The Click Depot Blog

Archive for the ‘Organic SEO’ Category

Google has a way of penalizing certain web pages, if it thinks you are trying to manipulate page rankings. This can be especially true when you have pages that you change daily to keep them up to date. The dangerous thing about linking to penalized pages is that you will see your website or certain pages drop off the search engine results quickly or move down in rankings.

These penalized pages can be internal links or external links. Google assumes that you can control what pages are linked to your website, so they penalize you if you are linked to a penalized page. Be careful who you link to because you don’t want to be found guilty by association. If you have a page on your own website, you want to be sure it is not linked to multiple pages to keep several pages from becoming penalized. This can take some strategy to control, especially if it is a pertinent part of your website.

There are a few things to look for if you suspect a penalized page linking. If your webpage or website drops in the rankings and stays there, you might have a penalized page. Sometimes, penalties can be as small as 10 spots, but that can make a lot of difference in the web traffic you get. If you move down a notch, you will want to check and make sure you don’t drop any further in the page rankings, or you might have a penalized page linking.

Another thing you can look for is your pagerank bar. If a page on your website has a green page ranking bar that turns to gray, you will want to figure out why. If your page rank is 0 to 10 and you notice this color change, chances are you have a penalized page link, so you may have to alter your website and the links to attempt to regain higher page ranking.

Pay attention to the external and internal links on your website because a single page with linking that doesn’t fit the “no follow link attribute” that Google is looking for can cause your entire website to suffer. This can require diligence in deciding the external linking you want, but can get more complicated when it comes to internal linking, if it is one of your own pages.

Because page ranking in the search engines is important to driving traffic to your site, you don’t want to have penalized pages dragging you down the search engine results. You will want to stay on top of your page rankings and notice any drops or page rank bar color changes and then try to fix the penalized pages as quickly as possible.

You have to realize that the search engine spiders don’t actually read content in the conventional sense. They look for certain signs that page rankings are being manipulated and then try to isolate them. Unfortunately, it can take as much as a year for Google to “forgive” the penalized page links, so you may have to remove them for the quickest results. When it comes to your website’s page rankings, this might be a worthwhile fix, once you have isolated the links that are causing problems.

Image Courtesy: http://www.brickmarketingconsulting.com/

One of the top priorities of every single web master is to make sure that his web page gets top page rankings on the different search engine on the Internet. It is only then that he can consider his page to be in the “successful” category with the right and proper search engine optimization.

Nobody really has the patience to go to page number 236 of the search engine results, hoping against hope to find the data he has been looking for. For that matter many searches rarely go past the first page. That is the reason why every single website owner and webmaster Online is jostling for Top 5 rankings on the search engines. That means that a large number of traffic is going to visit your website, browse through it, and possibly buy some of your products and services.

Nevertheless, there are 3 major things that can kill your page rank stone dead. One of the most fatal of these things is loading up your webpage with a number of links going to bad or invalid URLs.

Mistake #1
Many people are under the impression that the more reciprocal URLs they have on their page, the more popular the page is going to be. However, just imagine you with a well designed and properly search engine optimized webpage. You find a page on the Internet that has relevant content pertaining to your own niche. You link your page to that particular page, without first doing your do diligence and checking out its page ranking and antecedents. It is only later that you discover that particular website was stuffed with keywords or had URLs that take your own page ranking down.

Over enthusiasm on your part to get your page in the top of the listing without proper follow through in the shape of stuffing your page with a number of URLs will lower the credibility of your page, both with the audience and with search engines. This is not what you want to do.

Mistake #2
Another common mistake made is that website owners think that they will get noticed without submitting their link to Google. You need to submit the site map that has been properly search engine optimized and with all the meta-tags in place to the webmaster tools present in Google.
If you find that after being in the top 5 your page ranking has dropped drastically, you want to submit a request for re-inclusion with Google. They will respond and let you know why your ranking has dropped. When they do respond you need to rectify the mistakes they have noted as soon as possible to regain your spot.

Most times this is because you have stopped keeping live and fresh content on your page. That may mean getting fresh keyword rich content, putting in the right meta-tags, and using other legal White hat search engine optimization methods to get a good page ranking.

Mistake #3
Another thing that is definitely going to kill your page ranking is a number of links pointing to the same boring content on your website. Just imagine a number of links including author pages, tag pages and archives pointing to the same repeated content. This may look good from your perspective, however GoogleBot is going to find itself confused, especially when it has to index all those archive pages and tag pages.

K.I.S.S. is the best acronym to use when thinking about keeping your page ranking from being killed. By avoiding the three mistakes listed here you can keep your top ranking intact!

Image Courtesy : http://contactdubai.com/tag/ranking

Developing the perfect link building plan for your website can require a little of digging into the purpose of your site, business, and how you plan to help others with your information. In the online marketplace, a website’s importance can come from numerous factors including:

Age of the website
Traffic flow
Popularity and Inbound Links
Directory submissions
Unique Content

But, the troubles of developing a link building plan should start with your ideas of how you want your site to grow. Many people make the misconception that owning a website automatically builds their rank in the search algorithm - it is not true. You have to work hard to develop interesting content, work with a professional firm that can handle the massive workload of keeping up your link building efforts. Before you hire a professional to manage your SEO campaign, consider researching respective sites and developing content before joining directories across the web. Use smart, targeted steps towards building your inbound links on the web.

Research Respective Websites

A respective website (or high ranking site) is one with a lot of popularity. Respective sites such as government affiliated, professional organizations, and leading authoritative websites can help boost your link building plan in an instant. If you want to capitalize on the inbound links you have, you should work with other webmasters in placing your links on their sites for traffic. Many webmasters are open to new ideas, opportunities, and partnerships with smaller website owners because they had to work from the ground up. Helping you attract customers is a way of building rapport with respective influencers in a small way; consider the possibilities of attracting more links with setting one on a frequently visited page.

Develop Articles/Blogs/Signatures

Articles are the number one reference in building authority on the web. As you have noticed, everyone has published at least five articles somewhere to get their names out there. You have to be smarter, work harder, and write more distinctive content in your niche to keep a selective audience’s attention. Consider this - you are a pediatrician interested in building clientele in your market by link building online. You can have links on your articles, signatures in social networks, and professional profiles. These inbound links can pinpoint readers to the exact pages you want them to see on your websites.  Work with a professional SEO firm in order to integrate the proper content for the right market. The more emphasis you place on a single market - the better returns you will have in your link building efforts on respective sites.

Join Highly Selective Directories

Prominent directories (ones everyone fears) are the best ones to join in order to increase your link building. Some people join highly selective directories to place their site before a loyal market of surfers that only visit those directories for information. You have to work closely in developing unique content, organizing your site, and submitting it to these directories purposefully. By organizing your link building plan, you can take advantage of many opportunities available on the web. Contact your local SEO Company for more details by visiting www.ClickDepot.com to learn how they can assist in developing your website’s online presence.

Image Courtesy:  www.seopositions.net/blog/tag/blog

If you have a website, then you know that it cannot possibly survive without the right amount of traffic. What’s the use in having a killer page that no one visits? It’s literally like you have went through the trouble for nothing. If you have found yourself in this situation, then you might need a couple of pointers to help guide the way to driving more traffic to your website.

Listed below are some proven ways to start getting the traffic that your website needs to thrive:

1.Sign up to free ad forums – Any time that you have a chance, take some time out to sign up to a couple of these very helpful advertising spaces. The more that you sign up to and post, the more traffic you will get in return.

2. Above all, make sure that you have fresh, up to date, and interesting web content – Only write about those things that you know people are going to be fascinated with. A good way to know is to think about what fascinates you. What is something that you really enjoy talking about? You also need to make sure that you can go into a bit of detail about your subject. Content that is vague and fuzzy has no point of existence. Frequently add updates to your site, and you will notice that people keep coming back to find more fresh, true content.

3. Sign up to an affiliate program – Getting others to promote your site or products is a wonderful way to increase traffic to it’s maximum potential. The only downside is that you may have to allow a percentage to go to the one’s who are promoting the website. But hey, at least they are helping to drive traffic, right? And without them, you most likely wouldn’t have as much traffic as you should. Some people use this method by itself and find that it keeps their website booming with traffic.

4. Sign up to a video casting website – This is another great way to get the word out there about your website, and it is also extremely popular right now. People are constantly logging into those types of sites to see what videos are hot and also to see what everyone is talking about. Just make sure that you include a link to your website in the video, and you will see that traffic is headed your way.

5. Gain traffic through link exchange – All you have to do is contact the individuals who own the site, and give them your website address. You’ll be promoting their sites, and they will be promoting yours. A good way to begin is to contact someone that you know gets a good bit of traffic, because that is where the people are.

6. Keyword your website – Do a search on the topic of which you will be talking about, and figure out what keywords are used to search for pages that are similar to yours. You might even find that some of the search phrases are a bit odd, but just try your best to incorporate them into your content.

7. Use online forums to market your website – Find a forum that you are interested in, and visit it frequently. Talk about things that relate to your website because you never know, your page just might be the answer to someone’s question! And furthermore, participating in online forums is a fun way to promote your page.

Follow these 7 essentials, and your page will end up with more traffic than New York Times Square!

Image Courtesy : http://nasirjafri.com/improve-web-site-traffic/

Determining a website’s Click Through Rate or CTR is one effective way of measuring how effective an online advertising campaign is. CTR is usually obtained by keeping track of the number of users who actually clicked on a particular ad with respect to the number of times that a particular user has clicked on the ad. There are a number of ways on which you can improve your site’s CTR. Below is an outline of five easy steps to improve CTR without doing anything highly technical or magical.

One

Getting the number of clicks you needed to fully advertise your site would need the use of certain keywords. Yes people, online advertising is all about keywords. The effective use of keywords is one way of inviting people to click on your ad links, which increases your website’s CTR and improve your ad position.

Two

The use of website content keywords is one effective way of drawing more traffic to your website. This is because URL links are embedded through the keywords. Aside from getting high quality and relevant content, your web page needs to use the right color palette for its keyword links or hyperlinks. Blending ad content with bright colors was never effective. People are used to the blue hyperlinks, which consequently is one of the most clicked hyperlink color. Most advertisers use shades of black or grey because very light hyperlink colors make the reader look too long on the URL, which gives readers enough time to realize that it is an advertisement and decide not to click on the link.

Three

Think about putting signup pages to your site’s homepage. Not only will it collect e-mail addresses to accommodate your website’s free downloads, this step will also help you in running a split test, which is helpful in determining which types of freebies your visitors respond well to. This will also help you manipulate your system of delivering marketing copies and messages such as sales letters and email newsletters to your avid visitors, which is also helpful in provoking immediate response and continuous patronage from your target audience.

Four

Putting individual product pages is a great way introducing your visitors to the product or service you are selling. Product pages are essential in motivating your visitors to make the decision to buy. Just make sure that your product pages are attention-grabbing to ensure best results. Not only will this step improve your site’s CTR, it will also help you effectively increase your sales.

Five

Aside from setting up product pages, complementing them with seasonal headlines is one way of getting more people to click on your ads. It does not matter if your product is not seasonal, making use of headlines such as “Easter Sale” or “Christmas Sale” is one effective way of targeting local audience, which in turn serves to your site’s CTR advantage.

Hence, to get quality CTR scores for your website you need to do an effective and dynamic keyword insertion and setup a strategic homepage design and information pages. Not only will these ensure advertising success, it will also help you connect better to your target audience.

Image Courtesy : http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2008/05/

Recently, we were questioned about an SEO technique that is commonplace - Blog commenting and forum posting. So before we dive into the issue, let’s look at what this technique is. Blog commenting is the process of making comments on other people’s blog with the primary intention of generating backlinks pointing back at your own blog or website. Secondarily, it also generates “buzz” for your website and people get to know about you.

Now, everyone comments on blogs and that’s definitely not a bad thing. However, when you spam somone’s blog just for the backlinks that is certainly spamming. These days, there are several plugins and tools that are available to bloggers to block comment spam. One of the best available is Akismet
- http://akismet.com/. These do a pretty good job of blocking out comments that are either stuffed with keywords, not relevant to the blog post or use a weird-looking name or URL. Another technique for discouraging comment spam is the use of no-follow tags (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow) on blog comment links. These have proved quite effective as well.

However, there are other kinds of comments that are less obvious and in fact, many consider them perfectly acceptable marketing techniques. If a marketer visits blogs that relate to their website and post relevant comments on these blogs with backlinks pointing back to their sites that cannot be considered spam. Some still do. Perhaps it’s because when used as a backlink generating technique, they usually don’t just go about commenting on any relevant blog. They specifically target the ones that are popular and the posts that are related to their niche. They also try to find blogs that do not use the no-follow tag. Further, the point that really makes it debatable is that they don’t really desire to share thoughts on the blog posts and are doing it just for the sake of the backlink. So, is that spam?

According to us, it is not. As long as it is done the right way. Here’s the reason why. Television, radio and any other media advertiser tries to target their ads to the right market. Not all marketing is on TV or radio. Nike pays movie makers a lot of money to get actors to wear their apparel. Iron Man only drove Audi’s. So, is that spam? Not really. So when commenters try to target blogs and comment on them for popularity, why is that spam? The thing about do-follow. OK, that’s a no-brainer. The idea is good, but it really doesn’t help anyone that wants to improve their blog’s search engine popularity. Any who doesn’t?

Bottomline. Don’t get carried away. Remember that your blog could be spammed as well. Your competitor could use blog commenting too aggressively and beat you at the rankings race. In order for this to be a viable technique, this needs to be the same for everyone. Comment, but be relevant. Add to the content of the blog. Add thoughts, opinions or information that will be valuable to the reader of the blog post. Resits the temptation not to do so. If that makes you post fewer comments so be it. You can at least know that you are doing the right thing. That way, everone gets what they want.

So, where do you stand - the clean and clear side of things or do you dwell into the darker, questionable kind of things. There is always a gray area. In most professions, and even in personal life, we often run into decisions that we have to make where there really is no wrong on right, at least the law doesn’t mention it. That’s when we have to take one side, the side that we believe in and touches us stronger than the other. That’s when we need to decide whether we let ourselves get greedy and carried away or stand by and do the right thing.

One such situation the choice between Black Hat SEO versus White Hat SEO. In the world of SEO, there are several techniques and methods that one can use to get higher rankings on search engines, that are not conventional. They attempt to get the better of search engine algorithms and artificially achieve rankings that the page may not otherwise rank for. These are called Black Hat SEO techniques. Some of the common ones are mentioned here for your reference:

1. Keyword stuffing 1: Invisible text: Use keyword text that is the same color as a page’s background
2. Keyword stuffing 2: Hide the text: Add keywords behind other visual elements such as images so you don’t see them on the page but they are there.
3. Keyword stuffing 3:  Small font text: Keywords in really small font placed along the top, bottom or sides of a web page.
4. Doorway Pages: Pages that never display to the visitor but are there only so search engine spiders can see and list them. These pages redirect to the actual page that sells the product.

There are plenty more of these to go by. There are entire forums dedicated to these techniques - http://www.blackhatworld.com/. But here’s our stand on this: DO NOT DO IT. The reason should come from your business ethics, but if that’s not enough, just know that search engines are not stupid. They will get you and when they do, you will lose all your work because of a little bit of greed. About.com puts it well

Black Hat SEO is tempting; after all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings; that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO. Here’s a few articles that can get you on the road to knowing search engine optimization:

In reality, every professional SEO knows to stay away from these for the long-term. There are sites that sometimes need to be successful only temporarily, for instance, before the day of the elections, Etc. However, even for those, there is no point in using Black Hat. Search Engines could block out an entire IP. If you are on shared hosting, that could affect other sites using the same IP. You could be doing harm for you and others.

There are other harder decisions. Ones that are no all black or white. These are the hardest. Our next topic is regarding practises that are commonplace but debatable.

First of all, what are backlinks? Backlinks are simply links pointing to a page. So why are they not called just links? Well, you could call them that, but looking at it from your site’s perspective, you have links on your page, for instance, this link to the best raleigh internet marketing company (ok, i had to insert some propaganda, afterall, i want to make money too is an outbound link whereas any links pointing to this page (like the one you should add on your blog is a backlink.

Backlinks are also called inlinks (by Yahoo), inbound links (by Google) and so on.

So why are they so important? Read this post about search engine ranking factors and you’ll see that we said quality backlinks are the #1 factor in ranking pages higher on organic search results. Quality backlinks can skyrocket your website’s popularity and help your drive tremendous amounts of web traffic to your site. If you are serious about your business, whether is is online of offline, you need to know how to generate quality backlinks for your site. For that you first need to know what quality backlinks are.

Here you go, the seven qualities of a quality backlink:

1. Popularity: The page where the link is situated should be popular. In other words, that page should in turn have a lot of quality backlinks itself. It is emperically proven that SE’s look at at least 2 degrees of link popularity to determine rankings. Google page rank is a good measurement of the popularity of a page even though these days its accuracy is being questioned. So, if this is all too confusing for you then just know that you should get at least a few links from pages that have a google page rank that is higher than your page.

2. Outbound links: The page that you are getting backlinks from should not have too many outbound links on it. The recemmended number is 25 of less, in general. This is what makes the links from directories relatively less useful since directories typically have several dozen links on one page.

3. Age: The older the link that is pointing to your page, the better. This way search engines know that you are not buying links temporarily form a website to drive your link popularity.

4. Do Follow: Some websites mark some of their links as NO FOLLOW within their HTML coding or using other SEO techniques. They usually do this to avoid spam. No follow links are basically avoided by search engines when they determine rankings for a certain page.

5. Relevance: The link should be on a domain that is relevant to yours. It is increasingly becoming apparent that search engines understand link neighborhoods. In other words, if you are florist website and get a link from a website that talks about flowers, the link has more weightage than a link from a car mechanic shop. Now, your car mechanic might genuinely love the flowers he buys from you, but say sorry to him, search engines don’t really like his link all that much.

6. Location: Links that are mingled inside content (also called content links) are better than links that are on the footer or the header of sites or on a popup window for instance.

7. One way: Now this should actually rank pretty high up in this list but it’s down here because it is sort of obvious these days. Reciprocal links are less useful towards the link popularity of your website than one way links.

Now that you know what quality backlinks are, your next goal should be to find out how to get them. There are a lot of resources on the web that talk about this, but I’ll give you my 2 cents in a future post..

If you have an online or offline business that has never used the Internet for marketing on a large scale, there are a lof of things you can do to start on that journey TODAY, NOW, not later, not next week. By the time you end reading this short post, you will have the knowldge to start promoting yourself online.

STEP 1: Google Local/Maps: Go to http://www.maps.google.com and search for your business in your location. If you find that your business is already listed, great; if not, create one. You simply need to log in using your google/gmail account (create one in 2 minutes if you don’t have one) and complete the entire profile. This helps in a big way. A lot of people search Google or Google Local to look for businesses and the information that you enter is what gets searched. Make sure that you enter all your information in detail and upload pictures if possible.

STEP 2: Reviews: Send email to 10-25 friends/customers and ask them to write a review on Google against your business. This will help your business rise to the top of the listings. Here you go, you have a secret from us now!

STEP 3: Local Directories: Think about what your potential customers would search on the net to find your business. For instance, for a florist in Raliegh, it would be “Raleigh Florist directory” or “Raleigh Red Roses directory” or something similar. Search for those terms and observe the results. Usually, there should be at least a few listings of sites that you can submit your business too. These are called diretory sites and are like free Yellow Pages. You can list your business there and increase your brand’s prensence on the ‘Net.

After you are done with these steps, now that your business is online, the next step is to consult with a web designer or a Raleigh Internet Marketing firm to get a simple website. You should be able to get a basic one for about $500-$700. Make sure that the website is developed to be friendly to the Search Engines. You can find more information about this at http://www.theclickdepot.com

There are hundreds of things you can do to promote your blog. These 3 are the easiest ones that you can do within 5 minutes. So for something that can be done in 5 minutes, including reading this post!

3. Ping Site Update Services

Login to your wordpress backend. Go to Settings > Writing (in v2.5), and copy-paste this list

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/b…ter/ping.php
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

Every time you post, your blog will automatically ping these sites and they will know that you posted and their readers will know that you posted. How cool is that!

2. Ensure your URL’s are SEO friendly

Go to Settings > Permalinks, Select Custom Structure and past /%category%/%postname%/ in there. Your URL’s are now SEO friendly. Ensure that your .htaccess is writeable.

1. Install the Headspace2 plugin

Headspace2 is THE best SEO plugin out there in my opinion. It offers a TON of functionality. Even if you can’t do it all in 5 minutes, just installing it on your blog and knowing that it is THE way to go is half the battle won. Next when you get a chance, visit their site - http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/ and watch their videos. Get started, it it worth the time. They got Google Analtics integration, Meta tags optimization, Etc. all in one place.

Hope this post was worth your 5 minutes!