1. Post on Free Blogs
You will receive one way linkbacks to your website every time you create a new post entry on popular free blogs. Make sure your free blog can ping the blog update services such as Technorati. Blogging is one of the easiest and most recommended methods to create valuable links back to your website. Web users can subscribe to your blog’s RSS feeds and get regular alerts from blog services whenever your blog has been updated. Also each RSS feed that is subscribed to counts as a free inbound link to your site. I discuss my top picks of free blogging services in another article I highly recommend you read. These blogs have rewarded me with fast and high valued inbound links time after time.

2. Post on Popular Forums
Registering on multiple free and popular forums is the second method I recommend for a great linkback campaign. It’s very important though to drop comments on forums whose topics are related or closely follow the same category, theme, and target audience as your website. It’s a good practice to include and link keywords in your comments that are found on your site. Remember to always choose forums that allow hyperlinks in your comments or more importantly in your profile signature. The next task is to make sure these hyperlinks do not employ the “rel=nofollow” rule. If this is the case, these forums are a complete waste of your search engine optimization efforts. Search engine robots such as Googlebot do not index these hyperlinks, resulting in no inbound links to your website. Check to see whether the forum is high trafficked and high ranked. The higher the traffic/rank of the forum, the more weight the inbound link holds by Google and Yahoo’s standards. Strong inbound links will push you further up in search engine results resulting in more traffic to your website.

3. Submit Original Articles to Article Banks
I can’t stress how important this method of Inbound Linking is. If you have the gift of writing then your website will benefit greatly by submitting your articles to article banks. As with any form of inbound linking, use only those article banks that are reputable, adhere to search engine optimization rules, and do not employ the “rel=nofollow” rule in their hyperlinks. The key is to write about topics that don’t expire or become stale. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep the articles around 300 to 700 words. Each article you submit will most likely have a signature line with an inbound link to your site, and each time someone uses that article they are required by article banks to keep your link in that signature section.

4. Submit content to Social Bookmarks
Social bookmarks are the new golden child of search engine marketing. They’re free and heavily used for content building on millions of websites. Most major portals utilize them to get their articles, videos, and images distributed to a broader reach of web users. A major advantage of social bookmarks is that once submitted, your articles get indexed by Search engines a lot faster than simply waiting for search spiders to crawl your site and index pages. Each submission creates a valuable inbound link. You can generally submit articles to about 14 high traffic social bookmarks, such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Mixx and so on.

Follow these methods and you will see an enormous turnaround in traffic and search engine rank in a short moment.

Now, Google has something for those websites who are willing to go for a subscription model. It’s called “First Click Free”

In order to help users find and access content that may require registration or a subscription, Google offers an option to web and news publishers called “First Click Free.”

Important Goals of First Click Free are:

1. To include highly relevant content in Google’s search index. This provides a better experience for Google users who may not have known that content existed.
2. To provide a promotion and discovery opportunity for publishers with restricted content.” - Google

Guidelines from Google.

“Webmasters wishing to implement First Click Free should follow these guidelines:

• All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they’re trying to access.
• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.
• If a user clicks to a multi-page article, the user must be able to view the entire article. To allow this, you could display all of the content on a single page—you would need to do this for both Googlebot and for users. Alternately, you could use cookies to make sure that a user can visit each page of a multi-page article before being asked for registration or payment.”

Some of the orthodox owners of websites may be reluctant to display their web content for free; however it will definitely boost up their popularity and SEO campaign performance. Also, sharing information will make the World Wide Web a better place to surf in.

The best part was the Google Moderator tool where one could ask questions and also vote for the questions that were asked by others. Have listed few of these questions along with the responses posted by Googlers.

Q)”What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it’s search placement?”

A)In the majority of cases, it actually doesn’t matter–we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information. Especially if you’re a mom/pop site, we try to find ways to rank your site even if your site is newer or doesn’t have many links. I think it is fair for Google to use that as a signal in some circumstances, and I try never to rule a signal out completely, but I wouldn’t obsess about it.

Q)Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?”

A)There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Q)”Until recentley (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?”

A)In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience.

If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.

Q)”Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?”

A)This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.

Q)“What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?”

A)I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site.

Q)”Is the bounce rate and speed taken into account when ranking a page? i.e. if you see a searcher click on a result then return very quickly and choose another result, is the first page ranked lower?”

A)Assuming that users will be jumping out of a site like that, there’s a high probability that they won’t be willing to recommend it to others (or come back themselves). So yes, indirectly at least, if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like (and recommend to others).

Q)”How will social media or more specifically share of comments (buzz about a brand) influence the serps?”

A)Social media is great! But, there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.

A few things to note: 1. If you allow user-generated content on your site, remember to monitor for spam. 2. Also, if you’re looking to get buzz to directly help your site in SERPs, know that we normally don’t crawl javascript, so if it’s hosted in javascript you’ll still get the user traffic from the buzz (which can eventualy lead better rankings), but the user comments themselves won’t be indexed. 3. If you want to get the user-generated content associated with your site (as part of your URLs), then make sure you host the user-generated content on your domain (so it’s not link to a separate site).

Q)”Will it make any difference between a shared IP and a dedicated IP on SEO or search results, as opinions are divided on this aspect?”

A)Most of the web is on shared IP addresses, so it doesn’t make much sense for us to give those on dedicated IP addresses any advantages. That said, if your server is struggling with the load of your website, it might make sense to move to a dedicated server that helps to make sure that your users are happy when visiting your website.

Q)”Are natural results geotargeted?”

A)Yes. If you search for [bank] in the U.S., you’ll get different results than if you search in the U.K. or Germany.

Q)”does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by google?”

A)Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger

You can check all the questions at http://tinyhttp.com/tatask.The audio and video of the event will be available soon on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ . Online chat is a good way through which SEO experts and webmasters can get their queries answered in real time from someone at Google. Hope we have many more such events from Google.

URL
Submit the URL of your home page. Inner pages may be accepted but I’ve never tried that. Good luck to those who want their inner pages listed.
Title of the site
It is advisable to submit the official name of your site or company. I’ve never got an acceptance by using a keyword or any other text.
Description
After the category selection, I feel that this is the second most important aspect. The description should be short, precise and to the point. Please don’t include any marketing messages for your website.
Email address
A valid email address is a must. Since they don’t email (I haven’t received an email from them as yet) and send spam messages, it would be a good idea to include your corporate email address, it would make it look more genuine and not spam. If not, then Gmail is fine.
Patience & Perseverance
Patience is a golden virtue when submitting to DMOZ. Be patient, since every site is reviewed manually, it can take a lot of time. If patience is golden then perseverance is the silver virtue. If you are denied a listing at the first attempt, it’s not a bad idea to resubmit your site. Just make sure that you don’t resubmit very often, once in 2-3 months should be a good bet.
At last, I would like to say that going through the Submission Guidelines and DMOZ Blog is not a bad idea, you can get some new insights into the world of DMOZ. Good luck and Happy Submitting!!!

Poorly configured firewalls can block search engine spiders

It turned out that the delisted web sites were all hosted by the same hosting company. More precisely, the web sites were all hosted by a hosting company that used a special firewall software by SonicWALL Inc.

That firewall stopped the search engine spiders from accessing their web sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN and all other search engines that request the robots.txt file couldn’t index the web site anymore because the firewall didn’t allow that:

“An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver using this interface.

The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise and control of the web server.” (source)

This is the standard security settings of the SonicWALL firewall and it basically means that your web site won’t be spidered by search engines if you use this firewall without customizing it.

A firewall with these settings will drop the connection to anyone requesting the robots.txt file so that it looks as if the web site is offline. From an SEO point of view, this is very bad for your web site because all good search engine spiders request the robots.txt file before indexing your web site.

What does this mean to you?

If your web site is not listed on search engines although it has many good incoming links and optimized web page content, you should ask your web host if their firewall blocks search engines that request the robots.txt file. Your web host might not be aware of the problem.

• Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “Cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first. (This one if especially for those affiliated with Amazon.com)

However, most site owners who worry about duplicate content aren’t worrying about scraping or domain farms; they’re talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. E.g.: www.somesite.com/boots.asp?colour=black&brand=riedell and www.somesite.com/boots.asp?brand=riedell&colour=black.
Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site’s performance, but it doesn’t cause penalties.
Google says duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, Google does a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in their search results.
Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy.
Google’s way of handling duplicate content is as follows:

• When Google detects duplicate content, through variations caused by URL parameters, Google groups the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
• Google selects what it thinks is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
• Google then consolidates properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Here’s how this could affect you as a webmaster:

In step 2, Google’s idea of what the “best” URL is might not be the same as your idea. If you want to have control over whether www.somesite.com/boots.asp?colour=black&brand=riedell or www.somesite.com/boots.asp?brand=riedell&colour=black gets shown in our search results, you may want to take action to mitigate your duplication. One way of letting Google know which URL you prefer is by including the preferred URL in your “Google sitemap”

In step 3, if they aren’t able to detect all the duplicates of a particular page, they won’t be able to consolidate all of their properties. This may dilute the strength of that content’s ranking signals by splitting them across multiple URLs.
In most cases Google does a good job of handling this type of duplication. However, you may also want to consider content that’s being duplicated across domains. In particular, deciding to build a site whose purpose inherently involves content duplication is something you should think twice about if your business model is going to rely on search traffic, unless you can add a lot of additional value for users. For example, Amazon.com affiliates have a hard time ranking on Google for content that originates solely from Amazon. This is because they cannot outrank Amazon if they’re providing the exact same content. Amazon has a lot of online business authority (most likely more than a typical Amazon affiliate site does), and the average Google search user probably wants the original information on Amazon, unless the affiliate site has added a significant amount of additional value.
Lastly, consider the effect that duplication can have on your site’s bandwidth. Duplicated content can lead to inefficient crawling: when Googlebot discovers ten URLs on your site, it has to crawl each of those URLs before it knows whether they contain the same content. The more time and resources that Googlebot spends crawling duplicate content across multiple URLs, the less time it has to get to the rest of your content.

In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

• You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
• If you’re a webmaster of “beginner-to-intermediate savviness”, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.
• You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties! The remedies for duplicate content are entirely within your control.

It is highly debatable. Of course your keywords and key expressions should appear on the web page being optimized, but just the density of your keywords cannot improve your rankings — many factors play a part in getting you a good ranking, and keywords are just a part of those factors.

With more and more search engines putting greater stress on the contextual relevance, the use of keywords is going to be less important. This involves optimizing pages for what people want, not what they are looking for. For instance, right now if you search for “web designing” you may get lots of results of online web designing tutorials. But there are many search engine users who search for web designing even if they are actually looking for a web designing company. Contextual relevance gives more importance to the actual message, not just the keywords.

Having said that, a certain number of keywords in your web page copy still rule the roost. It’s not necessary that every single sentence on your web page should have your keywords. Just take care that your keywords/key expressions appear twice or thrice on your web page, and also,

• your keywords should appear as anchor text
• your keywords should appear within all the important tags such <h1>, <strong>, and <li>

Generally you put the main points as headlines or bulleted lists. So if your keywords appear within these tags, the search engine ranking algorithm thinks that your page has some relevant information regarding this particular keyword or key expression.

The main purpose behind article submission is to attract a large number of visitors (and links) to your website without incurring a great cost. Obviously, it is important to make sure that the articles you intend to submit are directly related or relevant to your business.

There are various benefits of article submission including advertising, marketing and publicity of your business on the World Wide Web. Two of the main benefits are:

1. Article submissions can enhance and improve the ranking of your online business in search engines by increasing the quantity of back-links and PR.
2. Another benefit that article submission offers is that of establishing the particular website owner as an expert in their industry. By providing valuable detail and information within articles, it builds the trust of potential customers thereby giving them a reason to visit your website.

5 key points to consider while writing articles

During the process of article submission do not forget to consider below 5 key points. Following these points will meet the purpose of both i.e. your target audience and search engines.

1. Articles should be original and information rich.
2. Articles should be keyword-rich but not excessive to the point of keyword stuffing.
3. The average length of articles should be between 500 and 700.
4. Give a unique title to your article with main keywords included in it so as to make it easy for web crawlers to identify and classify the topic of your article.
5. Giving subheadings, bullets and numberings to articles make it presentable and easy to read for potential customers.

Dynamic URLs look like:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view11=art&id=58

Static URLs looks like:

http://www.yoursite.com/productname

A concept of mod_rewrite subsists which can be used to change these dynamic pages into static pages. Static url’s are more easy to read. According to my observation, rewritten URLs were getting easily indexed and ranked higher in the search engines. I have noticed that dynamic sites got 2500 pages indexed on Google and after mod_rewrite more than 12,000 pages got indexed by Google. Also, rewritten pages get indexed more rapidly and more regularly than their dynamic pages.

We will always recommend mod_rewrite to transfer dynamic URL’s into static as the search engine crawler always prefers static URL’s over dynamic URL’s.

If you have a shopping cart or an e-commerce website, check out our search engine optimization solutions for existing e-commerce website or contact us for a search engine friendly shopping cart solution.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Organic SEO

Organic SEO means trying to rank well naturally. In organic SEO you don’t pay for every click you get from the search engines. All the clicks from the search engines are free when you appear on the search engine result pages on the merit of the quality of your website. The only money you spend is on getting your website optimised for the search engine and getting quality content generated for your website.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

In pay-per-click advertising you pay for every click you get from the search engines. Both Google and Yahoo! run their own pay-per-click programs. In Yahoo!, your position depends on the amount per click you are ready to pay, whereas in Google’s AdWords, your position depends on your bid amount PLUS the performance of your ad.

So which one is better?

Pay-per-click is preferable in the short-term when you want to get quality clicks immediately after launching a new website or introducing a new product. It’s not the best way of getting traffic but it is an effective way. You can start receiving quality hits as soon as you’ve activated your campaign.

Organic SEO is preferred for the long run. It doesn’t make sense to keep paying for every click especially when you talk in terms of thousands of clicks per day. For every major keyword relevant to your website you should try to appear among the top 10-15 results on the search engine result pages.

The search engine users too, trust those links more that appear naturally.