these, make sure to enter the fight info for the attribute tags.
  • These would not be of any help with the SEO point of view, as crawlers still don’t have the ability to follow linked images, it is best left for the larger sites that have plenty of content groups, They make it simpler for the user to find out what he wants, although some tweaking may be necessary to make sure that they work as expected on browsing platforms. Considering the Crawler’s limitations, it is very important to have well laid out, and easy to access site-map.

How to Hire a Good SEO

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

The Why & How of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

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.

Major Issues in Optimizing a Content Management System

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.

After Bing, Its Google’s caffeine..

Google Caffeine

What about Caffeine? Why more of it? Well, it seems Google had enough of the Bingoo stuff and decided to launch a Search engine platform of its own. The beta phase caffeine is set to roll out very soon – and we can be sure of some excellent timing by the Google guys – No Google dance this time..

By some leaked noises from Google – Caffeine will vouch for a greater indexing speed, more accurate results (better spam filtering), more exhaustive results and some undisclosed features (very much expected).

So what was the need for another Caffeine Bing?

Ben Parr at Mashable has covered some known corners of the new Caffeine while trying to test it – and it seems that the new Google has scored over the old master on almost all of the accounts..

[A] Speed –> Caffeine is twice as fast as the old Classic for the most popular of keywords

[B] Accuracy –> Caffeine scored over the Old Google in terms of accuracy, although it does seem to be deprived of universal search features at this point. So, don’t be disappointed if you don’t find your favorite conference pics…It might be just on its way

[C] News results and current events have a much faster arrival in Caffeine as compared to the Old one. Bing is there but can be counted as ‘Also ran…’ for the time being.

[D] In terms Indexing size , Caffeine is miles ahead of anybody else in the playing field including its younger sibling…

Google-Caffeine-0