Google's Panda Algorithm Now A Rolling Update?

Ever since Google released the Panda update in February, it has been known that Google carefully and manually pushed out updates to it on cycles that were often months apart.

Back in May, Matt Cutts said that is how they did it for now. Much like theGoogle bomb algorithm.

I am starting to believe that over the past couple weeks that Google has begun to either push the Panda updates out more aggressively on a manual basis or has set it to roam free on it's own - in the wild.

Yes, I think that Panda is now a rolling update. I can be totally wrong, but based on reading the various threads in multiple forums, it seems like Panda is updating almost daily. Maybe it isn't Panda related but it is hard to tell.

Skim towards the last 30 or so posts in this WebmasterWorld thread.

Anyway, I do not have confirmation from Google on this, nor do I think I would get one. But no one would be surprised if Google did eventually make the Panda algorithm a rolling update of some sorts.

For more of our stories on Panda, see our Google Panda category.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: So this is not a rolling update yet but Google did do a small Panda update as of late last week. I have official confirmation at Search Engine Land but here is the statement a Google spokesperson sent us:

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Google Toolbar Does Not Support Firefox 5

Yesterday I wrote at Search Engine Land, After Six Years, Google Drops Support For Toolbar On Firefox.

In my article, I stressed the fact that the Google Toolbar was first introduced for Firefox over six years ago. They have supported the browser for six plus years and with the introduction of Firefox 5, they have decided to no longer support the browser. Why? Theysaid "many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser," so why make it redundant.

But then Danny came in and added that this is a "stunning" move by Google. Why? Danny exampled "Google uses the toolbar to track user behavior. It's one way that Google gets site speed data that in turn is used to influence its search results. Many suspect that that surfing behavior is also used," Danny added.

That is pretty crazy if you think of it. Obviously, Google knows this and made a decision not to support Firefox 5. Are they that confident Chrome will take it's place? Will they also not support the new version of Internet Explorer?

Do you want the Google Toolbar on Firefox 5? Alex Chitu explained you can still run it if you use the compatibility reporter add-on.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

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SEO Tools – The Indispensable Part of SEO

The process of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves very well executed and systematic analysis. Siteopsys is a product that offers over 20 proficient automated tools classified into 7 categories that help an Analyst, SEO Consultant, Webmaster, Website Developer, and/or a Website Owner to analyze a particular website for various SEO and website parameters.

Following are the major aspects that are evaluated in the analysis course:

•    Website Evaluation                                                             
Evaluation of website parameters like content, sitemaps, server response, etc., which help in knowing the intricate details, that ultimately help in the optimization process

•    SEO Evaluation
Evaluation of webpage / website parameters that are directly related to optimization, like – search engine rankings, indexed pages, HTML Markup, Meta Tags, etc.

•    Link Evaluation
Evaluation of links’ parameters to know what kind of links exist (in terms of both quality and quantity); and gauging what kind of efforts are required in the next stage

•    Keyword Analysis
Analysis involves evaluation of various parameters of keywords, including choosing the ones that have greatest tendency to bring out maximum ROI (Return On Investment)

•    Competition Evaluation
Evaluation of direct industry competition online as well as indirect competition – competitors implementing marketing campaigns targeting similar audience as that of the industry segment, for which the marketing process is being executed

•    System Administration
System administration analysis involves checking of parameters that help ascertain current position of an online business / product / website. This information includes evaluation of factors, which ultimately help a website administrator to maximize the output.

•    Data Mining
Extraction of relevant information / data that can directly or indirectly assist in online marketing analysis and execution

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Methods To Improve Rankings in Local Search Results

There are situations when a webmaster wants to promote a website in a particular country or improve your rankings in a country-specific search engines. Some of the commonly used country-specific SEO methodologies are:

1.  Buy country specific Top Level Domain (TLD). For e.g. co.uk for UK,  .de for Germany

2.  Host the website on server located in the country which you want to target

3.  Select the country you want to target in Google Webmaster Tools

4.  Use the language or spellings particular to that country

5.  Get links form websites hosted in or having TLD of your targeted country

6.  Submit in local directories and Yellow Pages

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Features of SEO Friendly Content Management System

Most of the websites nowadays are made with Content Management Systems (CMS) with database at the back-end. There are many CMS softwares available on the net and many of them are good from SEO perspective. However, when finding an ideal SEO-friendly CMS, look for the following features.

Important Features

·         SE readable navigation menu (or drop-downs) with no JavaScript links

·         Static looking URLs free from parameters and Session IDs

·         Customizable URL structure

·         Control on Meta Data and Header Tags

·         301 redirects for Canonical URLs

·         Customizable Anchor text wherever required

Desirable Features

·         XML Sitemap generator

·         Breadcrumb navigation

·         Provision for Image Alt text

·         Option to add canonical tags

·         Facility to “nofollow” the links

·         RSS feed generator

·         Site search facility

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Meet the family: Meta name= “robots”

I offered you so many things to eat – PR Bar, optimizer beer, Energy drinks and what not. But did you ever wonder, what do Search Engine bots eat? Yes they love eating fresh content & HTML on your website; but there are few things on your website, that you never want to feed bots with like – flash, silly javascripts, duplicate content, affiliate links (that pass link juice) etc. So how do you stop these dumb bots – Simple, by defining robots meta tag values:

“

I just happened to stumble upon this cute flicker pic of five robots, I could relate to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask & Altavista. So I just simply used my paint brush and wrote their names accordingly. Looks so cool to me ! 

And now that you have met the bot family, let’s discuss different values you can serve to these witty Search Engine bots:

1. Index: Allows bots to index the page. This a default value, you need not define it on all the pages.
2. Noindex: Search Engines will not index the page and hence the page will not appear in its results.
3. None: It’s like shortcut for noindex, nofollow. “None” gives strict instruction to search engines – Don’t do any thing with the page at all.
4. Follow: Tell search engine bots, to follow the links on the page and take them as a vote to the linking website ie. pass the link juice.
5. Nofollow: Gives strict instruction to bots not to follow any links at all.
6. Noarchive: Stops paparazzi bots from showing the cached version of the page in its reults.
7. Nocache: Prevents MSN/Live to show the cached version of the page in its results.
8. Nosnippet: Stops the bots from not only reflecting a snippet of the page in search results but also doesn’t let them cache the page.
9. Noodp: Makes sure that search engines don’t use the description of the containing page in DMOZ as the snippet for your page in the search results.
10. Noydir: Works just like noodp, but used exclusively for Yahoo!

BTW, you may also want to go through our comprehensive article on Working with robots.txt file. I hope you enjoyed the post. Cheers! 
Image credit: flickr.

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The SEO war of redirects: 301 vs 302 vs meta-refresh tag

With this post, let’s discuss the much talked about 301 vs 302 vs Meta-refresh tags to understand which one in the most ideal one to use from the Search Engine Optimization point of view and in which situation? First, let’s have a look oni this small cartoon I’ve made for a general idea about redirects, then we will go into details so that the whole information is easy for you to digest 

301 Redirects
301 redirect is undoubtedly the safest way to redirect a website as all Search Engines treat a ’301 redirect’ in same way ie. They simply pass all the link value, juice, ranking etc to the redirected page. A 301 redirect tells a search engine that the requested page has permanently been shifted to a different location so search engines simply ignore the original URL and index the destination URL foreg. If we 301 redirect a website that is about watches (let’s say – awesome-watches.com) which is ranking for keyword ‘wrist watches’ to another website – cool-watches.com, the search engines will simply ignore awesome-watches.com and will index and rank cool-watches.com for the keyword ‘wrist watches’. 301 redirect is also the most handy tool to handle canonical URLs. The most common cases when we use 301 redirects are:

• If the page is deleted or permanently moved.
• You want a new top level domain for your website without damaging your link value and rankings. To serve either of the version of www vs non-www. This is done with a combination of 301 redirect and mod-rewrite.
• Content duplication. For example you may 301 redirect www.yoursite.com/index.htm to www.yourwebsite.com
  If you have many topically relevant but outdated websites which your are not willing to maintain anymore, you may slowly redirecting the outdated websites to the most current website. But beware, if there are many websites, redirect them one by one slowly as otherwise you might end up getting flagged for being a spammer. Please take a note that At SMX, all the engineers from all the search engines made a statement that 301 redirect will not carry the full effect if the content of the redirecting website is topically not the same. We should avoid redirecting our website to a site which is topically irrelevant to our website. For e.g. if you are planning to redirect (301) your website about cars, then you should not redirect it to a website selling watches. An inappropriate redirect will not lead to any benefit to your website.

302 Redirects
302 redirect, also known as temporary redirect tell search engines that the content of the requested URL is temporarily available at a different URL location but will be soon restore to the original URL. So in case of a 301 redirect, the search engines will index the original URL, but they will extract the content content from the 301 redirected URL. This is the the most dicey redirect that you can use on your website as all the search engines tend to treat a 302 redirect differently with lots of exceptions to what they claim. Here is a link for any budding 302 hijacker 
Mattcutts has explained here with simple examples, how Google, MSN and yahoo handle a 302 redirect. You may consider using a 302 redirect within your website pages (ie. Onsite redirect), when you want to serve search engines a simple version of a URL and the content from a different page with a complex URL, since simple and short URL’s look more click-enticing in the Search Engine result pages foreg www.yourwebsite.com can be 302 redirected to www.yourwebsite.com/userdata?user=12xc2?id=crap
However you must never try a cross domain 302-redirect.
MSN treats a 302 redirect exactly how it treats a 301 permanent redirect, that is, it will always ignore the original URL and instead index the destination URL. Same is the case with Yahoo, but yahoo reserves the right to make exceptions to this declaration (which they do at many occasions). You must be very careful as 302 redirects are often the default redirect in host control panels and JavaScript. Many meta redirects produce the same 302 redirect effect.

Meta-refresh Redirects
Actually a meta-refresh is not a redirect but it is s simple instruction to the browser to refresh the page after a certain period of time (content in seconds, with or with out a new supplied URL instead of the current one). It is situated in the head of the HTML page and looks something like this:
All search engines understand a meta-redirect but again, tend to react differently depending on the content figure. If the content time is 0 or 1 second, most search engines take it as a permanent 301 redierct; anything more than 1 is normally considered a 302 redirect. Use meta-refresh only if you your current hosting provider doesn’t allow a 301, primarily because the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (7.4) discourage the creation of auto-refreshing pages, since most web browsers do not allow the user to disable or control the refresh rate and secondly Spammers use a meta-refresh to refresh the page after every 5 seconds to save themselves from any type of ranking punishment. I am sure you don’t want to look like a spammer. If you want get into details here are some really useful threads on meta-refresh tags

Javascript Redirects
Don’t use Javascript redirect as search engines simply don’t understand it or tend to confuse it as a 302 redirect.

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The dilemma of Page Rank Sculpting, follow or nofollow

While every one around the SEO corner is busy hoarding the page rank of their site using nofollow attribute in quest to rank the important pages of a website, I am quite sure this practice (page rank sculpting) is just an accident waiting to happen as webmasters will abuse it up to an extent that Google will do what they have done to ‘keyword meta tag’ – start ignoring it. After the public announcements andclaims done by Rand Fishkin, Stephen Spencer, Danny Sullivan and even Matt Cutts, that directing the link juice to the important pages of a website improves the Search Engine Ranking of a website, the SEO community is using nofollow on anything they don’t want to rank for, claiming it a ‘wastage of link juice’ otherwise. But I personally believe that this nofollow practice is taking the SEO community no where, as webmasters have a license to get away to rank their websites even with a poor internal navigation and hence poor user experience. So obviously the nofollow era is facilitating more spammy websites making it to the top of the Search Engine lists. It’s just matter of time, when Google will take an evasive action.

If we have a look at the origin of a nofollow attribute, we find that nofollow attribute was made with the primary motto to combat comment spam (which it has failed miserably as comment spammers are still employed). Further Google found that nofollow can also help Google bots to firstly determine the most important pages out of huge websites with complex blog categories in little time and secondly the webmasters could use nofollow while linking to some website content which they don’t want to get associated with and vote to. Here is a recent precise statement made by Matt Cutts on use of nofollow attribute:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

Now getting back to my anti-nofollow visionary, the nofollow tags also facilitate a fake information architecture. As we know Google ranks the sites with solid internal navigational architecture higher on SERP as these are the sites which provide rich user experience to the Google users as the important content is just 3 clicks away, nofollow isn’t helping to their cause. Coz what most webmasters are doing at the moment is hoarding the page rank and shooting it on the targeted pages even when the target page is nothing but pure crap and weakly linked from other pages of the site.

Having said that, please don’t take me wrong, as I am not questioning the effectiveness of page rank sculpting, because it’s working great at the moment, but I am not too sure how long will this nofollow rampage last: I am afraid not too long. So I have a simple advise to give – use nofollow but only after you have crystallized your internal navigation and don’t rely 100% on this nofollow ploy as you might soon see Google derank the websites with weak internal structure indulging in page rank sculpting. I am looking forward to SMX Advanced and hopeful that it might clear up the mounted clouds over rank sculpting dilemma.

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Power feast: 31 most basic SEO factors you can’t afford to overlook

In the dynamic world of SEO, where there are so many small and big things that contribute to your website’s Search Engine friendliness, it is so easy for even professional SEOs to miss out on few of the factors. So as to make sure that there is less SEO skipping and your website is fulfilling Search Engine’s basic requirements, I have compiled a really simple and most basic SEO checklist that will help you to be a little more confident about your SEO campaign. This post is a little long, so to make it more interesting, we are also serving some mouth watering snacks like – beer, chocolate, Energy drinks and what not. Relax and enjoy the feast: 

1. If you haven’t booked a domain name yet, make sure you have your main keyword in it; people will link to you using your domain name as anchor text and hence giving a boost to your ranking for that particular keyword.
2. To begin with, make sure that you run a Google Adword Campaign to know the most convertible keyword theme for your website.
3. After the final keyword research, use this data to write unique and click-enticing title and meta description tag for each page. 65 characters in title tag is the maximum amount that will display in the search results but a little longer won’t hurt either. Keyword in the title tag is one most important factor you can’t afford to ignore.
4. Make sure that you haven’t overused keywords on the body copy; keyword density is a thing of past, Search Engines now useLatent Semantic Indexing instead.
5. Use keywords in alt and title tag of every image on your site (without making it look spammy).
6. Use H1, H2, H3 tags in your keyword headings. Use only one H1 tag per page with the most important keyword in it but you can use as many h2, h3 tags.
   
7. Use bold or strong tags to highlight the most important keyword.
8. Make sure all the internal and external navigational links have keywords in the anchor text and not just ‘click here’ and ‘learn more’. It gives a boost to the internal linking. You may even consider using tag clouds on your website for better Internal linking.
9. Be selective while submitting links to directories otherwise you may spoil your link profile in pursue of easy back links.
10. Use a robot.txt file to stop Google bots to index the unwanted & duplicate content.
11. Use Google and static sitemap and don’t forget to update it time to time.
12. Use keywords in bread crumb navigation.
    
    
    
13. Make sure you have a customized 404 error page. To make this task more interesting for you, check out these cool 404 error pages. (But please don’t forget to put a static sitemap or site search on your error page).
14. Implement Google Analytics and feed burner to monitor website stats.
15. Minimize exit links from your landing page.
16. Do your host’s IP analysis especially if you own a family of websites.
17. Write your company’s local address with your important keyword somewhere in the heading on the website and submit your website to Google local business Center for optimizing your website locally.
18. Make sure that there are no broken links. Use Xenu.
    
19. Every time you add a new blog or article (auto) ping atleast Google, Yahoo, MSN and technorati.
20. Keep your website and page URLs as simple as possible. Search Engines hate non-sense dynamically generated URLs like http://www.crapurl/114/cat223 or http://www.crapurl/view_item.php?listing_id=477443&pic_id=2. Use URL masking.
21. For usability follow these simple design principles.
22. Don’t try to rank all the pages of your website. Concentrate on five of them and keep cannibalization factor in mind while doing the internal and external linking of your website.
23. Be creative in your link building approach. One solid idea can fetch you a million dollar worth links.
24. Keep your website link worthy.
    
25. Domain age matters a lot. You can’t do any thing about it but you have to be patient. (I wish there was some aging formula for websites like anti-aging cream for women) 
26. Link popularity of the website. Use Yahoo for this as it presents more accurate link profile of a website than Google.
27. Additionally, use misspelled keywords in the keyword meta tags. It certainly helps.
28. You don’t want to waste your link equity/link juice to get wasted on ranking pages like ‘request for proposal’ , ‘privacy policy’, ‘shipping policy’. It’s better to use no-follow tags on such pages.
29. Make sure you update your website content as often as possible. This improves your website bot-crawl frequency.
30. Have your website W3C compliant, it will give your website some definite future benefits.
31. Test your website on text browsers like lynx.
    

PS: These are the most basic SEO factors that I can recall at the moment according to current Big3 Search Engine algos. If you think I have missed out on any of the important factors, please feel free to add them as comments on this post.
PSS: Images courtesy: gsinc.co.uk. I hope you enjoyed the feast and don’t be surprised if you find any of these products being sold at your nearest grocery store. Cheers !!

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Let’s get it right: 11 most essential design principles

Looking back at the past RedAlkemi blog posts, I think we have talked enough about SEO/SEM and I feel obligated to deviate to some thing that excites me as much as SEO does – Website Design. I understand how frustrating it can be for a website designer to limit his creative ability to create a website from search engine point of view. And likewise, it can be a real nightmare for an SEO, to optimize a website that is poorly designed and is a member of ‘usability hall of shame’. So let’s talk about some most essential principles ofwebsite designing (& usability):

1. Precedence (Guiding the eye) 
Precedence is one most important characteristic that a successful website should have (if a high bounce rate is not an issue for the website owner). I believe that it is in the hands of a designer, how he controls the eyeballs of the visitor on his website. Yes, it depends on the requirement of the website owner, how much weight he would like to give to a particular section of a website. The basic rule here is – first thing should come first – for example, In most cases, company logo (and not login window) is where the visitor should immediately see, as he opens a website so that he knows, which website he has arrived to. This just doesn’t stops here, as it is the duty of the designer to guide the visitor’s eye through a sequence of steps. For example:

Following design functions control the visitor’s eye balls:

• Position – where on the website the element is located?
• Color – If the color is bold or subtle?
• Contrast – Important function in Web 2.0 layouts
• Size – Bigger the object, higher is the precedence (unless every thing is big)
• Design Elements – Arrows, flipped sticker icons etc

2. Breathing SpaceSo many times I come across website designers, who think website designing is all about utilizing every square pixel of the screen area by filling it with maximum stuff. But I feel that, more vacant space you leave on the screen, easier it will be for you to divert the eyes of the users on the intended objects. To create space, you can compromise on vertical scrolling (not horizontal off course). Following are the important elements of spacing:

• Line spacing
  Remember that eyes are more comfortable reading text lines with medium line spacing. Too little and too much of line spacing can equally hamper the text readability and precedence as it may spill the visitor’s eyes. You can control the line spacing in CSS with ‘line-height’.
• PaddingWith few exceptions, the text should never touch surrounding elements like table borders, images etc.
• White SpaceWhite space is a technical term and when I say white space, it doesn’t necessarily has to be white in color. ‘White space’ refers to empty spaces on the screen. Expert designers use this white space to give a balance to the whole design lay out and ample white space makes the design look more elegant. To understand this art, open some fashion magazine and see how the publishers use white spaces to highlight the products in car and watch Ads.

3. Navigation
This is the design aspect closest to usability of a website, when the user gets lost on the website, wondering where to go? Make sure that this doesn’t happens to your visitor.

• Navigation: Buttons and other navigation items on the website should be easy to find, identify and understand.
• Orientation: ‘Top’ buttons, bread crumb navigation, back button, sub headings, sitemap and site search are some important elements of healthy orientation on a website.

4. Worst Case scenario:
Consider these factors in advance, so as to avoid end moment surprises (some real unpleasant ones  )
You might pick a dazzling font for your copy, but is it available on the user’s computer, what if not? Your design looks amazing in 1100px, but is it creating horizontal scroll?
What happens when the user resizes the window? Did you forget to keep your design center aligned?

5. Typography
This is how you can control your body copy:

• Font choice : Make sure, you are using standard HTML fonts. These fonts can make your layout look elegant, retro, flashy, professional, festive etc.
• Font sizes: Even though small fonts look more sophisticated, they are hard to read. So use a readably big font size. Modern Web 2.0 layouts allow you to use big fonts without looking ugly.
• Spacing: I have already discussed this above.
• Line length: To understand line length, if you open up a newspaper, you will notice that text is presented in small lines and multiple columns. Avoid elongated sentence lines.
• Color: Avoid extra bright, too high or too low contrast colors
• Paragraphing: Stick to left aligned text.

6. Usability

• Adhere to standards: To avoid confusions, adhere to the web standards and do the expected. For example, don’t underline a letter, if you don’t want to link it; as most people tend to expect an underlined word to link to some other page. Doing otherwise can cause confusions.
• Action blue print: Make a list of all the tasks that your customer might want to perform on your website. Then look for ways to make these tasks easy for the visitors to perform in minimum steps in order of importance of each task.

7. Alignment
Alignment doesn’t necessarily mean that the design elements should be in a straight line, but it means every thing should be consistently placed on the page in a set pattern. Aligning will make your design look more ordered and digestible.

8. Clarity (sharpness)
Keep the design sharp – pixel by pixel.

• You may want to use ‘sharp’ text in photoshop.
• Ample contrast to keep the borders clearly defined.

9. Consistency
Consistency means, you must have a clear theme in your mind before starting the design, so that you can select colors, font, buttons, spacing, illustration, pictures etc. that compliment to the website theme. An inconsistency in the design will make it look unprofessional and low in quality. So make early decision and stick to them. Smart CSS will help you achieve this consistency. Even if your website design is bad, a consistent website design will still look better then an inconsistent website design.

10. Design Maintenance
Do the design elements cross each other too much? When you make a change in one ‘div’, do the adjacent ones collapse? Keep all the design elements separated from each other (as much as possible) as the designs with the elements related to each other are easy to build but at the same time are very hard to maintain.

11. Use CSS smartly
Use CSS as often as possible, specially in the case of large websites. If you are to use buttons at multiple places of all the pages on your website, you may want to make a button in CSS and attach it to every ‘DIV’ where you want to place that button. Yes, by doing this you compromise on flexibility of these buttons, but you save a lot of time.

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Try these 4 useful tips and optimize your website locally

Are you aware that ‘nearly 40% of all search queries have some sort of local intent’? And most of the people (as much as 70%) Google or Yahoo before consulting their local classifieds or yellow pages. With this blog post I would like to throw light on some really useful tips on how to optimize your website copy for local search (Google and Yahoo maps to be precise) -

• Know your place
  When I say ‘know your place’, I actually mean geography. You should know all the variations of names with which your work place is associated and use these names creatively in one form or the other in header or strong tags and at least once in title tags too. If you are selling pizzas in Denver, instead of writing just ‘yummy pizzas’ in h1 tag, you may want to use ‘the most yummy pizzas in Denver’, this might prove to be a longer tail, with higher conversion traffic. So make sure that you include all the landmarks and places of interest when you write your website copy. For geographical research Wikie can be surprisingly useful for you.
• Play with categories
  If you are running a restaurant, targeting broader keyword categories like restaurant and bar, it won’t be such a smart thing to do, instead – ‘Best ‘Mexican food’ restaurant in Denver’ is a longer tail with a broader category that is more likely to convert. You can have more pages on your website targeting keywords like ‘best ‘Chinese’ food at ’15th street’ instead of ‘best restaurant’.
• Local Business Directories
  This is extremely important for your local search, make sure that your website is present in the local directories like Google Local Business Center, BBC, Talking Phone book, SuperPages etc. If not all, at least Google Local Business Center.
• Web Analytics
  Use Web analytics to monitor your website and watch out closely for the keywords people are associating your website with and insert those bubbling keywords into your website copy.

You may also want to refer to this wonderful post on Google’s local search algorithm.

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Link Building from a different perspective: Let’s do it naturally !

Even after all that buzz and rumors about Google ignoring paid links, link building is still the single most important part of achieving high ranking on any Search Engine. With this post, I would like to feature some comparatively unconventional (yet highly effective) ways to garner high quality back links for your website.

Look who’s linking ?
Get ready for surprises. Just enter the search parameter: “name” -linkdomain:name.com (in case of RedAlkemi I will enter: “RedAlkemi” -linkdomain:redalkemi.com) in yahoo and you will get a list of websites which have featured your website but haven’t provided you a back link. All you have to do, is to shoot a warmly written personal email to ask them to provide a back link to your website and you can expect at least 20-40% positive response (which is quite good).

Web 2.0 profile linking
Make a list of your favorite Web 2.0 websites (Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! 360 etc) that allow you to create your profile with a URL and make a natural looking profile with a link to your website. If the web 2.0 website has direct link disabled, you may tag your website and its equally effective.

Butter and link!
If there is a website which you have been desperately trying to link but never knew how to approach, I have a tip for you. Start praising the work of the website on the Social Media and chances are that they will soon get to know that they have a big fan and will feature your praising stories on their website while linking to you. Even if they don’t, you may send them a copy of the story or press release telling them that they are welcome to put the story on their website (with your link off course) and believe me every one loves being admired, they will link to you.

Link to me honey
Look around and make a list of your near and dear ones, who maintain their own personal website, blog, profile. Send them a personal mail to provide an HTML link to your website. If they really like you, you can expect a 100% conversion rate. Now if you don’t value these links, ask your SEO company that how much will they charge you for getting such a link?

Link local too
Make a list of local websites and directories (like yellow pages, Google maps), which can offer you local and global links on sign up.

Punish thieves linkably
If ever you find a webmaster who has stolen your image or content, don’t spare him and shoot him an email and ask him to provide you a back link from quality website he is associated with. It’s a linkable way of punishing the cyber thieves where no one gets hurt.

Even though you can’t rely 100% on such linking tactics, but they actually boost your conventional link building campaign, and if you are looking to start a link building campaign now, you may want to have a look at our ongoing Christmas offer on link building. And one more thing, we have Christmas holidays till 25 Dec, so I would like to wish you all a very MERRY CHRISTMAS in advance ! Cheers !

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Time & Effort distribution to reap maximum out of your Internet Marketing Strategy

RedAlkemi being one of the most comprehensive Online Marketing Solution provider, it is our cyber-duty to suggest website owners and development teams; how to ideally distribute their valuable time (in%) & efforts to reap maximum out of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

Each of the six activities above mentioned focus on how to grow the Popularity, Quality & Profitability for any kind of Internet Marketing venture like Blogs,Informative websites, e-commerce websites etc.

Creating reliable, rich & viral content (40%)
Creating viral worthy rich content deserves at least 40% of the total time spent on the whole internet marketing process. I know it might sound surprising to some but that’s the way it is. The idea here is to spend considerable amount of time creating articles, blogs, forms, applications & graphical content that provides value to your targeted customers. The term ‘viral’ means that the content should be so rich that it has the ability to spread over web automatically. It should entice the visitor to share it with his friends, bookmark it or at least try to memorize your site and to return again in the future to find more useful updates. Make sure that all the content on your website should seem so authoritative that no one on the world wide web can raise questions on its authenticity. The coverage, quality & the entertainment aspect of your content should be so comprehensive that it becomes almost impossible for your competitors to catch up. Needless to mention, in case of any doubt feel free to refer to Wikipedia to create some thing that is 100 times better than others. Rich content works nothing less than anchor for a top performing website. All your efforts including Development, SEO, Link building will go insane if your site is a warehouse of useless & uninteresting information that can be found anywhere on the web inducing nothing but boredom. Make it as interesting & lively as you can.

Developing New Features/Designs (25%)
You can take this component as the cousin to ‘Creating Viral Worthy rich content’. It comprises of the activities to upgrade your website constantly. Think of new ideas that can help you to maximize the impact of the content designed by you. The people involved here are website owners, think tanks, designers, developers etc. Even if you are the industry leader, it takes a lot of effort to stay there and maintain your cutting edge.

Studying the competition for new keywords & other industry trends (10%)
Each week, take out some time to evaluate the industry changes and the activities of your competitors. Keep a close eye on the new entrants, changes in keyword search trends and analyze the whole industry to discover the new trends & ideas that can add to your cutting edge.

Participate in online activities (10%)
Make sure that you spend some time socializing in the internet communities like forums, blogs, social media sites etc where the other industry gurus gather and share their thoughts. All these activities will not only build a positive profile for you as a website owner but will also reap attention, reputation and off course,it will reap some much needed industry relevant powerful links.

Testing/Refining according to the Visitor Data (10%)
Spend the rest 10% of the total time to keep a close eye on the analytics to track most conducive links & keywords so as to focus and redirect your advertising & marketing efforts. The analysis of your PPC campaign can yield surprising results that will surely help you to design or redesign your keyword targeting strategy. Analysis and resulting changes have equal share with in this 10% time share of the total marketing effort. Its all about testing, experimenting, analyzing, refining and repeating the good work. This component involves changing titles, headlines, object placements, PPC analysis, call to action etc. Without these experiments and testing you will never know what works for your targeted market segment and what not.

Manual Link Building (5%)
We are rating the much talked about Link Building at the bottom most, not because it is unimportant or outdated but if you have invested same time & effort on the aforesaid components, you need not beg for links in front of any one; you will get them automatically with much ease. Off course you still would require a link building campaign, but life would be much easier this way. Just a few dozens of rich carefully built links and you are on your way to outperform all your competitors. Obviously these handful of links will not be so easy to find but even if you hire someone else to do it for you, you can save some serious link building man hours.

I am not expecting every one to agree on this time & effort distribution though, it makes lot of sense if you apply simple Internet logics. And it is as simple as it sounds..! 

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Bait strategies to get the right kind of fish (links)

Link Baiting is an old and a popular term that is used for content that gets relevant websites in your sphere to automatically link to your website without you asking for a link. This is often mistaken as a part of viral marketing as it normally does not promote exposure or branding.

There are several ways of creating link baits which are mentioned below –

a) Good content hooks: Good content with catchy title: write focused content important to your business and use catchy titles. If you have a good title, then you have won half the battle of a successful linkbait campaign. Use optimized anchor text as the goal is to have it linked to often, the title will be used as the link in many cases.
b) News Hook: This does not mean generic news – but if you are one of the few people to actually know about new happenings in your industry, then you can be the first one to publish the news and use it as a “hook”.
c) Contrary Hook: When you go against common myths or well established notions and people will be incited to talk about you.
d) Humor Hook. When you have something witty written about anything in your industry niche, influential people etc, in a lighter vein.
e) Tool Hook. When you create free tools and make them available on your website for people to use.
f) Award Hook. When you provide award which are legitimate in your industry and people who have won them, link to your website to legitimatize them selves.
g) Giveaway Hook: When you give away promotional material for free on your website.
h) Research/Statistic Hook: When you have Compiled data, scientific surveys etc., on your website which have great importance in your industry.
i) Ego Hook: When you offer people significant exposure to express their ideas, talk about themselves, their ideas, or their company with your assistance.

As time is passing, people are finding more ways of link baiting. Depending upon the industry and the business model, link baiting technique would vary.

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