SEO Strategy Blog

Jan 12, 2010

List of top five micro-blogging platforms

http://twitter.com/– Maybe most popular micro-blogging service out there. I’ll be surprised if you don’t use it. So much is written about Twitter that I can’t add noting new.

http://friendfeed.com/ - FriendFeed is a micro-blogging service and feed aggregator that makes it easy to share information like messages, photos, videos and so on online. If you want to keep track on multiple feeds and share information with your friends, FriendFeed is your option.

http://identi.ca/ - Micro-blogging service based on the StatusNet tool. It is getting more and more popularity.

http://www.jaiku.com/ - Conversation-based service, currently owned by Google.

http://www.ping.fm/ - Free social network and micro-blogging service, that enables users to post on multiple social networks simultaneously.

Jan 11, 2010

Real Time Search - SEO experts, are you ready?

Social Media gains more weight in SEO. This video shows the value of Twitter posts in the search results page.

The event video:

Jan 10, 2010

How to optimize a flash site for search engines

Many people still believe that search engines can’t crawl flash content. This may be true for small search engines but Google can actually read and index flash content. Of course if you go to a SEO company, asking for optimization of flash website, there is a huge probability that they will turn you down or ask for a huge amount of money.

SEO of a flash website is not that unusual or complicated, compared to optimization of standard, HTML site. Google can crawl and index the text content and discover links of all swf file formats. At the moment of writing this, Google bot can’t index images, stored in a flash. So flash is not appropriate for an image gallery, if you want to get traffic from your images. It’s a pity because Flash is very suitable for designing cool and shiny photo galleries; I think that soon Google will handle flash images.

External content
The latest update of Google flash handling capabilities was the ability to crawl external resources, loaded by a flash file.

Flash for navigation
You can see many articles with advice not to use flash for site navigation but you can go around the problem easily, just submit your sitemap to Google.

So, how to optimize flash content for search engines?

On-site optimization
Google bot behaves like any human visitor, it will fill forms, press buttons and view the content. The bot can understand text content and hyperlinks so you need to have accessible text content within your flash website.
Off-site optimization
You need to do all the standard SEO routines – submitting to link and articles directories, forum posting, blog commenting, Social Media Optimization, Social Bookmarking.

Further reading:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/flash-indexing-with-external-resource.html - Flash indexing with external resource loading

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html - Flash Indexing

Jan 9, 2010

4 reasons your pages to be deindexed by Google

Pages that are indexed by Google appear on the result pages. Pages that aren’t indexed or are deindexed for some reason don’t appear in the SERP and don’t bring SE visitors. So if you have a website with over thousand pages, only the pages that are indexed by Google will appear in the search engine results page.

Duplicate content
Even though Google have several videos where they claim duplicate content is not so dangerous for website ranking, it may lead to loosing positions and even disappearing from the SERP.
Blog platforms often show the same content in different pages – monthly archives, label pages and so on. Try to minimize the harm through robots.txt and canonical links.

Penalties
Unprofessional search engine optimization can harm your site and case it to be deindexed from Google. It is better to avoid fast and aggressive methods of link building.

Untrusted site
Thousand pages on the net have some kind of malicious code that harm their visitors. Google tries to ensure its users safety and de-index such pages.
For some reason Google may think that your site is untrusted or even harmful.

Downtime
When SE bots try to crawl your pages and
If your server is down when SE bots try to crawl your pages, they may disappear from the SERP. You can check unreachable pages and other crawl errors through Google Webmaster Tools.

Jan 8, 2010

Social Media Optimization in 2010

Social Media Optimization is a marketing technique, used to attract visitors and customers by promoting website, service or product through social media. At the beginning of 2010 many businesses are aware that SMO is important for their development and success.

SEO and SMO
With the invasion of personalized search results, SMO campaigns gain more value for direct marketing and indirect link building and optimization.

SMO – important parts
Social media optimization includes many techniques like blogging, micro-blogging, forums, commenting, participating in different social and mailing groups. SMO is not just creating accounts in Twitter and Facebook, or blogging the promotions. Social media optimization is the art of engaging the community into dialogs, getting feedback, and even providing online support services. Yes, social media tends to work great as an online support or feedback media, and it works a lot more poorly for just usual promo messages.

SMO affects SEO
SMO plays great role in regular SEO campaign. Yes, it brings SEO value as it brings new links. You can easily obtain new, SEO-friendly links from blogs and forums, and even links with nofollow like Twitter links are crawled fast and add some SE value to your content.
Actually I have an observation that Twitter message links are crawled in minutes after posting. They contribute great for your content to be crawled fast and indexed as popular.

Community links
People usually blog stories and services that grab their attention. Quality tweets get hundreds and even thousand retweets. All this mark your content as popular and increase its search engine value. You can even just ask your friends and followers to spread an idea and add a link in their blogs. This simple approach may get incredible success.

Social Media Optimization will have great impact on this year optimization strategies. Smart businesses will orient their marketing efforts on getting better communication with their potential clients, and SMO will play big role there.

Jan 7, 2010

Twitter followers

Social websites like Twitter are valuable tools for online marketing. With the constantly increasing number of users Twitter is tempting place for internet marketers. But Twitter marketing don’t always work, many people are disappointed after a try. As any other type of optimization and marketing, Twitter marketing needs a carefully designed strategy to succeed.

Mass following
Mass following – this strategy doesn’t work so well any more. While Twitter accounts are increasing their number, the real people using this service are relatively same count and their number isn’t growing so fast. Of course many accounts will follow you back – some of them use auto follow back scripts, others just follow all of their followers. But how many of them are real people? And how many of them will read your tweets? Here is the time to ask: Why do you want more followers? Is it because you want somebody to read what you have written? If it is so you need real people not empty accounts or bots. Even most of the SEO specialists and Twitter marketers don’t read other people tweets. They usually follow more than thousand people, it is totally impossible to keep up with all.

Followers
One reason Twitter became so popular in a short period is that it is easily used for marketing products, services and brands. Large numbers of Twitter users are actually there not to participate in the community but to promote. Some have gone even further with automated posting and similar techniques.

Following blindly or using mass follow tools will get you large number of followers but your tweets won’t get any attention. No one will read your messages, no one will retweet good ideas and no one will follow your links.

Many people complain that Twitter doesn’t work for them and this is the main reason. Using mass follow tools get them only low-value followers. So they spammed their bot-followers with their link and surprise! No visitors from Twitter …

Twitter marketing is more than getting random followers.
You need followers who are interested in your business and your tweets. Getting such followers is hard and time consuming. You must build your name like building a brand. Being an expert in your sphere will make people to take you seriously.

Interact
People are more likely to pay attention to someone who talks with them. Real personal messages, answers to questions, comments on relevant tweets are all ways to interact with your followers.

Jan 6, 2010

How to promote a blog

Do you need to market your blog?

If you want to make money from your blog you need to market it as any other product out there. Blogging is not just writing and publishing articles. Visitors and income won’t just fall from nowhere upon you. You need to work hard to optimize your blog, create quality content, and promote them.

Content quality

In order to make money from your blog you need to have content that can bring people to visit again and again. Here is a set of simple rules that can help you:

Writing high quality content is the first and most important rule.
Use spell checking and grammar tools.
Read your post twice before publishing.
Find someone to read your post and find errors and misunderstandings before posting.
Write on valuable and popular topics.
Use simple but professional design.
Make your blog SEO friendly.

Ways to promote a blog
There are several basic ways to promote a blog.

PPC advertising
Social media marketing – promote your blog in services like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace.
SEO – hire a SEO company or do the job your self. SEO can bring you tons of targeted, SE traffic.
Forums – you can successfully market your blog on forums, especially your niche forums. Join some and give a try.
Blog commenting or guest posting – participate on other blog communities, share useful and relevant information.

Jan 5, 2010

HTML basics for SEO specialists

You need to learn the basics if you intend to do SEO yourself. HTML is very important for both on-page and of page SEO optimization.

You need to know how to structure a web site, what are the value and the meaning of the basic HTML tags and how search engines see them. During a link building campaign you must know which online directories, services and sites provide quality links.

Basic HTML tags you need to know

<html></html> - this tag tells that this is a HTML document. It is the root element of HTML document.
<head></head> - this tag is a container of all head elements like title, meta-tags, styles and so on.
<title></title> -this is your page’s title. It must be located in the head of the document. The title tag is very important – it provides basic information about your page to both human visitors and search engines. SE use titles in their result pages. The title must be short and descriptive with one or two keywords in it.

<body></body> - this tag defines the document body, all text and formatting elements must go here.

<a></a> - an anchor tag. This is the most important HTML tag for you as a SEO specialist. The anchor can be used for both creating a link to another HTML document or a bookmark within the same document.
The anchor tag has several attributes but the most important of them is href. It tells the link’s destination.
Another important attribute is rel. It tells the relation between this document and its target document. If a link is marked as nofollow (rel=nofollow), it says to search engines that this pages links to unverified document and it don’t want to pass its rank and quality to the linked document.
The text between the opening and closing anchor tags is the text that will explain to humans and search engines what kind of page is on the other way of this link. Search engines pay special attention to this text so it is the best place to put a keyword. Both search engines and human visitors pay special attention to the text around a hyperlink or anchor. Humans decide to visit a page according to this text. Search engines index the page content according to this text again. Humans and search engines are quite similar, aren’t they?

If you want to learn more:
What do you need to know about links

Headings - <h1> to <h6> - these tags are used to define HTML headings. The lower the number the larger is the text shown on your browser. Headings are great way to mark titles like blog post titles or category titles for example. This blog by default has several posts on a page and each post title is marked with a heading.

<img> - this tag defines an image. Here you have two SEO-important attributes. The first is src and marks the location of the image. The second is alt and is used to mark an alternative text to be shown to the visitors. Search engines aren’t exactly humans and can distinguish what is on the image. They use the other elements on the same page and the alt element of the image tag to index the image. Using a keyword here will help you get traffic from image searches.

Read more:
Getting traffic from your images

You can learn more HTML here.

Dec 23, 2009

How Twitter can make your business grow?

Twitter is a popular social network and micro blogging platform with great importance on online marketing practices. It enables its users to send and read short messages of up to 140 characters. Twitter users can and receive tweets via web, SMS, and custom applications.

Twitter can help your business in several ways. It can be used for building brand awareness, providing news and update information, even online support. It can also be used for surveying people opinion, getting real time news and reactions, keeping track on latest trends.

Twitter as a promotion tool
Building brand recognition will add an important value to your business relationships. You can use Twitter to provide information, news and updates to your clients. You can give some inner information, ask your employs to have twitter accounts and share some thoughts, and add some spicy content. Giving some preliminary information to your Twitter followers can start a buzz.

Twitter as a research tool
You can use twitter to participate in conversations in your niche. You can ask people for opinion on products, feedback for services and even advices. This can help you to build better relations with your clients. Searching for terms or just following the daily trends can keep you up to date with latest news and reactions.

Twitter as tool for getting traffic
Providing a link at the end of your news tweets can lead many visitors to your website. You can offer an option for your visitors to share or re-tweet the articles they like. One good article or information can be re-tweeted more than thousand times and reach enormous number of people.

Micro blogging can be a great tool for growing an online business. Using services like Twitter can help your business to get known and valued.

Dec 15, 2009

What do you need to know about links?

Q: What I need to know about hyperlinks?
A: A link is a reference to a document that the reader can directly follow. A hyperlink is marked with an anchor element, here is its most usual syntax:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/">SEO blog</a>

In the above example we have an element anchor - "a" with "href" or hypertext reference to our document – in our case – this blog. The text in the link tells the viewer or the search engine what document the anchor links. It is an optional text and can contain anything.
An anchor element can have several attributes:

href– points to link destination.
title – link title.
id – the element id.
target – this attribute is used mostly for creation of new browser window so the visitor won’t leave the current page. This is achieved through target=”_blank” or target=”_new”. It can be used also for opening documents into another frame.
class - this is not interesting from a SEO point of view. The class attributes says what CSS class to be applied on the corresponding link element.

A link with all this stuff will look like this:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/" title="SEO strategy blog" target="_blank" class="CSSClass">SEO blog</a>

You can use images in the link or combine different html elements – for example:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/"><img alt="SEO Strategy blog" src="our_banner.jpg"></a>

A link can have an empty href, or use "#" in the place of href location (href="#"). Most of the time, these links are used through JavaScript and can’t be crawled by the search engines.

nofollow
Nofollow is an attribute used to instruct the search engines that the hyperlink must not pass any value to the linked document. This hyperlink must not affect target's ranking. It is used mostly for blog comments or bookmark websites, where the site owner has no way to track all linked resources. Example of nofollow usage:

<a href="http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">SEO blog</a>

Q: How to check if a link is correct?
To check if a website links properly to you, you must see the source. Your hyperlink must have a href attribute with your site in it and without a nofollow attribute.

Dec 9, 2009

Link building is not that easy anymore

You Should Have Seen it. The link building process becomes increasingly difficult. Most of the good, old strategies don’t work any more. You see your traffic going down and wonder what’s happening? Maybe all your SEO efforts are in vain?

Social bookmarking, is it still working?
Social bookmarking sites and web directories are main tools in link building campaigns. But lately, most of them add almost no value to my SEO campaigns. Yes, if you manage to land your article on the first page of the big guys like Digg, you will get a lot of visitors.
For a day or two. But that’s all folks.

Most of these sites use some sort of third party advertising to generate revenue. And most of these advertiser networks have strict rules against links to dangerous websites. The social bookmarking sites can’t afford to check every link because they receive thousands per day. Solution for them was to add nofollow to some or even all outgoing links. Some of them get even further with cloaking links. Now webmasters submit their links, visit the SB websites, link to them but in return, they get nothing. You can submit your article link to hundreds social bookmarking sites and get no visitors and no links at all.

Blog commenting?
With mass usage of nofollow, you’ll only lose your time.

Forum posting?
The same thing. Some forums don’t add nofollow, only until they get enough visitors.

Creating blogs or random pages on the net won’t help you, because they are pages with no value. You must work on any of them to become popular – does it worth its time?

What will be the next, successful SEO strategy?
I don't know. Do you?

Dec 6, 2009

Best free ways to promote a blog?

There are many different ways to promote a blog and drive traffic. Here is a list of things I do for promotion. I hope it will help you.

Social media optimization works best for my blogs. Use sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg to promote your content. Create a community, join similar communities in your niche, participate in events and you will get people attention. Groups and communities in your niche work best. Also social media sites in you niche may bring you more visitors than big, global SM sites. For example, for one of my coding blogs I get tons of traffic from DZone – social bookmarking site for developers.
Offer social bookmarking buttons to encourage your readers to share what they like. Tweet and retweet buttons also can bring you many new fans.

Link building.
Link building is an essential part of a SEO campaign. Don’t skip it. Join the majority of blog directories and especially the ones in your niche. Share some personal information and write something interesting as a description of you blogs.

Press Release Sites – write a press release and send it to some of the biggest press release sites. If you have a specific niche like gaming – send your press release to the biggest news sites in your niche.

Register to search engines. It may sounds trivial but this may help you a little.

Run contest or offer something for free. You can offer an e-book, website template, or blog theme. Freebies tend to bring a lot of new visitors.

Forum posting and blog commenting.
Prefer forums and blogs in your niche. It would be better if they don’t add nofollow to your link.

List of useful social bookmarking sites - updated

Social Bookmarking websites are easy way to get many visitors and quality links. Here is a useful list with social bookmarking websites.

digg.com
buddymarks.com
spurl.net
linkagogo.com
a1-webmarks.com
diggyourpost.info
savethislink.net
newsmarked.info
ebaumsworld.com
seedz.org
tungaw.com
bookmarkglobe.com
iorkut.net
starton.us
bookmarkplace.com
gyach.com
cmymark.com
tedigo.net
websapiens.net
justpoint.org
totalpad.com
mysitevote.com
maple.nu
dzone.com
blurpalicious.com
socialogs.com
spotback.com
svejo.net
hitmarks.com

This list will be continuously updated.

Dec 5, 2009

How to get indexed faster - for blogspot blogs

Google indexing is often crucial for any website or blog out there. Sometimes your content gets indexed fast and sometimes it takes a week or even more to appear in the result pages.

There are some things you can do to make Google index your articles faster.

Publish your full RSS – these days Google prefers to index blogger blogs RSS feeds rather than the full pages. The crawler may visit your blog once in a while but if you publish your RSS, Google will index your new content in a matter of minutes. You can try and publish only short snippets but then your full post will be indexed rarely.
Get links from big and hourly updated websites in your niche. Your links must be regular, not marked as nofollow. High quality links will make the search engine pay more attention to your content.
Update often. Google likes the fresh content and will index your pages faster if you update them often enough. Even now you can see traffic bursts after posting new articles. Make schedule and post daily.
Quality content. I may repeat myself but quality content will bring you success. Satisfied visitors will link back at you and will share your link with friends. Your backlinks count and popularity will increase.

Dec 4, 2009

List of top webmaster, seo and blogging forums - updated

forums.digitalpoint.com – Digital Point, very popular forum with good and helpful community.
sitepoint.com – SitePoint – another very popular forum.
webmasterworld.com – WebmasterWorld News and Discussion for Web Professional
warriorforum.com – Warrior Forum, internet marketing forum.
forums.searchenginewatch.com – SEO oriented forum.
forums.devshed.com – Web development forum.
www.dnforum.com – Domain forum.
forums.blogflux.com – Blogging forum.
webdeveloper.com – Web development forum
ozzu.com – Webmaster forum.
kirupa.com – Web development forum.
v7n.com – Webmaster forum.
webmaster-talk.com – Another webmaster forum.
www.webworkshop.net – SEO forum.
www.bloggerforum.com – Blogging.
geekvillage.com – SEO forum.
googlecommunity.com – And another SEO forum.
webtalkforums.com – Webmaster forums.
forum.authorityblogger.com – Blogging forum.
seo-guy.com – SEO forum

This list will be continuously updated.

Dec 3, 2009

Fun

Cat behavior, can somebody understand it?

Dec 2, 2009

How to make your blog a money-maker?

Your first task is getting enough traffic. But traffic is almost never enough. So getting traffic. You can achieve this with various SEO techniques like link building, forum posting, on-site optimization. Traffic can be obtained through social media networks like digg, twitter, facebook.

Let’s assume you’ve finished the first part and now you have a decent blog with many visitors. Now you need to monetize your traffic.

First and one of the most widely used – PPC and CPM advertising networks. The profit of PPC advertising depends on many things but mainly your income will be according to your traffic, CTR and CPC. CTR stands for click-trough rate and it depends on the ads position and visibility. CPC means cost per click and depend on your niche. There are niches with high CPC like finance, mortgages, SEO. CPM advertising networks are relatively similar to PPC ones, but your income will depend on page impressions. Gaming and lifestyle niches tend to perform well.

You can make money through affiliate marketing. Many companies offer affiliate programs for people to sell their products. You can even join an affiliate network like ClickBank or Commission Junction.

Other way to make money from your blog is selling ebooks or other digital products. There is a big market for WordPress and Blogger templates.

Nov 26, 2009

Chrome OS or what is all the fuss about?

Few days ago Google led live webcast of the update on Google Chrome OS.

First what is Chrome OS?
Google Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system, under development, intended to be fast, secure and web oriented. It targets mainly netbooks and even a new term was created – chromebook.

You can learn more from the Official Google Blog here and this Google video: