Penguin- Google Latest Web Spam Algorithmic Update.

Penguin updates is Google new algorithm change which will decrease rankings for sites that Google believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We can say Penguin will target the web spam. Google said, new update will effect the 3.1% of organic search results in Google.

 But question is what is web spam and which practices Google will consider as web spam. Some of the web spam techniques are Keyword Stuffing, Clocking or Hidden text, Doorway pages, creating multiple pages having same content, Paid links etc. You can read more about spaming at Google webmaster Guidelines.

Beside this, Cutts also talked about the over SEO of websites and these websites now can get penalty in Google search results ranking. But what are the parameter which Google will consider over optimization are not clear yet.

If you think your website should not effeted by Pengin updates Google provide the feed back form for those website owners.

A Quick SEO Review for 2011

Google keep changing its search algorithm every year, as Google itself said, we are doing more than 200 experiments with search at a time. So new changes and updates in search algorithm effects the SEO of website. If we looked this year, Google Panda updates lower down the ranking of lots of websites, Google again suggests webmaster to make quality website for better ranking. Let's have a look into some of the major changes we saw in year 2011.

Google Panda
Google Panda updates lower down the ranking of website, lots of websites which had low quality of content suffered a lot from panda.

User can be King
In SEO we used to say content is king but signals are that in future user can be king. The reason behind this is, user behaviour can tell how good web page or website is. For example, a user will like the website or spend the time in website if:

Website is fast, have fast fast loading time

Have useful content to read, more average time users spend in page more will be authority of page.

Website must be presented to Google and other search engines so it can understand easily what website is about. This explain about the Schema.org adoption and why search engines are moving to Semantic Web. It helps search engines to organize and understand the billion of content they indexed every second.

Social is more Trustable
Now it does matter how much of your content is shared by people in Social Network. How much comments your blog post or article get, how much of tweets, +1, Facebook likes your page get, now all these things matters in deciding the SERP of web page. All of these signals count the trust rank of page which can become a useful metrics as Page Rank to calculate SERP of web page.

Google now start showing the search results with Google+ profile pictures and you can see Google+ posts in search results, some signal for social search.

Content above the fold- Google again gave the signals that content above the first fold matter a lot in deciding the search ranking

SSL Search- Google got mixed reaction from SEO industry regarding the SSL search. Google will not provide the keywords data if some one search with their logged in Google account. Google gave more importance on user privacy and search is becoming more personal.

How Robot.txt,Meta Robots and rel= nofollow Effect SEO

Lots of SEO misuse the Robots.txt, Meta Robots and rel=nofollow attributes, most of mix their role in SEO with each other. All of these three attribute effect the crawling, indexing and Page Rank of website,so you should have understanding when and where we should use these attributes. Let's take each one by one and understand them in brief way.

Robot.txt File
Robot.txt file a special file which is placed at root folder of website. It looks like www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. It tells search engine robots which file you need to crawl in website. If you don't want some of the pages or folder of your website crawled, you can use the robots.txt file. But there are few area where most of SEO made mistake in understanding the functionality of Robots.txt file

Q. I used robots.txt file to block a page or folder of my website. Will it come in search results?
Ans. Yes, it will come. Surprised, as i said it robots.txt file will tell search robots which page not being crawled but it does not mean they will not come in search results. These pages can come in search results if Google found the infomation about pages in high authority website pages links like in DMOZ, CNN etc. search engine will show your pages in search results.
Title and description found in SERP is based on the data search engine collects from other websites.


Q. I blocked a page of my website with Robot.txt file will it receive Page Rank
Ans. Yes, If some other pages of website are giving link to robot.txt page it will receieve the link juice from these pages.Page Rank algorithm will not consider whether page is robot.txt or not.

Meta Robots
Meta robots tags tell the search bots which pages need to crawled and which pages should get page rank. Some of the values of meta robots are index, follow, no follow, none and all. Let's understand the Meta Robots by answering some questions

Q. I blocked page using Meta tag noindex value, will search engines crawl it?
Ans. Yes, Search engines will crawl the page, search bots extract the all links web page had, but it will not come in search engine results. After crawling the web page if search engines found the Meta robots noindex value, they will not index the page, means your page will not appear in search results.

Q. What follow" and nofollow values tell?
Ans.Follow value tell the search engines that links found on this page will flow the link juice or page rank to given link. nofollow value means no link juice or page rank will pass from given page to those links.

rel="nofollow"
The rel="nofollow" attribute is used in anchor text, it is used when we don't want to give link juice or page rank to page mentioned in anchor text. Means rel="nofollow" links do not pass Page Rank to the target page. Search engines crawled and index the page having rel="nofollow" links.

Summary
Here is summary of how search engines handle robot.txt, Meta Robots and rel= nofollow attributes:

	Crawl	Appears in SERP	Page Rank
robots.txt	No	Yes, if it receives enough links.	Yes, robots.txt Pages get PR
META-robots noindex	Yes	No	No, if the links of the page are followed.
META-robots nofollow	Yes, if other followed links are found pointing to the target page.	Yes, if the target page receives links from other webpages.	Yes, all of the PageRank of the page is evaporated.
rel=”nofollow”	Yes, if other followed links are found pointing to the target page.	Yes, if the target page receives links from other webpages.	No

How to Tackle with Google Panda Updates

Google had started the regular Panda updates which will keep making panda impact on search engine ranking. Still lots of websites hasn't overcone from Panda and question is how to deal with Panda and what should be necessary steps for this?

Avoid Low quality of back Links.
More low quality of inbound links your website will have, lower will be your rank. Think about those websites which give you back links within one day or in few hours. These websites are really bad from Panda point of view. It would be better if you have less but good quality of back links.

Website Full of Ads and Banner
You see a website whose right hand side there are bunches of ads, in between the post you saw banner ads and header and footer sections are also occupied by ads. Avoid links from these type of websites. In same way avoid inbound links from those website whose content are poorley written.

It's not about Fresh and Unique Content
Your web pages have fresh and unique content and you think it's enough to tackle panda. Google Panda will not give any edge to your content untill or unless it's not shared by lots of people, the page has good no. of visits and got natural backlinks.

Some of the other things which Google may consider are:
How quality visitors behave in your website, how much time they spend on website and how much content they sahre. Do they trust the information of your website or not.

Seth Godin Thoughts on Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

What "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information age" think about SEO. How effective is SEO and how to take maximum advantage of SEO ? Here are thoughts of Seth Godin on SEO, which I took from his KnockKnock PDF:

"There are dozens thousands of companies that will happily work with you and your team to do SEO. SEO is the art of making your site attractive to the automated spiders that Google and other search engines send around the Web. By changing your site (and helping you get the right inbound and outbound links), a talented SEO firm can change your ranking—sometimes quite a bit. Why does this matter?

We know that about 15% of the people doing a Google search look over at the AdWords ads. We also know that more than 70% ignore the ads and rarely bother to look at the second or third page of search results. This means that someone types in, say, “London retirement home” and chooses from one of the top five or six returned entries, then they’re gone.

If you’re number 8 out of the 1,590,000 matches, you lose. In the past, I’ve been hard on SEO, mostly because of the way clients misuse it. They build static, boring, selfish Web sites and then try to make them work by ranking high in Google. What a waste! It’s like waving your hand to get called on in second grade— but not knowing the answer when you do.

If you’ve done the right kind of optimization—the optimization of first click to sale, the optimization of first click to satisfied customer—then (and only then) will your SEO investment pay off."

Top 10 Keyword Research Tools

Keywords research is one of the most important task in search engine marketing. Whether you are doing SEO of website or planning for PPC, keywords research and selection of keywords play a major role in success of project.

You should have good data about what keywords people are searches monthly and globally releated to your business and services. What is competition for these keywords and how much money you have to spend for each keyword. There are lots of tools for keywords research but top 10 keywords research tools are:


Google Adwords keyword research tool
Google Adwords keywords research tool is one of the best and most used tool for keyword research. Google Adwords keyword research tool provides the total no. of searches for keywords globally and locally.

You can filter the keyword search country and category wise. Also can get the data for keyword search for device type and further you can filter the keyword searches as minimum or maximum search volume.


Google Insights for Search
Google insights for search is wonderful tool to find the insights about search. You can search the keywords search from the time ranges and location wise. You can see how keywords search has increased or decreased in a given period of time. In my previous post you can read more about Google insights for search.

Google Trends
Google trends is another good tool for keywords research. You can search mulitiple keywords in Google trends and can comapre keywords searches for each keyword.

Google Correlate
Google correlate is the latest keywords tool introduced by Google. Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends. You can check the popularity in search terms over a time in Google Correlate. Google Correlate is like Google Trends in reverse.

Wordtracker
After Google keywords search tools, Wordtracker one of the best tool for keyword research. Worldtracker offers free as well as paid keyword research services. Only Google can offer free things in internet :). But still wordtracker is trusted and used by lots of online marketer.

Seo Book Keyword Research Tool
SEO Book keywords research tool is mainly powered by worldtracker but suggests good keywords search results



SEMRush

I like this tool for both PPC and SEO purposes. This tool show the organic keyword ranking and average cpc for keyword. You can use this tool for free of cost but to get better services you need to spend some dollars.

KGen
KGen (Keyword Generation) is Mozilla Firefox powered tool and allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web pages for search engines.


WorldPot
Worldpot is another free keyword research tool and provide good list of keywords searches. Good thing about worldpot is it provide you exact daily and total daily searches for keywords.


Twitter Search
Twitter search is also a good tool for keywords search. You can get idea how many people are talking about product and services related to your business.

Google New Algorithm will Impact 12% Change in Search Results

Yesterday, Google announced that user can see 11.8% change in search query results. Google said in official blog, we made big improvement in our search algorithm and you can see some change in search results.

Why need change? But if change is for good than why not? :). Google said we made changes in order to give high quality results, results which are more relevant to search query. New change had done to prevent the low quality content websites in search results, which used to copy content from other website or resources. In few weeks you can notice some changes in search results.

As Google said "Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does."

No doubt, it's 100% true. Initially Google launched this change in USA only and in few week or months will roll over in every country.

How to do Local SEO for your business

Launch of Google Hotpot, Google Places showed Google is giving more preference to local searches.
Google get more than 20% daily local searches and if Google found search query is related to specific local search, you can see upto seven local search results in search page. In order to reach people who are searching for products and services related to your business, website should have Local SEO.

Local SEO is not more different than SEO.
Local SEO is more specific and gives more weightage to regional or local search. In Local SEO we optimize the region, city, territory specific keywords. But the question is how to do Local SEO?

Things you should keep in mind for doing the Local SEO are:

Keywords Research & Meta Tags
Meta Tags which includes Title and Description tags should optimized locally. A proper keywords research can give you idea what people are searching locally. Use your keywords in title and description tags and write content in relevance to keywords and meta tags.

Local Directories Submission
Do the local directory submission of your website, which includes country specific directories. Besides this you can submit the website to local classifieds like hot frog, Olx, Quikr etc. In every country there are some popular web directories try to search those directories and submit website in those directories.
Some of the popular local directories in USA are

.  Yelp
.  CitySearch
. Urbanspoon
.  Trip Advisor
. Insider Pages


Google Places, Yahoo & Bing Local
Google Places plays important role and show website in Google search results. Register your website in Google Places and fill all necessary information which you want to give your customers. Upload pictures and videos of your business and services. In same way optimize your local business profile in Yahoo and Bing Local.


Make List of Category
Make a list of categories which come under your business and services. Make sure business and services come under the most appropriate categories. Submit your business under these categories in local directories and places.


Social Media Participation
Participate in Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and other social media websites. Try to engage the local audience in social media websites.

Three Most Common SEO Mistakes

SEO process involves lots of techniques and compromise of On Page and Off page optimzation. But still there are few common mistakes we do in SEO. Lets have a look into three most common mistakes in SEO

Starting SEO immediately
This is one of the most common mistake we make in SEO. As client give us website for SEO. We start working on keywords research, creating meta tags etc. First of all install the Google Analytics code in all pages of website. After that analysis the user behaviour, what's the daily traffic of website, top landing page, bounce rate of website etc.
After complete web analysis make your SEO strategies and then start working on SEO

Long Title and Description Tags
Don't make long title and description tags for web pages. Make sure your title tag should not be longer than 60-70 characters and description tags 120-140 characters including spaces.


Blindly Link Building
Link building play an important role in off page optimzation and determine the page rank of website. But take care about the website you are linking with, submit website to only those sites which have good page rank and are reputative.
Don't go for quantity , always go for quality. 10 back links from high page rank and reputative are better than 50 back links from low page rank websites.

Why People give Back links to a Website?

Suppose you make a new website for your business and want good ranking in search engines. And for better ranking of website no. of back links to website matter a lot. So you start link building of your website which includes Directories submission, Articles submission, Social media participation etc.

But think once, can you do reverse of it. Means other website will give back link to your website. As website owner this is one of the big question to concern, why people give back link to your website?

What are things a website should have for back linking? The answer is until or unless your website is not good resource of information, a master piece, you will not get links to your website.

When you read any article or blog which had given intresting facts for a particular topic, showed data and research, put a wonderful video, people love to read this kind of post and maximum time bookmark the post for easy access. Whenever a person write a blog or in internet he want to share more information about that, he will refer your website by giving backlink to your website.

So write something interesting, it can be funny, it can be in form of carton pictures or a very good graphical representational of figures and diagram. Give some thing unique, comprehensive and intresting to read. Make some small interesting videos about your product and services. Believe me its not easy task and if you able to do so, definitely you will get the back links to your website.

Tips for Faster Indexing of Mobile Website in Google Search

Whole world is using the cell phones and we don't know when cell phones become one of the necessary part of our life. If you are businessman, professional, student or NGO you can't ignore cell phones.

In my previous post Future of Social Media is Cell phones, i discuss about how people are using cell phones for accessing social media websites. It seems everything is going mobile and people want to get all information in their palm.

As a website owner, big question arises is does your website is cell phone compatible. In today digital era if your website is not cell phone or mobile phone compatible means you are already loosing. Google get large no. of mobile searches daily on its Mobile search page. So make you website cell phone compatible as soon as possible.

If you already have mobile phone compatible website but not appearing in Google Mobile search page showed website had some issues. In order to come in Google mobile search, there are few things which you have to follow:

Submit Mobile Site Map in Google Webmaster
It can happen that Googlebot has not crawl website mobile pages. In order to crawl the all pages of website submit the mobile site map in Google webmaster Tool.

Googlebot haven't permission to access website
Google have two different robots to access the website. For website it is Googlebot and for mobile website it's "Googlebot-Mobile". So in order to crawled website for Google mobile search allow User-agent "Googlebot-Mobile" to access your website.

Check Google Mobile Webmaster Guidelines
After doing all this if you can't find your website in Google Mobile Search page. Then check mobile web pages has used which markup language. Check that mobile URLs' DTD declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML. If it's in a compatible format, the pages is eligible for the mobile search index. For more information, see the Mobile Webmaster Guidelines.

Google Changes Algorithm for Spammy Content

A few days ago, Google changed the algorithm for spammy content. Website which used to copy the content from other website and resources will be no longer on search results. The websites which have low quality content are also in Google radar. As Google said, content of a website should be unique, relevant and comprehensive for better search engine result position (SERP).

Google had implemented the new algorithm and in few weeks you can see changes in search results. You can read more information on algorithm and spam content at Google Official Blog.

Best Practices for Anchor Text in SEO

Anchor texts are one of the important factor in determining the SERP. A keyword enriched anchor text help the search engine bot and visitors to understand about the page they are navigating. You can take the maximun benefits of anchor text by using it in most appropiate way. Some of the best practices for anchor text are:

For Internal Linking
Anchor text are best medium to link the inner pages of your website. Anchor text help the search engine bots in understanding page. Suppose your website has page of "Sports Shoes", and you used in other pages of web site Sports Shoes as anchor text. Same way you had done in some other pages of your website by using anchor text sports shoes. Now a same anchor text from all pages of other website help the search bot that page is exactly about "sports shoes". Also anchor text help the visitors by giving full information.


For External Linking
When you link your web site to some other website which can be by article writing, directories and press release submission use same anchor text for a given web page. Even in blog commenting, instead of using your name, use your main keywords as anchor text.

How to Remove Web Pages of Website from Google Search Results.

Suppose you want to hide some web pages of your website in Google search results, may be they are confidential. Some other cases can be,  your company had stopped the services or products they used to provide earlier, or you broke the partnership with some other firms. But you notice your website pages are appearing in Google Search, which you don't want to show .

You can solve this problem by using Google URL removal tool in Google Web Master Central. URL removal tool help you in removing URL quickly.

For this, First of all you have to remove or delete the content or pages of website which you don't want to see in search results. If some other agency is handling your website you can asked them to do so.

After this go to Google Web Master Central and use URL removal tool. If you already have an account in Google Web Master central then:

. On Dashbord click the site configuration in left hand navigation, then

. Click crawler access, and then click remove URL

. Click on New Removal Request, Then type the URL of page you want to remove from search results and then

. Click on Continue. Click on image below to see clearly

The Click on Remove Page from search results and cache then select the check box and click Submit Request.

Relevancy is Key in SEO and PPC

Relevancy is one of the key factor in SEO and PPC. Whenever anyone search in search engines, search engines show the most relevant results related to that query.

In SEO your content should be relevant to your products and services. In link building process a link from relevant site is much better than irrelevant web site.

Same in PPC, for search results of a particular keyword, search engines show the most relevant ad to that search query. In PPC your keywords should be relevant to ad text and your ad copy should be relevant to landing page. More relevant will be your ad copy more will be chances to get clicks.

And also one of the factor to determine Quality Score in PPC is relevance of your ad text, keyword and landing page.

So be Relevant :)

5 Things you should know about Link Building

Link building is one of the important task in off page page optimization, it require lots of hard hard work and patience. But before starting link building process you should have sound knowledge of link building. Some important things you should know about link building are:

. A link form a High Page Rank is more valuable than a low page rank website.

. Links with "nofollow" attribute will not give any link juice or page rank to your web site.

. Link buying is banned by Google and other search engines. Keep away from link buying practices.

. A link from relevant website is much more valuable than a link from irrelevant website.

. Cross linking can be acceptable for few web sites, where content show its necessary to give back links. But using it for lots of website is a spam.

SEOMoz- 2010 SEO Industry Survey Results

SEOMOz had shown the survey results of SEO industry for this year. More than 10,000 SEO respondents from 90 countries participated in survey, one of the biggest ever SEO survey. It was an online survey and each respondent had asked to give the answer of 45 questions. Survey includes the

. Aveargae salary for SEO professional on basic of their experience, which includes the countries US, UK, Canada and Rest of world.

. How Google is working against paid links brokers

According to SEOMOZ survey 30% of link buyer broker had sent re consideration request to Google. Means it can take few year to a website to appear again in Google.

. Total amount of money spend on SEO per year, per month, average budget for SEO campaign.

. Nofollow links in SEO

. Agency vs In-House SEO, Here SEO Agency dominates the In-House SEO, Spam Reoprts

. SEO vs Non SEO using the social media for SEO process

Please click on the image to see clearly survey results

You can read the entire 2010 SEO industry survey report on SEOMOZ

Why 404 Page is Important for a Website ?

How many times you have noticed when you search, click any link and see page 404 not found. You will see 404 page when you write wrong url, link of web site has broken or had been removed from website. It is called a 404 page because in response to a request for a missing or broken page, web server send a HTTP status code of 404 to indicate that page is not found.

Create useful 404 Pages for your Website

404 page help the visitors if they type wrong url for your web page or link of your web page is broken. You can customize the 404 page and can provide the necessary information people are looking for.

Try to make search box in your 404 page so that people can easily search for page they are looking for. Some of the good examples of 404 pages are


404 Page of Ateaseweb.com

404 Page of Alt-web.com

You can see both 404 Pages provide the search box and good informative content to help the visitors. In second 404 Page you can see the link to site map of website. So create useful 404 Page for your website with helpful information to easily find out your web page.

Importance of Video Site Map for a Website

Video site map help search engine to show your videos in search results. More than 213 million searches happen on Google daily and Google get more than 38% searches for videos in a single day. If your website have videos related to your services, products they can appear on search results with the help of video site map.

Video site map help the search engines to index your video easily which turns to more visibility on search engines. For more visibility of your videos you can do the video search engine optimization of your videos. VSEO include creation of  Title, Description, Video play page url, Thumbnail url and url of your raw video file for each video.

After creating video site map, submit it in Google web master central. With the help of video site map you can make your video more crawable to search engines, which will help to display your video in Google search results.

How to use "Google Insights Search" for Online Marketing & Advertising

Google Insights Search is wonderful tool to find out what people are searching in a particular country, regions etc. With the help of Google Insights search you can compare the search volume by categories wise, Time range wise. You can compare search for more than two products at a time.

In Filter section of Insights Search you can filter your search and can make it more specific. For example you can filter your search for web, image, news search, can filter country wise, time ranges etc.

Lets take an example to understand it better. Suppose my company is doing the business of Car Loan and Car Insurance. I want to run an PPC advertising campaign in India for my business services. But first its better to find out what people are searching in internet.

In "Google Insights Search" type keywords related to your business or services. In given example i type the "Car Loan" and "Car insurance". You can see the filter section next to search boxes. Since i want to run my campaign in India so i select India, Time period- current year and in Category i choose the automotive search.

 Please click on image to see it better.
After clicking on search you can see the two different graph for both keywords. In below picture red color graph represents the Car Loan and blue Car Insurance. You can see the search volume month wise.

Please click on image to see it better.
You can check the volume of search state wise, the regions in map with dark blue color shows more search volume for car insurance in those state.

You can also check the top searches for your keywords. All these search volume data help in deciding which state you have to invest more for PPC campaign or any online marketing Campaign. You can make your online marketing strategy much better with help of Google Insights Search results data.