Add +1 to help your site stand out

Add +1 to help your site stand out: Search results can be more helpful, and more personal, when recommendations from the people you trust are there to guide your way.

The +1 button can help publishers, too. As potential visitors see recommendations from their friends and contacts beneath your Google search results, you could see more, and better qualified, traffic coming from Google.

To get started, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central You’ll be able to configure a small snippet of JavaScript and add it to the pages where you want +1 buttons to appear.

Create a +1 Custom Button

How to Create Meta Tags for Bloggers

Blogger never add Meta Description & Keyword Tags in all your posts? This will sometime lead to decreasing of yours blog traffic or sometime not index in Google. So to solve this problem you have to change yours template code.

As a search engine crawl your site, it takes the information from the Title & Meta Tags such as Description and Keywords. The Meta description should be used to describe the content of your page honestly and concisely and be 1 or 2 sentences, 3 at most.

For this to happen, you have to add some pieces of code to the template.

1. First Sign in to Blogger dashboard » Layout » Edit html
2. Search for <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
3. Add this code just below that line.

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://bloggertricks.com/"'>
<meta content='DESCRIPTION' name='description'/>
<meta content='KEYWORDS' name='keywords'/> </b:if> 

Example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://abc.com"'>
<meta content='Blogger never add Meta tags in all your posts?' name='description'/>
<meta content='meta tag, meta description, meta keyword' name='keywords'/> </b:if>

That’s it! Save and view your work.

After changed of this tag, you’ll see that on post pages, the Meta description and Keyword tag included at the source code of that particular page within the <head> section.

Demo: Check out from here: http://search-engine-optimization-tip.blogspot.com/2011/02/three-common-url-problems.html

Are Shorten URLs SEO friendly?

Shorten URLs SEO Friendly

Shorten URLs will be used especially at Social Media sites to share web pages and interesting links. People are spending hours and hours in front of Facebook, Twitter etc, so URL Shortener services are increasing day by day. Most of people have this question that whether these short URLs are SEO friendly or not.

Usually shorten URLs will redirect to destination URLs. We need to find out whether these redirections are permanent (301) or temporary (302). We have few free tools on the web to check it. Yes, URL Shorten Services are using permanent 301 redirection which is search engine friendly. Please have a look at the following example for better understanding.

Example:

Checked link: http://bit.ly/fZzYtX

Type of Redirect: 301 Moved

Redirected to: http://search-engine-optimization-tip.blogspot.com/2011/02/change-blogger-title-tags.html


You can check out the redirection from here: http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

Conclusion:  Shorten URLs are permanent redirected & they are search engine friendly as well.

Google Farmer Update – How much damage it can do?

This article on the most recent change to Google’s algorithm, which impacts on websites appear in the organic search.  The article says that although Google makes more than 500 changes a year, this change will definitely be noticed.

Last week Google has made the biggest change in its search algorithm. It affected many websites that depend on Google to drive majority of their traffic. This major change is done to rank quality content higher in Google search results. Particularly pulling down the sites, which have low quality / less original content and are of no use to users. The effect is that users will find sites which wrote the original content. Google says in a blog post on Thursday that these tweaks in the algorithm will affect 12% of its search results.

People give funny names to Google’s algorithm update. Be it “Jagger update” or “Hilltop update” This is called the Google “Farmer Update”. Do you know who gives names to Google algorithm updates? Many people in search marketing world don’t know how Google updates get their names. It all started in 2003 from Webmaster World.

Change Blogger Title Tags

Remove the name of your blog from the page title of your posts by swapping blogger titles for better search engine (SEO) implementation and displaying post name instead of blog name. It will helps to increase yours traffic through search engines. Only you need to change yours Blogger title tag html code.

Blogger always adds your blog name to the page title of all your posts? This will sometime lead to decreasing of yours blog traffic or sometime not index in Google. This problem is suffer mainly by those who generally used long URL. So to solve this problem you have to change yours template code.

Fix URL Problem

I have already mentioned 3 Common URL Problems that you can face while running your website in my earlier post. Now I am trying to share that How you can Fix them.

Problem 1: 

Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs

There are a couple of things you need to do to fix this:

• Decide which URL style you want to use, www or non-www.
• Set up a 301 redirect so that any links to your non-preferred URL style will go to the right style. This way you don’t waste link value by splitting it between two URLs.
• Set your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools so your search result listings are consistent with your style preference. 

          Direction: Site Configuration(on right side) -> Settings

• Make sure whenever you build links to your site that you use the preferred URL style.

Problem 2: 

Duplicate Home Page URLs

The fix here is very similar to the first one. Here are a few tips:

• Set your main home page URL to be http://www.mysite.com. 301 redirect everything else to this URL since it is the most basic (If your preferred URL style is non-www, then do http://mysite.com)
• If you have to set up different versions for tracking purposes or some other reason, set a canonical tag to show the search engines which version you want showing up in the search results.
• Make sure when you build links to your home page that you link to the correct version.

Three Common URL Problems

Problem 1: 

Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs

If your site has a non-www and www version of all your URLs, you’re going to be splitting link value for the same content between two URLs. Rather than capturing 100% of the link value on the page you want to rank in the search results, you could be doing a 50/50, 60/40, or some other kind of split between the two URLs.

Problem 2: 

Duplicate Home Page URLs

This is a close cousin to Problem 1, but is especially bad because it’s your home page.

It is possible to have a lot of different URLs that all go to your home page content, especially if you haven’t fixed your www and non-www duplication, which can result in a lot of unnecessary duplication.

For example:

• http://www.mysite.com

• http://mysite.com

• http://www.mysite.com/index.html

• http://mysite.com/index.html

These URLs will all lead to the same content. If you have links going to all four of them you will see a four-way split in link value. There are a lot of sites out there that have fixed their non-www and www problems, but I can still find multiple versions of their home page.

I’ve even come across sites with different extensions (.php, .html, .htm, etc.) that bring up the same page as well. This leads to even more duplication and potentially wasted link value.

Dashes versus Underscores

Is using hyphens in between your keywords more effective than using underscores when naming a Web page?

Lets for Example:

Is internet-marketing.html more readable by search engines than for instance internet_marketing.html?

So the answer of this question is YES because if you have a URL like abc1_abc2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for abc1_abc2 (which almost never happens). If you have a URL like abc1-abc2, that pages can be returned for the searches abc1, abc2, and even “abc1 abc2″.

Reason behind this, please check out from here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Important Points to Remember while Developing a New Website

Clients usually develop a website by their own designers and outsource the SEO task to some one outside the company. So before the involvement of SEO consultant, the website would be completed and it is very difficult to change the design. So it would be difficult to perform on-page optimization for the Search Engine Optimization consultant. SEO is not an after thought but it should be implemented while designing a new website. For the development of a Search Engine friendly website we need to take care of a few important points. Those are website URL structure, rooms for header tags, usage of flash and other animations etc.

Improve Your Website’s Internal Linking Structure

Internal Linking Structure

A website’s internal linking structure is a crucial part of the overall SEO strategy. Whether it is the end user or the search engines, it is important to optimize a site’s internal structure for maximizing the benefits. If you plan to obtain high rankings in search engines, you need to effectively plan your website’s internal linking structure, also termed as a website’s navigational structure or site architecture. The inner structure of the site must be planned adhering to the usability guidelines as well as the best search engine optimization practices.

Given below are 8 important tips to help you plan an inner structure which conforms to both usability guidelines and SEO.

Website Navigation Design

Website Navigation

Website navigation structure and behavior affect the ease with which search engine spiders can navigate through the site and index it. Your site navigation should facilitate the uninterrupted movement of crawlers within the site. 

Search engines prefer sites which are easy for them to navigate and retrieve information related to the site’s topical information, and consequently rank them higher for the site keywords. Therefore it is very important for the site to have a simple navigation structure that is easy for the spiders to crawl.

There are many types of navigation structure that can make it search engine friendly or not.

Few tips to Index more pages

Website Indexing

Want to get more pages of your website indexed by search engines? Here are some useful tips:

1.    Site structure
Make sure your sub pages are easily accessible by search engine bots. Create a sitemap page that links to all pages of your website and place a link to it from the homepage. If you have a large website, break the sitemap up in several parts and keep the total link number under 100 per page. Link from your homepage to deep pages to get them and the sites around them crawled faster.

2.    No session IDs
Get rid of session IDs. Bots rarely index pages with a session IDs because they think that those are different pages (because of the different IDs) with the same content. 

Google Penalty Checklist and Penalty Checker

Google Penalty Checklist

Some content that point out some of the mistakes through which a website suffers from a Google penalty, They are:

• Linking to banned sites

Run a test on all outbound links from your site to see if you are linking to any sites which have themselves been Google banned.

• Linking to bad neighborhoods

Check you are not linking to any bad neighborhoods, link farms or doorway pages. Bad neighborhoods include spam sites and doorway pages, whilst link farms are just pages of links to other sites, with no original or useful content.

Google Penalty Advice

Google Penalty

To check for Google penalties with any degree of certainty can be difficult. For example, if your website experiences a sudden reduction in ranking for its main keyword terms it can be caused solely by a Google algorithm change or search results (SERP) update.

With any algorithm change or Google SERP update, there are always winners and losers, and when a sudden drop in rankings is experienced Google penalties are often incorrectly blamed.

If you suspect a Google penalty, it first makes sense to check whether any Google algorithm changes have been made which could be the cause of the problem

What is Latent Semantic Indexing | LSI?

Latent Semantic Indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.

Role of LSI in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Some Tips For Video Optimization

1.      Make sure that your video clips are relevant and informative

2.      Give your video a Catchy Title

3.     Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site.

4.      Optimize your video for Important Key Phrases

5.      Good old HTML content is still a favorite with the search engines. If you want your video to rank well, you need to give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround your videos with on-page copy that can be indexed by the search engines.

6.      Keep your Videos to five minutes or less

7.      Make use of a Video Sitemap

8.      Tag your Videos

9.      Brand your Video with your Logo

10.  Remember Inbound Linking Factors

11.  Offer the Option to Embed Your Video

12.  Add Descriptive Meta Data

13.  Allow Users to Rate your Video

14.  Syndicate Your Video - Submit your video to RSS.

15.  Offer your audio and video content in as many formats as possible.

Bounce Rate | Exit Rate

Bounce Rate

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs.

One can calculate the Bounce Rate as:

The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page.

Where

• Rb = Bounce rate
• Tv = Total number of visits viewing one page
• Te = Total entries to page

I.e. Rb = Tv/Te

Exit Rate

Exit rate comes into play on the second (form) page after the landing. If you sell the product on the landing and take the information (payment, sign up) on the form page, look at the exit rate. If your landing page bounce rate is low but no one is buying, you might notice a high exit rate on the form page which means there is a problem.

Difference between Keyword Density | Keyword Frequency | Keyword Prominence | Keyword Proximity

The difference between the following terms & how they affect search engine rankings are as listed below:

1. Keyword Density

Keyword Density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a web page.

I recommend using a keyword density ratio in the range of 3 to 4%

2. Keyword Frequency

Keyword Frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page.

I recommend that you ensure that the most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently use keywords in a web page.

But be careful not to abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.

3. Keyword Prominence

Keyword Prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page.

The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag.

4. Keyword Proximity

Keyword Proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are the better.

Avoid Seven Things - When Looking For Link Partners

Link Building

Below you will find 7 tips for avoiding the major pitfalls:

1. Do not link to sites that are irrelevant to yours. 
2. Avoid sites that have a "Links Page" that is hard to find. 
3. Avoid sites that contain more than 25 to 50 links per page. Outbound links not more than 25 to 50.
4. Do not link to sites with directories that are disorganized.  Again, it could be a "Link Farm".
5. Avoid sites that don't contain valuable information.
6. Avoid sites that have poor linking strategies and/or are connected to "Link Farms".
7. Avoid linking to a lot of sites with a low PR.  A few are OK, but generally aim for sites with a higher PR than yours.