Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Optimizing for Local Search

As I did research on optimizing a website for local search, I found few things that should be considered. Below are the points:

  1. First adopt organic way of optimization
  2. Include city name and region in title tag, meta-description and meta-keywords tag
  3. Have full address in footer area
  4. Add business information in Local Business Center/Google Maps
  5. Target local keywords in Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
  6. Target keyphrase and location in each page
  7. Have incoming links from local pages
  8. Have incoming links with location and business
  9. Have extra pages that are more local area related. For example: direction page, places to visit when you are here, Nearby parks/meuseums/schools
  10. Having pages for other local offerings
  11. Adding geo-sensitive meta tags. For example:(Meta name=”zipcode” content=”12345,45678,09876″; meta name=”city” content=”dallas, houston, Austin”; meta name=”state” content=”texas”; meta name=”country” content=”usa, united states of america”)

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Hearing a lot about Agloco? What is it all about?

I recently have been reading and hearing about Agloco a lot. Are you too? I heard that it is an online community owned by members from all around the globe, who joins for free. Then different thoughts and questions started hitting my mind, "wow! really? So, it means I can also be a owner of this company if I become a member? Will I benefit from being a member? What if this is just a scam like many other "get rich quick" kind of scam? How will I get the share as the owner? How does this company work? And How do they make money?" Then I started reading more. It appeared that the company started around the last half of 2006 and they are progressing slowly. They still have a long way to go to start generating enough revenues so that they will be able to distribute owners their share and cash disbursement. What this means? Well, Agloco may just crash before it really becomes a successful venture. However, there is a positive and bright side as well. Agloco may be the next big and successful community and the company, just like Myspace or Youtube or even Google. What if this becomes true? How will it be to be a member or even a owner of such a company? Well, what is there to lose by becoming a member? It doesn’t cost me anything. Thinking about this potential growth, I just signed up. If you want to, sure you can. Just fill out a form and follow the instruction at www.agloco.com/r/BBFR6201 . Ofcourse, you should find out more about Agloco too.

Friday, June 29, 2007

Meta-Tags for Page Optimization

There are many different meta tags that do different things (refreshing pages automatically, redirecting; preventing from being cached etc). However, from the marketing or website optimization standpoint, “Title”, “Keywords” and “descriptions” are important.

Forming a good “title”:

Most of the search engines look into the title content first to match the searched keywords/phrases. Therefore, you can use combination of the most important key-words and key phrases so that the line is powerful and attention grabbing. Title Tags can be made in the form of a sentence but it is good to remove unneeded “linking” words, such as (the, in, at, is etc). You should never make more than 200 characters for a good title.

Forming “Meta – Keywords”:

There has been a debate about how many keywords one should use or whether to use commas or spaces between keywords/key phrases. I have been using commas to separate key words. To increase the chance of matching a search phrase, you can use the strategy of placing key words where it can be tied with the words ahead or after so that it is meaningful. You should always pick the right words and phrases to match the content of your site to search queries made by your target market. And you should try to place the primary keywords or phrases at the beginning. Don’t over-spam keywords though (repetitive use of a single keyword in order to manipulate search engine indexing and ranking)!

Forming “Meta – Description”:

Use your most important keywords and key phrases in your description, but make it meaningful! It has to be in the complete sentence form. Like the title tag, content you used in description tag is used by some search engines to tell people what your site is about. It's your only chance to motivate most people to click to your site. It can be considered as the summary of the web page that is rich with primary key words. Common questions include: "How long can the description be?" and "How many times can you repeat your keywords in it?" Again, there are no exact answers to these questions. I generally make about 40 – 60 words in description part. The rule of thumb is just to describe your site as attractively as you can using the fewest words possible.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

DO NOT Spam!

If you don’t want to get into big trouble and if you genuinely want develop your internet business successfully, then you have to make sure that you don’t SPAM!

Although there are different variations definition for Spam, the most general is the sending of Unsolicited Commercial Emails. In order to make sure of “NO SPAM”, you can follow few points as below:

  • Don’t rely on just the email marketing. If you use this method, make sure you have a clean opt-in list and clear opt-in process defined.
  • Always provide a way to "opt-out".
  • Do not annoy anyone even your “opt-in” list members by sending too many emails that do not interest them.
  • Do not mislead anyone (in Opt-In/Opt-Out process or in the e-mail).

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

One Best Traffic Generating Idea

Curios to know what it is? I was too, when I didn’t know what it was. Later, when I found out about it and learned about various other things, I came to know that it is in fact “Articles” or “content” that plays the key role in generating traffic for a site. I am sure, you can’t deny that content is the meat part of any website because it relays information about your product or services to your targeted user or internet users are constantly seeking for information about the right product and service for them, that’s why they come to your site to get that information.

Therefore,
Delivering information by writing a good article can sky rocket your traffic. If you don’t agree with me, please comment. May be you have got another best idea!

Friday, March 30, 2007

SMS for Internet Marketing

Why it makes sense?

  • SMS can be delivered very quickly to very large number of people at once
  • # of people who have access to their cell phone to use SMS is very large
  • Potential that people will read your message is very high
  • SMS is not as costly as other means of marketing

Because of above mentioned characterstics of sms marketing, I think SMS marketing will be more effective than any other form of marketing. I think SMS marketing will soon outbid the use of email marketing because of these qualities. However, if you plan to choose sms marketing as the means of marketing for your site, you should consider following things in order to maximize the outcome.

Things to do when SMS marketing:

  • Only follow permission based marketing
  • Personalize message
  • Clear and Concise message
  • Do not Spam

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Promote Your Blog or Feed by Adding Google Button

See the “Add to Google” button on this page at the right navigation panel? You can do so and increase your site visibility by letting people add your feed to their Google Homepage or Google Reader Page. This is a good way of promoting your site. If you don’t have a blog in your site, you can create it. I suppose, this will also help all of your site or blog pages get indexed in Google quickly too. To create your “Add to Google” button, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html and give your feed information. You can do the rest by following the page.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

If you want Googlebot not to index your page

There are times when you don’t want to eat; there are times when you don’t want to travel and there are times when you don’t want to do something that you would want to most of the times. Similarly, there are times when you don’t want Google to follow one or some of the pages of your site. Let’s say, you have created a temporary page within your site, or you have contents in a page that you will be moving to some other pages. Then, probably it is not the best idea to let Googlebot follow or crawl through that page. However, you do want to Googlebot to index all other regular pages.

Basically, you can prevent Googlebot not to index a page by using “NOINDEX” tag. This tag is appropriate, when you want Googlebot to follow some links but not all. However, use of “NOINDEX” tag may not be that appropriate as it requires a lot of updates when you change something. Optionally, you can use “NOFOLLOW” tag on the parent page if you don’t want Googlebot to follow any links. The use of “NOFOLLOW” or “NOINDEX” can be done as below inside the head tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">

Using “NOFOLLOW” tag is quite simple. However, it is not the safest way to prevent Googlebot from following links, especially if your page that you don’t want to be indexed is linked from a third indexed page.

Therefore, you will be better off using “NOINDEX” tag instead. Another way you can control is by using file ‘robot.txt’, which has instruction set for bot about how to behave on that site.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

URL Rewriting – Is it really necessary?

In the past, Search Engines including major ones like Google, Yahoo and MSN had hard time understanding and indexing pages that are dynamically generated. In such dynamic pages, a single page can deliver multiple page contents depending upon what the user has input. For example, the dynamic url http://www.xyz.com/abc/def.asp?x=12&y=adf&z=45 delivers one page content while http://www.xyz.com/abc/def.asp?x=2&y=adf&z=34 delivers completely different content even though both of these links are using the same file ‘def.asp’. Search Engines in the past were not smart enough and thus would consider both these links as one file and indexes just one. However, SEs now can understand and parse all these types of links regardless of their complex structure with querystrings. It is considered that all major Search Engines can now handle dynamic urls up to 3-4 querystrings. So, you will be okay and be assured that your site will be indexed properly even if your site is dynamic. However, static pages are always good over the dynamic pages. So, why not take the advantage of static pages by URL rewriting? URL Rewriting, Mod-Rewrite in Apache server, is the process to convert dynamic urls to static urls. By having static urls, you will make the urls friendlier and easier for end users, In addition, static urls I think rank better in search engines than dynamic ones.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

How to make a Search Engine Robot Friendly Site?

There are so many things that you can do to make your site search engine friendly so that Robots of search engines can easily crawl your site pages and index them properly. Here are some basic and simple rules for making your site SE friendly.

  • Make all pages of your site reachable from the main (home) page in not more than three clicks.
  • Create a “SiteMap” page that has links of all the pages within your site, which you want search engines to index.
  • Consider having about 250 – 300 words of content in a page. If you make a page too long, search engine will just ignore them. Generally, most search engines don’t index more than 100 KB of text on a page.
  • Avoid making image links or writing key phrases or content in image or flash objects.
  • Make sure you don’t have any broken links. Also, make sure there are no common mistakes.
  • If possible, don’t use script navigation. Also minimize the use of scripts because search engines cannot read scripts.
  • If you dynamically display content of pages extracting from database, try not to pass too many parameters through the querystring. Search engines are not smart enough to understand all the passed variables.
  • You can use the file “robots.txt” to describe how you want search engine robots to behave within your site.
  • Make sure your site is up all the time with out any server crash.
  • Attain as many quality inbound links as possible. This will ensure your site to be indexed quickly and also the higher page rank.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Getting Your Website Indexed in Google

You do a search for something in Google and Google displays millions of different pages, which are stored in servers all around the world. Do you know how Google does the actual search and how it displays so many sites in its result pages? Do you know how Google actually finds those pages? In fact, this is what indexing is called. Before a site appears in search result, search engine must index it. Once a search engine indexes a site, the search engine robot analyses it with relevant information and saves it in search engine database and thus it can deliver that information in its result page when searched for certain key phrases that are used present in that site pages. If a site is not indexed, search engine can not display that site in its result pages regardless of how relevant the page or site is.

Most of the sites do get indexed by search engines including Google. It is just that some do get indexed early while others take some time. There are certain factors that determine how a site is going to be indexed. Actually, there are basically two ways to allow search engines to find a new site.

The first way is by manually submitting an address of the site using a submission form of related search engine. This is generally called site suggestion. You can suggest a site or inform about the site to search engine by providing the site url and some description. Then the suggested site will be on queue for indexing. Other pages of the sites are interlinked with the main homepage so the search engine robot or crawler will automatically find those pages and index them as well.

Another way is to let the search engine robot find the site on its own. You just have to make one other site that is already indexed link to yours. This means, if you just make sure of at least one inbound link to your site from an indexed site, the search engine robot will index your site as well when its crawler crawls the next time. This is probably the better or the desired way of indexing rather than directly suggesting a site. This method can also be quicker than manually suggesting.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Email Marketing – A Good way to increase your site popularity

Just today in my hotmail inbox, I received 8 new emails that were from somebody I never communicated with. Couple of those messages interested me and I opened and read them. However for all the rest, I selected and hit “Delete” right from the inbox without even opening. For the ones I read, I remember signing for their Opt-in list once in the past. If you are sending such emails, do you know whether people read your emails or delete them without reading?

If you are planning to make your site popular, email marketing can definitely make a big difference and traffic to you site can sky-rocket in a very short period of time. However, you have to adapt the right way of email marketing.

Depending upon the way you do your email marketing, you can either make or break your business. This I think is very true. If you just scam people who are not interested in your service or products and your site, you just will earn bad credits for your business. You might even get black listed by ISPs or get into legal issues. The better alternative, in fact the fruitful way of running your email campaigns is by adapting a method called “Double Opt-In” (signing up people for one of your programs and sending them email with their sign-up confirmation and welcome message as part of the sign-up process). This way, you will only be collecting list of people who are really interested in your type of business and upon only targeting to them, you can have better conversion. If you have a good and clear privacy policy and an easy way for people to unsubscribe, your email program will rock! Always remember, a good quality service is the key ingredient for running a good business.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

"target=_blank" - Good or Bad?

There must be mixed fillings and perceptions for the practice of linking out of your site in a new window. On one hand, it is good for the original site because their site window will still be opened even if users leave on to the link you provide. This is surely a nice way to retain your visitors within your site. However, does this kind of practice hurt your page rank or will search engines penalize for using such kind of practice of opening links in a new window? You don’t have to worry because they don’t care. Search Engines including Google don’t really care what you have in “target”. Their crawlers just ignore what’s inside the “target”. However, they do follow the link. So, you are pretty safe from SEO point of view for using “target=_blank” or whatever or using other methods to open links in a new window.

This doesn’t mean, you should standardize this way of opening links in a new window. In fact, I think you should only open new windows if you really need to. Otherwise, just don’t. From the user standpoint, it usually is annoying except for some reasons.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Humor About Different Types of Marketing

A friend of mine got this as an email forward and he forwarded it to me...

A Professor at one of the IIM's (INDIA) was explaining marketing concepts to the Students:

  1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" - That's Direct Marketing
  2. You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says: "He's very rich. Marry him." - That's Advertising
  3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day, you call and say: "Hi, I'm very rich. Marry me." - That's Telemarketing
  4. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink, you open the door (of the car) for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and then say: "By the way, I'm rich. Will you marry me?" - That's Public Relations
  5. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says:" You are very rich! Can you marry me?" - That's Brand Recognition
  6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" She gives you a nice hard slap on your face. - That's Customer Feedback
  7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" And she introduces you to her husband. - That's demand and supply gap
  8. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say anything, another person comes and tells her: "I'm rich. Will you marry me?" and she goes with him - That's competition eating into your market share
  9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say: "I'm rich, Marry me!" your wife arrives. - That's restriction for entering new markets.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Things to consider when creating a site

There are certain things that you and your developer must consider while developing a new site. Based on my experience, here are some points I think should not be ignored:

  1. Make it load fast
    The site should load fast enough. I have heard that people don’t wait more than 15-25 seconds on a page if they don’t find anything that interests them. If your page doesn’t even load within this time frame, what good is it for you even if your site looks incredibly elegant and contains wonderful content? Therefore, you should make sure that it doesn’t take much time to load your site page. To insure this, make sure your site is going to be hosted in a good and fast server. Don’t use too much of big graphics, applets, animation or flash movies. Rule of thumb should be minimizing the use of things that are not really needed.

  2. Target the Market
    You should know about the audience of your site. Will they be teenagers? Will they be business executives? Or will they be IT experts? Once you know about your audience, you can offer and cater better service and your audience will also prefer your site over others. For instance, if your audience is mostly teenagers and your site is full of entertaining and flashy stuffs, and has informal looks, your site will perform well.

  3. Focus
    Make sure your site is focused on its objective and on the product or services. You can surely do up-selling and cross-selling for different products or services as they can be essential for your business but do it deviously. If you have to offer many different kinds of products, categorize them and display them in different pages.

  4. Build Trust
    Will you buy a product if you think the product is not going to work after 24 hours? Will you buy from someone who you think is a fraud? I won’t. I am sure you won’t either. No one will if there is no trust. Therefore, it is extremely important to build trust first before convincing your visitors to purchase from your site or use your service. Make sure you clearly write out your privacy policy about visitors and your site users, your contact information including your email address, mailing address and phone number.

  5. Easy and Secure Payment Method
    The various options you offer for payment method, the more ways people can purchase from your site. You can really make your client’s and customer’s life simple if you adapt easy and many payment options. Set up merchant account and start Credit Card payment processing. In addition, set up for e-checks. Accept Bank Drafts, money orders and regular checks and provide your address to send it to. In addition, make your payment processing pages secured by installing SSL.

  6. Easy Navigation and Consistent Look and Feel
    Make your site easier to navigate for users. It doesn’t worth it if the site is too complex and confusing. If you maintain inconsistent look and feel for different pages within your site, it may be confusing to users and they might leave from your site without knowing your site is valuable for them. A good navigation structure will let users find what they want very easily and quickly and thus can convert them into your happy customers more effectively.

  7. Search Engines Indexing
    More than 80% of your new site traffic comes to your site from major search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo and so on. Therefore, you can really tap into your intended market if your site pages are well indexed in all search engines and if the placement is good in Search Engine Result Pages. Therefore, spend some time doing research in effectively creating meta-tags for keywords and descriptions. In addition, make sure to create a Sitemap page. All these extra concerns help in indexing your site to all major search engines.

  8. Content
    Content of your website is the major factor in driving traffic to your site and converting that traffic to customers. A good content in your website positively impresses all major search engines, thus your site can be better ranked in SERPs. In addition, a good content makes your site users understand well about your products and services and compels them to purchase. Therefore, your focus in developing a new website should be for creating a good and persuasive content.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Why linking is important?

Linking is important for any website to succeed. It generally helps in two ways:

  1. Linking creates path to your website from other sites in the internet. As people follow links to get from one page to another in the net, there is a great chance that people will get to your site if a link to your site is present in the page that they are viewing. This way, the more links there are on other sites, the more your site will be visited.

  2. Linking adds value to your site and thus makes a good impression for Search Engines. If a search engine finds more links for a site from other sites, it perceives that the site must be more interesting and has valuable content in it. Therefore, it prioritizes the site by increasing its ‘Page Rank’ and providing a good placement in SERP (Search Engine Result Page).