Before the advent of Google’s search algorithms, only web marketers and companies with deep pockets could hope to get top search engine rankings from floods of traffic to their sites. Nowadays, the playing field is leveled. To get your website at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages), you want to make sure you have a good chunk of one way inbound links from reputable and high ranked websites. There are four proven search engine optimization methods I highly recommend employing for your blog or website. Please note these methods require some minor research, a touch of patience, and some basic web knowledge.

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.

I find it very annoying as a web user to search the whole web, find what looks like a desired result, and then end up being on a log-in-page. These pages have just one aim in mind ‘Give me money, else go away!’ I always move away from such a page because I know that I can find that information on other websites as well.

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.

Google hosted a live online webmaster chat on October 22, 2008. They had a presentation on “Frightening Myths and Misconceptions” where John Mueller demystified some webmasters myths related to Page Rank, duplicate content, links, 404 errors and geo targeting. There was also a return of their popular “Three for Three,” in which they had three different Googlers tackling three different issues … in less than three minutes each!

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.

How do I get my site listed on DMOZ? This is a million dollar question that everyone in the SEO industry is asking. Being in this industry for a while now, I’ve had a chance to experiment on how to get listed in DMOZ. As a result of this I’ve managed to get 4 of my sites listed in this highly reputed directory. I would like to share with you some of these experiences and help you in my small little way to scale this Mt. Everest of the SEO industry.
Just a word of caution, please don’t treat this post as a guide for a DMOZ listing. I’ve mentioned factors which I feel (from my personal experience) play a role in getting selected or rejected.
Selecting the Category
This is the most important factor. Selection of the right category is of utmost importance. For sites targeting a niche category (something like DNA Testing), it is better to select the appropriate category straight away and submit your site. For sites targeting popular categories (something like Internet Advertizing or SEO), it would be better if you take the regional route. First select your region, county or city (city in which your company is based) and then choose the appropriate category. For example if you are an SEO company based in Sydney, Australia, then it would be good if you select Australia first, then Sydney and then choose SEO.
Once the category is selected, its time to fill the form

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!!!

Some webmasters recently experienced a delisting from the search engines without any good reason. The webmasters had not done anything wrong and their web sites were optimized for search engines. Nevertheless, the web sites had been removed from search engines.

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.

Organic SEO or Pay-Per-Click search engine advertising, which is better? It depends on what you want at a particular moment.

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.

The other day I stumbled upon an article which gave tips on how to choose a domain name and how important is the presence of keywords in the domain name or URLs. I just skimmed through it and here’s what I feel would be a good domain.

Short and keyword rich
If you have SEO in mind then a good domain name is very important for your business. First and foremost it should have your keyword. In addition, it should be short and easy to remember. Being in the SEO industry I can safely say that URL’s of pages and the anchor text of links linking to these pages play an important role in Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The presence of an appropriate keyword in the domain name will do no harm to your SEO campaign as most webmasters generate links by making use of the business name in the anchor text. This will make sure that your keyword is present in the anchor text as well as the URL.

Long may do
There may be a possibility that you don’t get a short domain name which incorporates your most general keyword. In this case a long domain name (not more than 3-4 words) can be considered. For example let us assume that you are an internet marketing service provider and you can’t get a domain by the name of internetmarketing.com. Here a domain name such as internetmarketingusa.com may also serve the purpose as it gives an idea of your business and geographical location.

Country TLD may be useful
These days major search engines like Google have separate sites for each country and they give importance to the sites which are hosted locally. In this case a country code top level domain would be ideal for a business owner who wants to target a select geographic location. Let’s say that you want to sell a certain product or service only in the UK then in that case a domain.co.uk would be best suited for you.

Some may argue that in choosing a domain name with keywords you compromise on the branding, but I feel that’s the risk worth taking because good conversions are more important than branding.

Sitelinks are the links shown below some sites in search results and  are meant to help users navigate to your site. Google analyzes the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for and when it does find something suitable then it creates a sitelink. This is what a sitelinks look like

Sitelink

There need to be atleast three sitelinks created by Google for a particular site for the sitelinks to be displayed. The unfortunate part is that we cannot tell Google to create  sitelinks according to our choice, it does so on its own. However once Google does create a sitelink and if you dont want that particular link to be displayed then you can block it. Simply go into webmaster tools, there go to the sitelinks option and block a particular sitelink. Once blocked within a few days Google stops showing the sitelink and the sitelink remains blocked for a 90 day period. If you want that sitelink to be blocked for more time then all you need to do is just go to the sitelink page on webmaster tools. Each time you do so the sitelinks will be blocked for an additional 90 days. You can unblock a sitelink whenever you wish too

So how do sitelinks help an SEO campaign? Many a times it might happen that Google might create sitelinks of pages that you think people might not visit frequently  or more importantly you feel that there are many more important pages that deserve a sitelink. Then if you block a sitelink, Google automatically will create some more  relevant sitelinks.  Having irrelevant sitelinks might deter users from visiting your site and that is definitely not something that you want to happen.

Have you ever seen local listing appearing on the first page followed by the natural listings?  That’s one more service that Google provides us. Google Local Listing is a free web mapping service. You can add your business through local listings and rank prior to the natural listings. The local business results attract the attention of a user with the detailed map of the region with various results to choose from alongside. This in effect leads to a significant drop in clicks for results, despite being #1 right below the map. Even though your website is thoroughly optimized and has all the SEO elements in place but if it appears below local listing it affects your website traffic tremendously.  To maintain the website traffic, add your business through local listings and improve or maintain you website traffic.

Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier. Sitemaps have always been a part of good Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they have become even more important.
Using sitemaps has many benefits, like easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new pages, then using a sitemap can be vital to your sucess.
Google Sitmaps uses a special XML format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap which is very important from SEO point of view. One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders.