Aug
28
More source:
- http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/paid-search/paid-search-vs-organic-search.html
- http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1514/Paid-Search-vs-Organic-Search.aspx
- http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/organic-paid.htm
- http://searchengineland.com/paid-vs-organic-search-understanding-the-dynamics-33155
Jun
30
Before I start collecting feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, I want to talk a little bit about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc. so that we’re all on the same page.
Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
Sep
9
SEO Components (Title, Description, Keywords)
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Leave a Comment
Many people still have doubt to the three SEO components (Title, Description, Keywords). Here you go for better understanding!
Mar
21
Are you one of those guys who had made a website with lots of stuff to offer to visitors (your portfolio, perhaps) but have no idea what to do next? Well, what do you know.. there are thousands just like you. One of the thing that you can do is to let people KNOW about your website. Be warned though; this is hard work but seeing the traffic report afterwards will be music to your ears.
Link building is like trying to ‘advertise’ your website on other people’s website. But it doesn’t just stop there. You can let people know in your favorite forums (in correct section, of course), create those nifty looking forum signature and link it to your website (you can try with email signature too!), leave a comment in people’s blog that would link to your website or even print the URL in your name card. Endless of choices. It would be much better if the website that you are going to have the same audience as your website, so they would think “Hey, this guy’s website have photos of Hawaii too! Let’s check it out!”
Now, why would you want to build links to your website in the first place anyway? Is this really important? Can’t we just skip it?
Okay..why did you make the website in the first place? What was the purpose? If you are trying to showcase your artwork or skills in photography, link building is a very good way to get exposure from the public and even potential employers that might want to hire you. If you are living in Alabama, someone from New York might notice (and being awed) your work (being hired is a bonus). Link building is also good for SEO purposes. When there are lots of popular sites linking to your website, there is a big chance that your website would come out on the first page of the search engine. And when that happens, you can expect big and significant traffic to your website. Once in awhile, search engine all around the world have tendency to change their policy or method to display the search result. Nevertheless, putting up your link in popular websites is a safe bet.
Link building may sound easy, but depends on your target audience (and target websites) it will take most of your daily life routine. It will be tiring at first but hey, no pain no gain. First come out with list of websites/forums/blogs that you would like to ‘approach’ or post in DAILY, and then figure out things to post. Example, for forums, you can join in any interesting topics but at the same time showing them your forum signature embedded with a link to your site. If your daily life is hectic, or simply not enough time to do all this, you can always find freelancers on the internet for some money. There are even SEO companies out there that would do all the hard work of promoting your site.
To sum it up, link building is to create your small ‘network’ that would link to each other while building up your site popularity and relevance.
(word count 537)
By Shizu, Maple Software Creation, Jan 8, 2008
Mar
21
Black Hat Search Engine Optimization is those techniques that used to get higher search result ranking by using unethical methods. These black hat search engine optimization usually contain one or more of below categories:
- Break the search engine rule and regulations
- Create a poor user experience directly because the black hat search engine optimization techniques utilized on the websites.
- Unethically present the content in a different way or non-ethical way to the search engine spiders and search engine users.
Black hat SEO will provide a short term gain in the ranking result, but running these techniques on website, it will also running the risk of penalized by the search engine.
Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid
- Invisible/hidden text or tiny text – making the text’s color same as the background color, idea to hidden the text from people seeing and to get higher ranking result by adding keyword for search engine; or smaller the font size of text.
- Put irrelevant keyword – put the irrelevant keyword to the website which the keyword is popular but it is not related to the business of our website.
- Trademark infringement – put the competitors’ names somewhere in our website especially in the tag which will help to increase the ranking.
- Duplicating contents – making more than one page which is with the same contents. This will double up the tag that can increase the ranking from the search engine results.
- Page jacking – hijacking or stealing the popular website contents and put it in our website with few or no changes. The owner of content might not notice their content been stolen.
- Cloaking – detecting the search engine spider when these spider visit and modifying the page content. It used to improved ranking results of own website. Using some spider or software to grab all the page in the search result index and page content, later use the information grabbed to analyze.
- Guestbook spamming – posting some fake comment in other websites’ guestbook which will provide the linking to our website.
- Doorway pages – A page which will using to improving the ranking result and it is not contain any real content with it. And then it will re-direct to the real destination page, or automatically re-direct. The information will not useful and interesting to internet surfer.
- Google-bowling – submit the competitor’s website to the link farm which will might causing bad affect to that competitors such as idea to make them penalized.
- Spamming – creating some pages with not useful contents. The pages created specifically for the purpose of getting higher ranking. The page content might be the advertisements or the listing of other websites.
Punishment of black hat SEO
- Banned – The search engine will remove the website completely from their search engine index. One way to check whether our website is removed from search engine index is go search our website in the search engine.
- Penalized – the search engine will decrease the ranking of our website in the search engine ranking result. The ranking dropped then the website will visit by lesser internet surfer.
By Shizu, Maple Software Creation, Jan 8, 2008
Mar
21
How To Analyze Competitive Keywords For Your Website
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Leave a Comment
Human think in a different way, but a lot of them thinking the same thing. It could be ‘bread’ right this second, it could be ‘fix my television’. This is the sort of thing, as a webmaster/SEO consultant, to think about. What are the words that people may be thinking when they use the search engine to search for something. How are you going to decide what to put up? But first, why?
Setting up proper keywords for your website would mean two things; traffic and popularity. Depends on how you set up your keywords, your site may appear on the first page of search engine or the 20th. Put yourself into the customer’s shoe. Would you want to keep clicking on ‘Next’ on the search engine result until page 50 to find what you are looking for? I don’t think so. Studies had shown that people tend to stop browsing through the results until page 10. Personally I would stop at page 3. Therefore, getting and setting your keyword is absolutely important. The single biggest mistake that newbies would do is to skip this whole keyword mambo-jumbo.
Now, before you have your head exploded, there are tools out there to help ease your headache. Some of the tools are the following. Some of the tools out there are free, and some of them need to be paid.
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - SEOBook.com’s Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis Tools Gadget:
http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/#kw - Trellian Keyword Discovery:
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html - SEOBook.com’s Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion Scrapper Tool:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/
Type in the search boxes the keyword that people may be ‘thinking’ when they use the search engine to find products/services related to yours.
For example, let’s say that I have open up a website dedicated on teaching people how to play the guitar.
In Google Adwords Keyword Tool, first I type in ‘learn play guitar’. I can see that ‘learn play guitar’ and ‘learn to play guitar’ have high search volume that ‘learn play the guitar’. That’s it! The most suitable keyword would be ‘learn play guitar’. How astonishing that a single word would mean big difference.
But! Look at the Advertiser Competition. ‘learn play guitar’ have high numbers of advertisers using/bidding it. Surprisingly, ‘learn play the guitar’ have medium numbers of competitiveness. If you want to avoid using keywords that most people out there are using, your second best bet would be the keywords with not much of competitiveness. You can still use keywords with high numbers of bids, but you are competing with the rest of the world (and popular sites!)
To check and see the statistics of how many websites are using the same keyword, you might want to check out SEOBook.com’s Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion Scrapper Tool. Type in the keyword, and then it will display amount of competing pages, what Google suggest, and what does the Wordtracker would suggest.
You can try to check out out popular websites out there that are similar to yours and see what sort of keywords they are using. That would give you some rough ideas. Be reminded though, eventhough you can just copy-paste their keywords, you will learn nothing. If you are still unsure about what keywords would be suitable for your website and its content, you can hire SEO firm(s) to deal with it. They’re the experts afterall. Setting up good keywords would guarantee you traffic. Afterall, you have what they’re looking for.
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By Shizu, Maple Software Creation, Jan 8, 2008