My SEO In - SEO Web Tips, Latest Search Engine Optimization News

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

The Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools provides webmasters with the results of Googlebot attempting to fetch their pages. The server headers and HTML shown are useful to diagnose technical problems and hacking side-effects, but sometimes make double-checking the response hard: Help! What do all of these codes mean? Is this really the same page as I see it in my browser? Where shall we have lunch? We can't help with that last one, but for the rest, we've recently expanded this tool to also show how Googlebot would be able to render the page.

How It Works

Before using the Fetch as Google, you’ll need to have added and verified your site in Webmaster Tools. Then, follow these instructions:

You can use this tool to fetch up to 500 URLs a week per Webmaster Tools account. When rendering a page, Googlebot will try fetch all the external files as well. Such as images, CSS and JavaScript files. These files are then used to render a preview image that allows you to see your page as Googlebot sees it.

1. Using the same anchor text for all the links

A very common mistake that many people quite often make. I still see a lot of people using the same anchor text while building incoming links to their website. They simply ignore the fact that search engines are looking for natural links and it doesn’t look natural if all the links have the same anchor text. Always try to mix up the anchor texts in your links. You certainly can’t control the anchor text for all of your incoming links. But the ones you do, make sure to utilize it properly.

Using 3-4 different anchor text is a good practice to follow while building inbound links. Always target your most important keywords in those links.

2. Building too many links from the same domain

Links are counted as votes to a site being linked to. The same way in an election you can’t vote more than once, too many links coming from a single domain are not given much value. In many cases having even 100 links from the same domain can be counted as a single link by the search engines. But this highly depends upon the authority of the site and the link value of the site linking to you.

For example, 100 incoming links from CNN or NY Times or any other authority site in your niche will make a huge difference to your link profile. But you can’t expect the same to happen if the site giving you hundreds of links is not an authority in its niche. It will still be counted as a single link by the search engines.

So don’t be too happy if you get a thousand links from a forum or a single site. Get your ass out there and start working on getting links from different domains.

3. Building only do-follow links

First of all there is nothing like a do-follow tag in HTML. There is a no-follow tag in HTML which instructs the search bot not to crawl that link. Adding no-follow tags prevents passing any link juice to the linked page. Do-follow is just a term coined for the absence of no-follow tag in a link. Which means that the link can pass juice. So don’t get confused with the terms.

If you are really taking link building seriously you should also emphasize on making it look natural. Search engines look for natural link profiles. A natural link profile contains all kinds of links. Do-follow and no-follow links both. A link profile with only do-follow links looks dubious and is certainly going to raise a lot of eyebrows. So from next time whenever you have a chance of getting a link even if it is a no-follow, just grab it!

You don’t have to worry about the number here. Even not to worry if you are getting all the do-follow links. If you are building the links naturally eventually you’ll have a good balance of do-follow and no-follow. What you have to remember is that a link is a link whether a do-follow or a no-follow.

4. Not mixing it up

A natural link profile would contain links from all kinds of sources. Like from websites, blogs, social media sites, etc. Do not concentrate only on getting links from one type of source. Mix it up!

Make profiles on popular social media sites. Start a social media campaign, work on getting links from other people’s profiles. Ask people to share your links on their profile. Write guest posts for other blogs. Contact established bloggers in your niche ask them for links. Submit articles and press releases. Read this post to learn tons of efficient ways of getting links from different sources.

Remember while asking people for links, they owe you nothing! So they won’t link back to you unless you really have something on your site that would be helpful for them or for their readers. So make sure you deserve to get links first before asking anyone to link to you.

5. Using PageRank for link assessment

A very common misconception that many site owners have is that, a high PR link is the most ideal link to have. People are more inclined towards a page’s PR than the quality of a link from that page. Remember that PR is just an indication of the quality of a web page. It certainly doesn’t define it’s link value.

For an example, a page with PR value of 2 and only 10 outgoing links would be a far better choice to get a link from, than a link from a page with a PR 4 and 100 outgoing links.

After Google’s recent Panda and Penguin updates, a page will either lose or lessen its linking value by linking to a low quality or a spam page. So if you are spending your time and energy on building links from other web pages make sure you assess their linking value based on the above four factors.

6. Targeting different niche

A lot of people think that no-matter what, a link is still a link. Well of course yes, it is. But spending a lot of time on getting a link from an online beauty a shop won’t do any good to your rankings if your website sells cars.

You need to concentrate on your own niche. Make sure you put all the efforts and time on links that will ultimately give you rankings and if not, targeted traffic!

So spend your time and effort on quality and authority sites within your niche.

7. Not linking deep

A very common mistake that a lot of people do; is building links only for their homepage or any other important page. Your link profile can not look natural if you have hundreds of links for your homepage and 0 links for other inner pages. A healthy backlink profile can not be one-dimensional. You have got to link deep.

Every site has a bunch of important sub-pages. Your job is to identify the sub-pages that could be important for your target audience and the pages you wish to promote. After the identification of those pages, make a list of these pages according to their importance. After you have a list of pages that are most valuable for your site, now you can decide how time you have to give building links for each page.

In my code journeys and programming adventures I’ve encountered many strange foes, and even stranger allies. I’ve identified at least five different kinds of code warriors, some make for wonderful comrades in arms, while others seem to foil my every plan.

However they all have their place in the pantheon of software development. Without a healthy mix of these different programming styles you’ll probably find your projects either take too long to complete, are not stable enough or are too perfect for humans to look upon.

The Duct Tape Programmer
The code may not be pretty, but dammit, it works!

This guy is the foundation of your company. When something goes wrong he will fix it fast and in a way that won’t break again. Of course he doesn’t care about how it looks, ease of use, or any of those other trivial concerns, but he will make it happen, without a bunch of talk or time-wasting nonsense. The best way to use this person is to point at a problem and walk away.

The OCD Perfectionist Programmer
You want to do what to my code?

This guy doesn’t care about your deadlines or budgets, those are insignificant when compared to the art form that is programming. When you do finally receive the finished product you will have no option but submit to the stunning glory and radiant beauty of perfectly formatted, no, perfectly beautiful code, that is so efficient that anything you would want to do to it would do nothing but defame a masterpiece. He is the only one qualified to work on his code.  

The Anti-programming Programmer
I’m a programmer, dammit. I don’t write code.

His world has one simple truth; writing code is bad. If you have to write something then you’re doing it wrong. Someone else has already done the work so just use their code. He will tell you how much faster this development practice is, even though he takes as long or longer than the other programmers. But when you get the project it will only be 20 lines of actual code and will be very easy to read. It may not be very fast, efficient, or forward-compatible, but it will be done with the least effort required.
 

The Half-assed Programmer
What do you want? It works doesn’t it?

The guy who couldn’t care less about quality, that’s someone elses job. He accomplishes the tasks that he’s asked to do, quickly. You may not like his work, the other programmers hate it, but management and the clients love it. As much pain as he will cause you in the future, he is single-handedly keeping your deadlines so you can’t scoff at it (no matter how much you want to).  

The Theoretical Programmer
Well, that’s a possibility, but in practice this might be a better alternative.

This guy is more interested the options than what should be done. He will spend 80% of his time staring blankly at his computer thinking up ways to accomplish a task, 15% of his time complaining about unreasonable deadlines, 4% of his time refining the options, and 1% of his time writing code. When you receive the final work it will always be accompanied by the phrase “if I had more time I could have done this the right way”.

Where do you fit?

Personally, I’d have to classify myself as the perfectionist. So, which type of programmer are you? Or perhaps you know another programming archetype that is missing from my list? Post a comment below and I’ll add it to a new updated list.

Businesses, and even consultants, often do more damage than good when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Google's search algorithm is constantly evolving and getting better at what I call "SEO detection" -- the ability to detect artificial backlinks and attempts to manipulate your website to rank better.

In a lot of ways, what worked a decade ago for SEO still applies today. But intentional SEO -- such as over optimizing your website, too many backlinks with keyword anchor text, lack of diversified backlinks and other tactics -- can actually get you in trouble with the search engines. Google can distinguish, for the most part, what's natural and what's not.

One thing to remember is that Google likes sites and content that other people enjoy, find useful and share with others. When was the last time you shared a site that felt like spam or had little content on it?

Here are four tips that can help improve your website's SEO, without doing any SEO:

1. Create killer content. Just because you offer a service or are an expert in a particular industry doesn't mean your website deserves to rank on the first page for your particular set of keywords. What ranks is quality content and resources that people find useful and want to share.

As a business owner, your time and money is best spent on generating original, useful content for your site. Try to post a new piece at least once a week, if not three times a week. Google loves fresh, original content.

2. Include your keywords in your articles and titles. Let's say you're a manufacturer of solar panels and one of your keyword phrases is "solar panel manufacturer." You'd want to write an article on what to look for when seeking a solar panel manufacturer, and work that phrase into the headline. This isn't SEO rocket science. It's about properly labeling your online content.

3. Incorporate social media share buttons on your site. Increasingly, social signals are being taken into account by search algorithms. Why? Because people share content that's worthwhile. Having social media buttons allows your online visitors to share your website and its content.

You'll also want to incentive people to share. Host a contest or product giveaway to get people tweeting and sharing your website URL.

4. Offer expert advice on other websites. Most blogs, magazines and news sites welcome content submissions. Offer to contribute an article or post explaining something related to what you do. These sites often receive a lot of submissions, so make sure that yours is authentic and informational.

Not only can contributing to other sites help generate awareness about your brand, it's an effective way to getting high quality, non-spammy links back to your site. If you do it right and people like what you write, this can help establish you as an industry expert as well.

The independent authority on Search vendors in Australia, topseos.com.au, has released their list of the thirty best SEO Companies in the Search marketing industry. Each of the companies named in the rankings have been through a meticulous evaluation of their organic optimization services focusing on five areas of evaluation. The strengths and competitive advantages of the companies included in the evaluations are compared in order to generate the list for each month.

The Managing Partner of topseos.com.au, Jeev Trika, explains “we often times talk to the clients of the agencies. We address how much needs analysis was performed by the agency prior to any work being conducted, the quality of keyword analysis carried out, and both the on page and off page optimization strategies implemented by the agency.”

The Top 30 SEO Companies in Australia for November 2012 are:

The process for evaluating and ranking the best SEO Companies in Australia involves the use of a set of evaluation criteria, at least three customer references, and the use of various industry resources for information and research. The five areas identified to be critical for SEO services include on page optimization, off page optimization, needs analysis, keyword analysis, and reporting methods. In addition, customers of SEO services are asked their opinions on the service provider and about their online marketing initiatives in general.

Most Search Engine Optimization experts find search engine submission services to be a waste of time and a scammy type of service.

That being said, Google's John Mueller took it a step up by saying using these services may hurt your rankings.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread John responded to a webmaster who was asking "mass website submissions to search engines," and asked if it will have any impact on their rankings.

John from Google said, yes, it may, it may have a negative impact. Why? John explained that it can lead to a tremendous number of unnatural links for your site. As you know, unnatural links can more than ever have a negative impact on your site. Despite the concerns with negative SEO, this is the reality we live in these days.

So yea, it sounds like in some cases you can use these services to negatively impact your competitors, assuming their link profile looks horrible anyway?

As anyone who's ever struggled to achieve and maintain high search results rankings can attest to, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a constant race to stay one move ahead of your competitors. To win that race, you need to continually improve your own website and monitor your competitors' SEO activity.

If you've watched rivals usurp your top rankings, you'll want to consider these five tips:

1. Focus on content creation.
When it comes to digital marketing, the acronym "ABC" doesn't just stand for "Always Be Closing." It should also remind webmasters to "Always Be Creating."

Whether you're pursuing SEO, pay-per-click or any other digital marketing strategy to attract new visitors to your website, the quality and amount of content matters. Adding fresh content to your site makes it more appealing both to the search engines and their automated indexing programs, as well as the people who read your pages. High-value content can also lead to viral sharing, which increases the number of external backlinks pointing at your website and further improves your SEO.

So content creation is a "win-win-win." If you're concerned about competitors usurping your high search rankings, you can't go wrong by investing time in creating blog posts, articles, downloadable products and other content for your site.

2. Plan your keyword targeting strategies carefully.

As you're creating this content, you'll want to pay careful attention to the keywords you're targeting. Just because you've reached the top spot in the Google results for a given keyword doesn't mean that maintaining this ranking is a valuable use of your time.

What you need to focus on are the search queries that yield the highest total traffic. To determine which keywords are most effective and which ones can be ceded to competitors, look at the traffic data for different search queries using Google Analytics or Google's Webmaster Tools program. If possible, use advanced tools like Raven Tools (free, with paid plans starting at $99 per month) to determine which keywords are producing the most conversions.

3. Stay abreast of SEO news.

SEO is a field that's constantly changing. If you're able to jump on a new technique or growing trend before your competitors, you may be able to cement your lead in the natural search results.

Set aside time each week to monitor SEO news websites such as Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch. If you see evidence of a major change in SEO best practices, take action right away to prevent your site from falling behind in the search results.

4. Monitor your competitors' backlink profiles.

While it's important to monitor your own website's backlink profiles to prevent negative SEO attacks, you should also keep a close eye on any changes in the links your competitors are building.

Often, the best SEO techniques aren't widely publicized. Instead, people accidentally stumble upon a winning combination that leads to positive website results. By monitoring your competitors' backlink profiles using tools like Majestic SEO (free, with paid plans starting at $49.99 per month) or Open Site Explorer (free, with paid plans starting at $99 per month), you can both identify potential linking partners for your site and uncover any new linking strategies your competitors may be using to try to beat you.

5. Monitor your competitors' on-site SEO activities.

Also monitor competitors' on-site optimization efforts. If any competitors dramatically change their SEO activities, you could be looking at one of two possible scenarios: They may have discovered a new way to optimize their pages in the search results, or they may be updating their pages in response to a penalty from the search engines.

Online Branding vs SEO

For marketing, while SEO has its own advatages, online branding offers many benefits. In certain instances, marketers may be confused to use whether SEO or online branding. However, we bring in the benefits of both strategies for marketing a product or service.

Search engine optimizer is popularly known as SEO and a process of improving the rank or visibility of a website by editing its content and HTML including associated coding and removing barriers to the indexing activities. However, SEO has nothing to do with online branding. The more you do SEO the more you attract visitors and customers.

On the othe hand, spreading your brand and getting recognized by the online world is online branding. Social media sites started helping marketers to promote their products more effectively than ever before. The brands are noticed when the internet users while using certain social networking sites resulting in purchasing your product or service.

How important is it to be on top? In search marketing, the difference between a first and second place listing can be huge, according to new research from Compete.com.

Their recent analysis of "tens of millions" of consumer-generated search engine results pages from the last quarter of 2011 highlights a few interesting insights for marketers. As shown in the illustration above, 85 percent of all listings shown are organic, with 15 percent paid search listings. Overall, 55 percent of search engine results pages have ads.

When it comes to clicks on those organic listings, 53 percent go to the top result. The second sees 15 percent of the action, the third 9 percent, the fourth 6 percent, dwindling all the way down to 4 percent to round out the top 5.

“Since the vast majority of listings on a SERP [search engine results page] are organic, and the majority of clicks are on the first listing, it’s imperative that brands strategy including constantly monitoring results due to the ongoing evolution of search engine algorithms,” Compete analysts advise.

Paid listings perform far better at the top, as well. Not necessarily the top of the ad block, but the top of the page as a whole.

Compete’s research shows that 61 percent of paid search ads are displayed in the right sidebar. Yet these ads get just 13 percent of the clicks. Sure, you want to be on top in the right ad block; the top listing on the right gets 4 percent of all paid search clicks, while the second gets just 3 percent.

However, the third listing in the top ad block gets more than double this, at 9 percent. The first listing at the top of the page gets an overwhelming 59 percent of all paid search clicks. Clearly, wherever it makes sense and is attainable, the top of the page is the place for advertisers to be.

A few other interesting tidbits stand out in the report:

Compete also offered by way of advice for marketers, “There is a strategic battle going on in SERPs and every decision has a dramatic impact on results. Most, if not all, search marketing efforts need to prove a ROI as there is a very definite spend, whether it is SEO or SEM.”

According to SEL, major Google Panda update happened on 27th September 2012 and almost 2.4% search engine queries for English language is impacted with this update. This is the 20th iteration of Panda update and changing the name convention for Panda updates, it’s call as Google Panda 20.

What’s new in Google Panda 20th Update?

Unlike all previous algorithm update, which was just a data refresh, this 20th Panda update includes more signals and it’s an algorithm update and not just a data refresh. Usually in a data refresh, very few percentage of search queries are affected but this time, it was a major algorithm update and affects 2.4% search queries. That means, more ranking signals added or removed in this update.

One major issues with this update Webmasters are facing is, distinguish between EMD and Panda update. Since, the time difference is hardly 24-48 hours and Webmasters who are using exact match domains to get SEO advantage, it’s hard to determine if they are affected by Panda or Exact match domain penalty.

Though, one thing which is very common about both the algorithm change is: Both are targeted to penalize low quality content and improve the ranking of high quality content and domains. So, if your blog traffic went down between 27th-29th September, you need to work on your Blog SEO, quality of articles and work on over all Social media optimization and branding of your blog.

Though, I really hate the latest update as I could see too many results from same domain and it’s decreasing the over all Google search quality. I hope it’s just related to few of my queries but if you are also seeing the same results as me, do let me know via comments. One thing which is certain after Panda, Penguin, EMD and other algorithm updates is Google values high quality Blog with quality content. More over, niche targeted blogs are easier to rank for small tail and Long tail Keywords.

If you suspect that you have been hit by Google Panda 20th, you can use Google penalty checker tool to find which algorithm update affected your blog. You can check out a timeline of Google algorithm updates here.

If you are not affected by EMD and affected by Panda algorithm update, I recommend you to check out following 5 articles, which will help you to understand how SEO works after Post panda and penguin world and how you can stay ahead of crowd:

Road to Panda recovery is going to be time-consuming but with few tweaks you can easily see the traffic difference in matter of a week. If you have never done SEO optimization of your WordPress blog, you can take advantage of my Personal Blog coaching or WordPress SEO service to make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly.

1.    CREATION OF BUFFER SITES
We Create Fan page, You Tube, Google+, Blogger, Twitter, Yahoo Groups, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc, And use them as buffer sites to reduce link velocity. Main object is of the better sites is that, money site/Main site, should be 100% safe or in other words there is No Risk of Google slap (Banned, Deindexed or Sandboxed).
2.    SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

3.    WEB 2 SITES OR SOCIAL NETWORKS
Web 2 sites/properties or social networks are not article directions. They should be created as websites and treat them as websites.

4.    VIDEO CREATION & SUBMISSION

5.    ARTICLE DISTRIBUTION TO VARIOUS BLOG NETWORKS

6.    SUBMITTING ARTICLES TO THOUSAND OF ARTICLES DIRECTORIES WITH ARTICLE MARKETING ROBOT

7.    POWERPOINT AND DOC SHARING

8.    PRESS RELEASE

9.    SOCIAL BOOK MARKING

Our philosophy at Creative Content Experts is that search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) require different approaches and time-lines. SEO comes first as you identify keywords and develop on-page content. Then comes SEM as you build links to your site from 3rd party websites.

Search engine optimization is performed on your website by developing or solves a problem for a search engine user. Well written copy on your website starts with relevant keyword selection. Then you develop a page or pages that help search engine users answer a question or solve a problem. Page titles, heading, meta-tags, and the actual copy on the page are all important pieces of the SEO puzzle.

Search engine marketing begins after quality content on your website has been published. You then identify which of the various 3rd party links are most relevant. All 3rd party content should be focus and well-written since search engine users and customers may find this content before they search for you.

Having an easily -accessible quick contact from on each key page of your institution's website on the right side of the page, below the header, will aid the user in requesting information. Why there? Testing has shown this is the most effective placement. The eye travels in an "F" pattern-ending up on the quick contact form.