Posted by admin on Thursday Apr 14, 2011
Filed under :SEO
The Robots META tag is a simple mechanism to indicate to visiting Robots (Search Engines/Crawlers) if a page should be indexed, or the links on the page should be followed. The meta tags are placed in the <HEAD> section of an HTML page.
The META tag contents parameter contains one or more directives separated by commas. The currently defined directives are “[no]index” and “[no]follow}. The “index” directive specifies whether the robot should index the page. The “follow” directive specifies whether the robot should follow links on the page. The defaults are “index” and “follow”. The values “all” and “none” set all directives on or off: “all=index,follow” and “none=noindex,nofollow”. The META tag (as with all HTML tags) is case-insensitive.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Apr 6, 2011
Filed under :SEO
As described on URL Canonicalization article we published in March, having a unique URL (“canonicalization“) for each webpage is important in improving your “Pagerank“. Canonicalization is accomplished by redirecting non-standard webpages to a preferred (“standard”) webpage. There are a number of ways to redirect a webpage, but 301 (HTTP/1.1 Status Code, “Moved Permanently”) redirect is the search engine friendly method which passes the pagerank and search engine ranking status from old to a new page. Here is an examples of how 301 redirect can be implemented on LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/PHP) environment.
Apache .htaccess: non-www to www subdomain redirect
1. Make sure your httpd.conf file has the “Directory” directive with the “AllowOverride All” setting.
<Directory /path/to/your/domain/document/root>
AllowOverride All
</directory>
2. Enable Mod-Rewirte Module
Your apache configuration should have the mod-rewrite module enabled, which is the default. You can verify this by perusing httpd.conf file for the following line:
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
3. Create a .htaccess file in the document root directory of your website with the following content.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^webtrafficexchange.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webtrafficexchange.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Just replace the “webtrafficexchange.com” with the domain name you’re trying to redirect.
Posted by admin on Tuesday Mar 8, 2011
Filed under :SEO
One of the first things discussed when beginning SEO project is the URL canonicalization. You may argue that the impact on having multiple URLs resolving to a same page may not have huge effect on SEO (if you use it consistently internally), but it certainly doesn’t hurt to normalize the URL so that only one Url serves a single webpage. Implementation is not too difficult for most webmasters, and there is an evidence that URL canonicalization will have a positive effect on your SEO effort. You may use one form (www or non-www) of Url for all your internal linking, but you cannot guarangee that others will do the same on 3rd-party websites.
Search engines such as Google and Bing rank URLs, not websites or webpages. Having multiple URLs for single contents will hurt your ranking especially when Google implemented “Farmer” algorithm (February 2011) to penalize sites with duplicate contents. So, how do you canonicalize your URL? There are a couple of ways to achieve canonicalization. Suppose, we want www.webtrafficexchange.com to be the default homepage of our website. We can make our webserver so that if someone requests http://webtrafficexchange.com, we can do a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.webtrafficexchange.com. That helps Google know which url we prefer to be canonical.
If you have an ecommece website with a lot of GET parameters such as sort order, category ID, session ID or tracking ID for your conversion tracking; you may have single content served by various URLs like http://www.kiddietoys.com/?src=nextag&session=abc and http://www.kiddietoys.com/?src=shopping&session=xyz. To let Google or any search engines know that you have preferred url for all variation of those urls, you may use <link> tag inside the <head> tag as shown below:
Google will understand that the duplicates all others refer to the canonical URL shown above. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
What is URL Canonicalization?
URL Canonicalization (also known as URL normalization) is the process of resolving multiple URLs to a single standard URL known as the canonical name.
How does non-canonicalized URL impact your SEO?
If Google sees a page as being published at two different URLs, it may rank your pages lower than they would otherwise. Non-canonicalized URLs can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL, and hence affects link popularity (or pagerank) of the URL as well as possibly affect depth of search engine crawl.
How do I resolve URL Canonicalization problem?
You can permanently redirect non-www URL to the www URL with 301 redirect. For apache web server, you can create a .htaccess file on your document root folder with the following content:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^webtrafficexchange.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webtrafficexchange.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Posted by admin on Sunday Mar 6, 2011
Filed under :Google Adsense
Google Adsense is one of the most popular Ad Network you can use to publish advertisements on your website, and start earning income immediately. Depending on impressions (CPM) and click-through-rates (CTR), your Adsense revenue may vary from a few dollars to a few hundreds per day for high traffic websites. Optimizing your Adsense placement could potentially double, or even triple your Ad income if correctly implemented.
This article describes a few tips on improving eCPM (effective Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions), which effectively increases the Adsense income provided that you have constant traffic. For Adsense, eCPM depends on two primary factors: CPC (cost-per-click) and CTR (click-through-rate). The CPC depends largely on the content of your website. The more competitive keywords that your content serve, the higher the CPC will be. For example, the contents relating to “Web Hosting”, “Merchant Account” and “Smart Phone” will generate higher CPC than less competitive topics such as “Toys & Games” and “clothing or Apparel”. If you’re writing new topic for your website, try choosing topics that are more competitive or target keywords that have higher CPC. The second factor that affects eCPM is CTR. The more click your Ad generate, the higher eCPM will be. There are a number of ways to improve CTR, and they are:
Improve your Ad placement by making your Ad more visible. Try using larger Ad sizes such as 336×280, 300×250, 160×600 and leaderboard (728×90) Ad units. According to Google Heatmap, higher CTR is achieved by placing your Ads on front and center at the top of your main contents.
Limit the number of Ad Blocks per page.
Blend the Ads as naturally as possible.
Decreasing bounce rate will also improve CTR. If you have higher bounce rate, your visitors are leaving your website after viewing only one page. Provide a lot of relevant contents on your website (essentially draw targeted traffic), so that your visitors view more than one page before leaving your website. Lowering your bounce rate will make your visitors stay longer on your website, and will increase chances of clicking on your Ads.
Google implemented “Smart Pricing”, which reduces maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids for published Ads that are less likely to convert. If clicks your Ads generated is flagged as non-converting traffic, your Ads will be smart priced and your CPC will drop dramatically. To improve your CPC, experiment the following:
Remove Ads from pages with low eCPM. Try bringing it back within a few days to see if eCPM improves. Perhaps doing this avoid being smart priced. If it does’t improve remove completely.
Add targeted Title tag, Meta Keyword, and Meta Description tags to make it easier to target the content of the webpage.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Oct 27, 2010
Filed under :SEM
What is PPC?
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the placement of an advertisement on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for a specific keyword phrase in return for specified payment when a visitor clicks on the link. The PPC link is also known as Sponsored Link, and the advertiser pays an agreed (or bid) amount each time a visitor clicks on the link.
The advertiser generally places PPC advertisements on the search engines in the hope of selling products or services on their website. The job of a PPC link is to send targetted traffic to the website (landing page). Regardless of the visitors spending money on your website, you’re obligated to pay the agreed sum to the search engine company. One more thing to note is that the advertiser pays nothing to make a sponsored link appear on the SERPs, but pays the fee only when someone clicks on it.
How to place a PPC Advertisement?
With ever growing ecommerce population, many businesses place advertisements on search engines in the hope of attracting buyers. One of the easiest and quickest way to attract targetted traffic is by using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertisement. The following 4 easy steps will help you place PPC Ads on search engines.
1. Choose your keywords
Choosing the right keywords is a starting point in placing a PPC Ad. The goal is to attract potential buyers to your website (the people who are in the market for purchasing goods that your company offer). Attracting visitors who do not intend to buy reduces overall conversion ratio, and demage ROI (Return On Investment). There are plenty of free and commercial keyword analysis tools available to help you research your target keywords. Word Tracker is one of most popular tool available which will help you decide on the right keywords.
2. Determine your budget
If you are new to PPC, it’s best to use well known search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Unless you have a good chunk of money to burn, it’s generally good idea to start out small and increase incrementally based on the ROI results. No advertiser can continuously place PPC or any other forms of advertisement, if there are no increased revenue from the dollars spent.
3. Decide on Title and Description
The title and description of your advertisement is critical in attracting your potential customers to click on the Ad. The description is generally limited to 200 characters, and some PPC search engines control the text that will appear in the search engine results. True representation of your products and services is critical in increased click-through and conversion ratio.
4. Bid on the keywords
Before you can bid on the keywords, you must register with search engine marketing company and fund your Ad campaign. You may fund your account with credit card for a set of amount, and may optionally decide to replenish your account when your fund falls below certain amount. You may use this funding amount to limit maximum daily Advertisement dollars, in which case Ad stops when the limit is reached.
For each keyword that you would like to avertise, you can place a bid amount ranging from a few cents to several dollars depending on the popularity of the search term. The bidding amount determines placement of your Ad compare to your competitors.
How to develop an effective PPC Advertisement?
As with any advertisement, a PPC advertisement needs to be crafted in order to produce effective results. There are no known single method that will produce the best result, and hence each advertisement has to be carefully crafted based on the needs of a company. Developing an effective PPC marketing campaign is very time consuing and costly work if started from scratch. Please use the following tips from the pros to save time and avoid wasting money.
1. Contextual Ads (also known as content ads), such as Google AdSense, do not generally produce a good ROI as compare to search Ads. For starters, turn off the content Ads completely or only bid a small fraction of your search Ads.
2. Bid on targeted phrases with less competition. General keywords are more expensive and usually produce a lower conversion rate. Use targeted keywords with phrase or exact match instead of broad match. To place a phrase match, place quotation marks around your keywords.
3. Increase your Ad conversion by tracking your campaign using A/B split testing, and multiple landing pages for greater consistency and relavancy.
4. First position isn’t always the best. The #1 position will generate more clicks, but not necessarily a good conversion rate. A number of studies show that search positions in #3 to #5 positions generate a better conversion rate than positions #1 and #2.
5. Use second-tier PPC search engines such as kanoodle, findwhat, epilot and enhance. Bidding on popular keywords in Google and Yahoo can be very expensive, but the same keywords will cost a lot less on second-tier search engines. Those second-tier engines will generate less traffic than the incumbents, but they are cheaper.
Google Adwords Train & Gain
Google Adwords recently offered 4 weeks of Train & Gain Challenge, and provided tips and tricks on improving merchant’s PPC campaign performance.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Oct 27, 2010
Filed under :SEO
Have you ever pushed your limit on SEO efforts, and experienced the OOP? On November 15, 2003, the Google SERPs were dramatically altered by Hurricane Florida, also known as Over Optimization Penalty. Google has increased the threshold for triggering the OOP since, and SERPs are back to pre-Florida level.
One of SEO technique well known for OOP target is over usage of anchor text. For example, you decided to change the navigation on your site to include a keyword, say “Keyword Home” instead of “Home”. After a few days, you lose search engine rankings. You change navigator menus back to original, without the keyword, and the lost rank comes back.
Google does not want a site to rank well overnight. If you start a new site, you can easily build search engine optimized pages with good backlinks and your site will be placed in a sandbox for several months before slowly rising to the top.
On the other hand, if you have an existing site and decided to optimize your site with the seo effort. The new pages are fully optimized, but now the OOP comes into play. The site does not rank well and gets held back for several months before slowing rising to the top. This isn’t proven, but OOP seems to play bigger role in more competitive keywords — money making keywords.
The OOP exists for the same reason Sandbox exists, and delays a site from rank well overnight. This might have some affect on Google Adwords sales, as new entrants will likely buy adwords for the keywords until its rank rises.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Oct 27, 2010
Filed under :SEO
If your SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) rank fluctuates, don’t be alarmed. Everyone’s rank fluctuates, and that is the nature of search engines. You may be happy to see your site rank highly on most coveted keywords, but don’t expected to last forever without constantly updating your site. Search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms and new sites are constantly being added, so SERP ranking fluctuations are expected. Also, your competitions are updating their sites to achieve better rankings.
About once in every 30 days, Google recalculates the page rank of each web pages, and re-indexes the SERP for all keywords. The Google Dance is the time period between the start and end of the re-indexing. During Google Dance, the search results are different on www.google.com, www2.google.com, and www3.google.com. The www2 and www3 are known to be Google’s test engines. The dance normally takes about 4 days.
Even when no Google Dance is in effect, SERPs may be different for same keywords at different time of the day. This may be due to hitting different Google servers between searches. Search results may be different on different Google servers, and geographic location and load balancing potentially makes users land on different servers.
You as a website owner should concentrate more on targetted traffic and conversions rather than pure SERP rankings. As you enrich your website by adding more relevant contents and building backlink to your website, you are ultimately attracting more targeted and qualified traffic.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Oct 27, 2010
Filed under :SEO
HTML meta tags are not magic bullets that will magically boost your site rankings in search engine listings. They are one of many tools that will help improve your standings in search engines that use them. Google does not seem to value meta description and keyword tags anymore, but many other engines do. Use them with other search engine strategies will help improve your overall site rankings. We have only focused on the tags that have relevance in search engine optimization.
What is a Meta Tag?
Meta tag or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the <HEAD></HEAD> section of a HTML document. The information inserted in a meta tag is not visible to the user, but are intended for search engines. The meta tag has three possible attributes: content, http-equiv, and name. Meta tags always provide information in a name/value pair. The name and http-httpequiv attributes provide name information, and the content provides the value information. Meta tags do not have a closing tag. For detailed specification, please refer W3C Metadata Specification.
Why are Meta Tags used?
Meta Tags are originally designed to let search engines know what the site is all about. This information is in turn used by the search engines to decide how to rank the sites in their search results. However, as the competition increased, webmasters started manipulating this information for their advantage and search engines started withdrawing their support to meta description and keyword tags. For this reason, there is no guarantee that your website will do any better than the ones that do not have meta tags in search engine rankings. Apart from search engine rankings, some search engines use meta tags to describe its web pages on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Title Tag
The Title Tag of a HTML document describe title of a webpage. The Title Tag is NOT a meta tag, but it is defined in the <HEAD> block of a HTML page and it is displayed at the top title bar of the browsers. Search Engines use this title information in the hyperlink listings on the search engine results.
The title tag plays a vital role in describing your page to search engines, and it does influence your rankings on search engine results. The title of a web page should be carefuly assembled, especially the words that appear and the order in which they appear. Your targeted keyword should be stuffed in the title tag, instead of your company name to boost the content relevancy. You may also place the keywords in the order of their importance. Google is known to read only about 90 characters of the title tag, so you should leverage this length to cover prominent keywords relevant to the page. It is also helpful to have custom title tags designed for each page you have on your website.
META Description Tag
The Meta Description Tag is used to provide a short and concise summary of your web page contents. Some search engines index contents of META description tag to present the description of your site on their search engine result pages (SERPs). In the SERP, the users go through the description of the page and decide whether to visit your site or not, so it’s important that you compose an eye-catching and descriptive information about your website. About 25-30 words description should be used. Keywords and phrases should be included in the Meta Description Tag, though care should be given not to repeat them too often as over usage may penalyze your website ranking.
META Keywords Tag
The META keywords tag is use to list keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve targeted for your webpage. Most search engines do no longer value the Meta Keywords Tag anymore, so it is up to you to use them or not.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Oct 27, 2010
Filed under :SEO
There are probably more than 100 rules that Google uses to rank pages in the search engine result pages (SERP). No one really knows all the rules, and they’re changing on a periodic basis. Various confirmed and suspected SEO rules described here are educated guesses by SEO experts.
Positive Google Rules (On Page)
Keyword in URL.
Keyword in domain name.
Keyword in title tag.
Keyword in Heading tag (i.e. H1, H2, and H3).
Positive Google Rules (Off Page)
Google Page Rank (Higher the better).
Anchor text of inbound link to your site.
Link from “Expert” site.
In directories (dmoz.org, Yahoo, and etc.)
Site Age.
Negative Google Rules (On Page)
No body text. Text represented in graphics form.
Over Optimization Penalty (OOP) – Google Florida
Link to a bad link farm.
Redirect through refresh metatags.
Use of poison words.
Excessive cross-linking within same IP block.
Keyword Stuffing in body, meta tags, and alt text.
Posted by admin on Wednesday Oct 27, 2010
Filed under :SEO
As Google does not reveal its engine algorithms, no one really knows whether the sandbox really exists. The sandbox is nothing more than a theory developed to explain what many SEO experts have witnessed with their listings.
Google programmers may feel uncomfortable ranking new websites well until they have proven their viability to exist for a few months. The term “Sandbox Effect” refers to the idea that all new websites are placed in a sandbox (“away from real web sites”) for a period of time deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence. The usual holding period seems to be anywhere from 90 to 120 days.
The sandbox is a relatively new filter that appeared after the widely publicized updates of Austin and Florida. If you don’t know what Austin and Florida updates are, don’t worry they’re mostly in the past.
The Sandbox Effect is that new websites may get into Google’s Search Engine Results Pages relatively quickly and may even perform well for a couple of weeks. When the filter is applied to the new website it is referred to as being put in the “sandbox” status. The new website will still show in the result pages, but it will not rank well regardless of how much original, well optimized content and regardless of how many quality inbound links the site may have. The filter restrains new websites from having immediate success in the search engine result pages.
Is there a way to get out of the Sandbox? The simple answer is wait. The sandbox is not a permanent fileter, and is only intended to reduce search engine spam. If your website is in the sandbox, you may want to use this time to build traffic using traditional methods such as writing articles, building a strong community visitors, and partnering with companies. You may also use this time to build strong inbound links from other sites.
