How to do Mobile SEO? - Tips and Best Practices

Mobile SEO is different from desktop SEO and Mobile phones and not used like desktops. Content, navigation's and user experience are different from desktops to mobiles. Here is a list of tips and best practice that can help you when you start with a mobile SEO,

(1) To start with you need to think that you are going to target mobile users and not
desktop users. Plan for it.
(2) As told mobile users are different and as well mobile search engines are different like Google Mobile, Medio and Jumptap.
(3) Get a dotMobi domain and build your mobile web site, for the best and effective SEO.
This has more value than 'yourdomain.com/mobile' or 'm.yourdomain.com'
(4) Ensure that you don't use flash, Ajax, frames and other presentations. Make it simple and clean. This will help to load faster that serves users and as well for the bots to find it easy.
(5) Use compliant markup language and mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS). This means WML
(or WAP 1.0) / xHTML. Make sure you go for W3C's MobileOK guidelines
http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/
(6) Make sure that your mobile site code is crawl-able by using proper headers and
robots.text file.
(7) Make use of the mobile predictive search key phrases that helps with your business and location. Optimize the mobile site based on the most preferred predictive search key
phrases.
(8) Study you mobile audience and competitors rather than desktop audience and
competitors. Optimize your mobile site content with those mobile search key phrases and categories that your mobile audience will be using.
(12) Make sure that you have good level of outbound links and the navigation is easy to for users and bots.
(13) Ensure you key content is placed in the top part of the page as the users and bots will find it easy.
(14) Build sitemap xml for you mobile site and submit to Google Webmaster tool under
mobile sitemap section.
(15) Submit your mobile site to mobile search engines and top directories like dmoz in order to know about you site and to build inlinks.

Aim to work on these tips and practices to proceed with good mobile SEO. Configure Google Analytics for you mobile site and see the difference in your business from your mobile audience.

Getting good SEO results are not as easy like before for SEO Beginners and Intermediates

In the recent times, knowledge of SEO industry has grown widely with the help of SEO seminar, conference, off line training, online training, e-books and many more. Due to this we see growing number of SEO's around the web and they take up projects and play with the industry based keywords through white hat, black hat or by both techniques. These as well increase total search results and this plays a good game with Google and other major search engine results.

First point is that many SEO's are coming out every year and they compete each other with their client competitor sites. This increases the level of total competition.

Second is that the frequent industry updates in organic promotion. SEO beginners and intermediates need to update their knowledge by reading top sites like Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, Google webmaster help and many. Subscribing to Google blog will as well support.

Earlier, old SEO's had very minimum options to learn and practice with the help of forums and very minimum number of experts articles and understanding the algorithms tactic was not so easy like now. And the only advantage was that there were minimum SEO's, so with basic knowledge many SEO's were able to survive in the industry.

But now the algorithm is more open and we can see many free advices from top SEO experts on most of the tactics that has been gained through years of experience like the free advice articles section you see here.

If you want to win the game in organic listing, it is not only defeating your client business competitor online, it also includes your SEO knowledge updates compared to the SEO's who promotes your client competitors sites that helps you to maintain the results.

So in order to get good SEO results and to be effective in the SEO competition, you need to be updated with the current SEO trends and examine what you learn through various forms. Drop your comments if you need more insight.

Does Google treat all links equally?

This is a question many think about when they deal with SEO. Does Google treat all links equally? . I will say a big NO.

There are different types of links, search engine algorithm evaluates and ranks. Here they go,

Internal links and External links - Both links are treated differently. If the External links are bad neighborhood sites then there are chances for your site to be dropped in search engine listing. Internal links spreads link juice according to the number of times the pages are interlinked.

Relevant links and irrelevant links - If your website link to irrelevant theme site then there are possibilities for your site to rank low.

Paid links or purchased links - Google and few search engines do not encourage Paid links that helps to pass link juice and this is considered as violation of Google's webmaster guidelines. As well all Paid links are not considered as violation. There are few solutions like adding no follow attribute to the link and by redirecting the link to a page that has been blocked by robots.txt.

Anchor text HTML Links - Within the site the HTML links with Anchor text has the most value and passes good amount of link juice.

Image Links - within the site Image links with most suitable and relevant ALT attribute gets the second level value and link juice.

JavaScript Links - As per the latest update Google started crawling these links but gets the third level value and link juice.

At this point, as far as links are concerned it plays vital role in both on-page and off-page optimization. So start planning before you go with the types of links.

How Google Sitelinks are Created and Managed?

Google site links helps users to get more idea on what the site or blog is actually about and  Google site links are generated automatically for better user experience.

Here an example for sitelinks. Search Google for "SEO Help Blog" keyword and we can see sitelinks listing. This helps users to get an idea on what the Blog is about and the users can click directly to the page they need without navigating to find the most useful topic. Added, only the best site or blog gets sitelinks and they provide a better visibility to search users about the importance. For sitelinks screenshot, see below,

As well, if the Blog or webpage author is much popular then you can see sitelinks for the author name search "Jagadeesh M", as seen in screenshot below,

We don't know exactly how Google algorithm works, including sitelinks and they the factors are internal to avoid users from manipulating search results. But still out of several examines and experiences we can understand how it works. Here is a list that can give you an idea on how it works.

• The Blog or Site that mostly lists first for a specific keyword(s) creates Sitelinks.
• Search engine friendly structured navigation.
• Reasonable organic search traffic.
• Good Blog or site visit from search results.
• Site or blog age and frequent content update.
• Good amount of useful internal links / outbound links.
• Inlinks from quality sites or blogs.

This list may be a small part that helps creates sitelinks but these are important that works all time.
By now as you know Google do not provide option to add sitelinks since it is generated automatically but Google provides site or blog owners and webmaster to remove / block sitelinks which they feel not needed. Google Webmaster tools can manage links in Google sitelinks. Hope you know about Google Webmaster tools and you might have configured you site or blog with it. In Google Webmaster tools we have an option "sitelinks" in "site configuration" navigation that can be found in left hand side of the dashboard.
Expect now you got an idea how sitelinks works and if you don't have one to your site or blog, start working on it and if you find your existing sitelinks are to be managed, then work on Google webmaster tools sitelinks option.

Ask your SEO / SEM / SMM Questions in Search Engine Watch Forums . You will get answers from me and fellow search engine industry leaders. Best!

What type of Paid Directories does Google like?

Many do think that Paid Directories are totally uncounted for sites ranking by Google algorithm and some think all paid directories are same for Google ranking. Which one do Google go with?

Google only supports editorial Paid Directories i.e. paid sites inclusion through manual review following quality guidelines and rules. Before submitting to a paid directory do double check for its recognition. Some may have just added there terms of use as editorial or human edited paid directory for namesake but actually may not be. Do not get stuck with that. Don't get paid and banned from Google. Consult with some top search engine forums or industry leaders and you may proceed for paid sites submission.

Here few editorial paid directories you can consider

http://dir.yahoo.com
http://www.joeant.com
http://botw.org
http://www.sezza.com
http://www.ezilon.com
http://www.gimpsy.com
http://www.goguides.org
http://www.dirjournal.com
http://www.skaffe.com

You may also recommend editorial paid directories through comments if I have missed any

In addition you can report Google about paid links that violate guidelines by using this authenticated paid link report form

Define: PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting deals with the principle of link flow architecture utilizing rel="nofollow" attribute and by organising non-priority pages for SERP's in an external include file, blocked with your robots.txt to stop your site link juice to pass for unimportant pages, untrusted sites and bad neighborhood

Where all does PageRank Sculpting matters

• These can be implement to your least important pages like sign up, cart page and so
• Other domains that you don't know or trust
• This would work better for sites having 100's and 1000's of WebPages that are not important for keyword listing and in addition link juice loop to the domain

Feel free to post your comment or tweet me your views @jagadeeshmp

Learn and Share about SEM in Search Engine Watch Forums

Hello world, a short information about search engine watch forums and my part.
I would like to share the information that SEW forums is one of the place where I had spent time to learn more and in-depth about SEM industry years ago. There were several topics, which has been posted in search engine watch forums that was helpful and even now it goes on and on. Latter I had chance to reply threads by sharing my knowledge and it was a great pleasure to know that those thread replies were helpful for most of the members.

There are many Moderators and members who actively participate the forum thread posts and comes up with great advice, tips and techniques which tends to bring out their expertise knowledge in specific filed and also in general. I am very much happy to add value for SEW forums and I am glad to say that I am one of the Moderators

If you are a site owner, webmaster, designer, developer or a SEO person trying to improve your ability in search engine marketing, then the right place is Search engine watch forums. I welcome you to Register and get in touch with SEM queries!

Everything about Meta Robots and robots.txt

Robots plays important role in the field of SEO. We have two ways to control pages and folders one is using Robots META tag and other is through robots.txt

A web page creator can specify which page should be indexed and which page should not be indexed by search engines by placing Robots META tag in the HTML section

Here are some Robots tags that are common

< content="NOINDEX" name="ROBOTS">- Ignore content and follow links
< content="NOFOLLOW, INDEX " name="ROBOTS">- Include content and do not follow links
< content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" name="ROBOTS">- Ignore content and do not follow links
< content="INDEX,FOLLOW" name="ROBOTS">- Include content and follow links
< content="NOARCHIVE" name="ROBOTS">- Cache link should not show Search results pages
< content="NOODP" name="ROBOTS">- The Open Directory Project (ODP) title and description for the page should not be displayed in Search results
< content="NOYDIR" name="ROBOTS">- The Yahoo Directory title and description for the page should not be displayed in Search results
< content="NOSNIPPET" name="ROBOTS">- Titles are only displayed in Search results page and not description or text context for this page

In addition to manage folder level user agent control robots.txt file can be used. This file can be placed in root of each server and the format is plain text not HTML

Through this file website owner or webmaster can allow access to web page content and disallow access to admin, cgi and any secured files that you don’t want search engines to index

A typical robots.txt file will look like

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin*
Allow: *content*
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /paypal/
Disallow: /credit/
Disallow: /cgi/

Explains, all robots can crawl except the admin files, and crawl files named content folder, and should not crawl test, paypal, credit and cgi folder.

Hope this post helps to know more about robots and its act in SEO. You can analyze further on checking Google's robots.txt file http://www.google.com/robots.txt and post comment or tweet @jagadeeshmp if you need better understanding :)

30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready

Revised 30 SEO Tips in 30 Days - Explained in Google Knol (Won best knol of the Month March 2009 & Top Pick Knol Award)

Having less time to do SEO by your own :) do not worry, now you have a chance to turn your website SEO ready in just 30 days by applying one SEO tip a day? Here are those 30 SEO tips

Tip [1] Add Titles related to targeted keywords, place only important keywords, do not exceed more than 25 characters
Tip [2] Meta description should be unique for each pages with targeted keywords. Do not stuff keywords into Meta description.
Tip [3] Layout pages with CSS, avoid tables
Tip [4] Add Keywords towards H1 tag as page headlines.
Tip [5] Implement Bread crumbs for increasing web site navigation structure example Home >> Service >> SEO
Tip [6] Create Static Header and footer navigation links, Links should be text not as images
Tip [7] Analyze your targeted keywords using Google suggest
Tip [8] Keywords in navigational links play a vital role and have its own importance to search engine eyes
Tip [9] Use most important keyword in file name or URL
Tip [10] Minimize table especially nested tables
Tip [11] Say yes to Quality links and No to Quantity links
Tip [12] Never try to place hundreds of link for a new site on the very first day
Tip [13] Your targeted keywords need to vary a lot in anchors
Tip [14] Always have a good combination of links from new and old sites
Tip [15] Try writing articles having links and have them in the resource page of your site
Tip [16] Images are important, make sure your site logo contains your keyword
Tip [17] Put CSS and JavaScript into external file / folder
Tip [18] Pay special attention to your content
Tip [19] Make sure to have sitemap as text links
Tip [20] Place robots.txt in root on your server
Tip [21] Create Google site map to your web site
Tip [23] Start a blog and participate with other related blogs
Tip [22] Submit site to open directories
Tip [24] Create feed xml and ror xml for xml search engines and directories
Tip [25] Try to avoid automatic directory submission and build manual links
Tip [26] Monitor your hits and traffic by using free Google analytics
Tip [27] Know how to analyze the reports and to optimize the results
Tip [28] Know about redirection methods and theory - 301, 302, and 200 response codes
Tip [29] Implement, understand and react to website analytics reports
Tip [30] Make your body copy sufficiently long and keyword rich

Quick Guide

If you want these SEO tips in your site or blog as Gadget, feel free to use my SEO Tips of the Day Google Gadget that displays one SEO tip a day in your web page which can even help your site visitors to learn SEO tips and to get SEO and other Internet marketing Tweets follow me @jagadeeshmp , thanks for your time!

10 Extraordinary Ideas to Increase your Twitter Followers

As we see many of our friends have written what twitter is all about free social messaging service for staying connected with friends and followers etc etc, so I don't want to add that content to my post :) in fact for a change we will start with an introduction on how the name came up and what’s the meaning of twitter. Here the meaning "Make high-pitched sounds, as of birds" so we can add some hi pitch text and fun along with the discussions in twitter "What you doing" update section like as I do some mischief with my SEO updates and my personal stuffs. By this followers would be interested in your update and they like to read and share your stuffs and not get bored

Here are the ideas how you can make your twitter profile, web page, blog visitor a follower

(1) Read blog post and comment your valid suggestions with your twitter profile in URL field and don't mind about no follow attribute. If your comment is a valid one, user will check your profile to gain your knowledge and share, by this they may follow and their friends may follow

(2) Retweet valuable tweets, suggestions and discussions and you may follow @retweet so that you can monitor which messages are getting retweeted. This way, you can find your own upon the continuous practice. By this your twitter profile might be followed by interesting people

E.g.: RT @jagadeeshmp Great SEO help resource Blog http://tinyurl.com/btqjz5

(3) Follow people back if they are interesting and update often

(4) Join twittgroups.com and tweetchat.com and add (#) hash tag to your update so that your message will be seen to the people in those groups and if your resource or updates are useful there is a possibility that they would follow you

E.g.: Great #SEO help resource Blog http://tinyurl.com/btqjz5 and check out in

http://tweetchat.com/room/seo
http://twittgroups.com/group/seo

(5) Increase your updates count :), it should have a mix of discussions, questions, feedback and retweet both techy and non-techy. So users may think following you may be useful lolls. Just keep in mind it should be useful and users should like you and your updates :)

(6) Add your twitter profile in all top social networking sites like linkedin, friendfeed, facebook, mybloglog, digg and the likes.

(7) Add your twitter profile in your email signature as well as in your blog or website

(8) Use TwitterFeed to automate your tweets that turns all of your blog posts into tweets

(9) In addition, try to enable you twitter account with twitterholic.com, twittercounter.com and twittervision.com

(10) Agree to the fact that this involves a lot of time and it would happen overnight. Guess this is the most important thing out of all nine :) Put you effort over the above 9 ideas and attract more followers and get more clients through twitter

If you find above post useful feel free to follow me and if any ideas are missed out you are welcome to add in comment section, with your twitter profile which will be an additional benefit to readers.If the idea is good, readers and I may follow you. Are you Happy! Now Howz that?
;-)

How to generate enough qualified leads?

Is this a question that is snatching your sleep of you at nights? Well then I feel you definitely need to read through this blog that is going to explain exactly how to produce and accelerate quality leads to your website.

I have populated few major strategies below that can be utilized to help generate quality leads for your website.

So first of all what all are the important components of lead generation?

· Rate converted – the actual number of leads that have in reality been converted into sales
· Money – the amount of money involved in getting a new lead
· Purchase price – in the first visit of each new customer, how much are you earning, monetarily
· Sales and time average – the average of the total sales that a customer does over a lifetime with your website

Few important questions that you need to ask yourself are:

· What is my aim?
· How much sales was done in the initial arrival of the customer
· How frequently are the same customers coming into your website
· What is the profit percentage that you are achieving from your website
Out of my experience as an SEO professional, I have understood that Leads Generation is a process that helps you get more and more of leads into your website, thereby increasing the sales figures!

Few sources of lead generation include:

· SEO – This is a very useful way to make others know more about your site, making it search engine visible. Applying SEO strategies into your website would help it get into the top ranks and also helps in appearing in the top pages of search engine results. Sounds great doesn’t it? :)
· Search Engine Advertising – Google Adwords and PPC options that assist you spending only for quality clicks
· Campaign organizing – Creating specific ad groups
· Creating relevant and separate landing pages for each ad group
· Creating specific sales pages in the website will help in specific linking to these web pages, thereby increasing the chances of being noted online in search engines.
· Email marketing – explain more about your products and services, through emails, as it reaches out more widely and stays as a ready reckoner in the inboxes for clients and customers.
· Referral Marketing – Let your customers get you more sales through word of mouth, thereby making them your sales generating sources!
· Advertising through various media
· Marketing though the telephone
· Partnering with other online merchants in order to generate exciting offers, that mutually benefit you both
· Mailing your clients with your details
· Last but not the least, frequently keep checking of the sales results and keep changing the marketing strategies and campaigns if the need arises.
These are just few of the many techniques that can be adopted to help you with your website’s lead generation. And one more very important thing that I want to say again is spend more time on your website. It needs your constant work and time along with efforts in order to make it one of the best sites with some great sales figures! So go ahead, your site is waiting for that extra lead generation :)

12 Useful Online Marketing Resources for Small Business Owners - A self check

In this post small business owners can find list of Webmaster resources and tools that can help to track and improve existing SEO work performed in Business website or Blog

But don’t forget to leave SEO work to experts :) and suggest your thoughts on your type of business and customers using below Webmaster resources and tools

(1) Google Webmaster Tools to improve traffic
(2) Analyze your visitors, search engine visibility and keyword search through Google Analytics
(3) Find pages that link to your site and competitor site using Site Explorer
(4) Track search engine result placement for your keyword and URL
(5) Check your web page in different screen resolutions
(6) Type out your domain or keywords in search box to find relationship between linking sites and topics, a Visual Meta search engine
7) Check you site load time and fix if it is too slow. This will help search engine spiders to crawl easily
(8) Find out how search engine spiders look at your site
(9) Find how your website is targeted in local search engines
(10) Find insight of your website keyword search terms and location; target your business accordingly
(11) Get quick traffic and cost estimates on your keywords for sponsored listings
(12) Measure your ROI from SEO, PPC and conversion rate optimization

The above Online marketing resources and tools are easy to use by Small Business Owners and using this you can support web site promotion work performed by an individual or SEO company.

You are NoWhere on the Search Engines Why?

You have wonderful products and services, you always hymn “Customer is our king” and you have showcased some of the best services that anyone in your industry can feel proud of! Then wondering why still is your website not visible in the top searches of search engines? There could be many reasons why still your website is being buried somewhere deep inside the search engine results.

Let us analyze one by one as to what the probable and top reasons could be:

• First and foremost thing to start with is to choose URLs that are keyword driven, so that users land exactly on your website when they type those keywords!
• The first best thing would be to check if your website has been listed in the search engines or not. This can be checked by typing out the website URL in the search engines and checking out if the result is showing your website as a result or not. It should ideally show a result of your own website, thereby proving that your site is actually listed.
• Getting search engine visibility takes time. It does not happen just like that. You need to spend more of your time and effort on it, just like it takes time to build up a new business and establish it. Though the results are not SO long to be seen, still it done need to have some time for itself too, to get established and familiar for the search engines. Give it more of time and consideration and hard work, and am sure it’ll pay off. So don’t be lazy start off right away
• Another essential thing to be noticed is to have more of written and relevant content in your website. Now this does not mean you just fill your website with keywords, just for the sake of getting listed in search engines. You must write articles in such a way that are meaningful, relevant to your website at the same time uses important keywords that your visitors might search for in search engines.
• Title tag title tag title tag!!! Get this phrase embedded in your brain! The area in the HTML pages that asks for page title is where you must include keyword or keyword phrases, in order to get attention of the search engines.
• Next thing would be to include ALT tags to the images in the website. This also helps in the images in your website to participate and contribute its share to search engine optimization.
• How popular is your website among the search engines? This is the next question that you must be asking yourself. Popularity of a website increases with more of quality inbound links. The more other websites would link to your website, the more your website’s popularity increases among the net, thereby the search engines. This is done by link building, wherein you submit your website links to other quality and related websites, in order to develop site popularity.
• Finally create a business blog and update your current key services, products or any value added information which can help your business as well as your visitor. This can boost your search engine visibility and traffic

Well as I already said, there are many other things that might be one of the reasons hindering your website from coming anywhere near the top search results. But these are few of the important reasons.

With these tips, don’t be no-where in search engines, you are Now-here, get noticed!! Keep going!!