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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 32 – How do users see rich content such as Flash, Movies, etc.

ashish — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:10:18 +0000

This is a subject that has come up before in a smaller way, but needs more details and more explanation. In the last few years, the use of content has expanded to include rich multimedia content. Using Youtube Videos, using other videos, using Flash animations and even using Flash for menus and for hosting images (such as one major company has done for their photo hosting site) has had a dramatic increase. It is recognized that the usage of such rich media helps keep users interested, and when you consider the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”, this increases when you have a Video that keeps your users interested, and allows you to increase the time that people spend on your site (Imagine a site where a review of gadgets is done, the effect is increased manifold when the visitors can see the same review of the gadget in the form of an additional video where they can actually see things working – in such cases, if they are impressed by the review, a properly placed affiliate link to buy the product can actually catch a fair number of people and earn additional money). So, this should make you want to change your strategy to add more rich content to your site, after all, it will bring additional visitors to your site who will stay longer.
The problem with the above statement is that part of it is not true if your site depends on search engines for its visitors, and has not yet built up a strong position on the first page of results. The reason for that is very simple – Search engines are still not able to index the contents of these rich media effectively. So, even though Google has been trying for some time to understand the content of Flash, and even try to figure out stuff from inside videos, it is a long way away from being able to properly index your rich content (what this means in simple English is – if you have a great video review of a new camera, a search engine cannot figure out that this is a video of a review and cannot make out what the details of the review are all about). So, if you are a big site that routinely figures in the top search results, then you can go in for the rich media content to a much larger degree, but if you are a smaller site, then if you decide to go in for increased rich media, make sure that you are not betting your entire strategy on these rich media. Visit the site using a browser that is configured like a search engine crawler, and you will realize that search engines will almost totally ignore such rich media. If you do want to have these rich media, then there should be enough text based content to satisfy the search engines, as well as enough title text on these rich media so that the search engines can understand what these rich media are all about.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 28 –Directory Submission and hiring somebody – Points to be aware of (contd..)

ashish — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:11:26 +0000

In the previous post (Directory Submission – Some points), I had talked about optimizing the Directory Submission process, including how to ensure that you are submitting only to high value directories, and start looking at manual directory submission rather than using software for the same.
In this post, I will be discussing more about hiring somebody to do the directory submission. When you start spending money on directory submission, you need to make sure that you are getting somebody who knows how to get the best value for you. One alternative that is always available is for you to do the directory submission yourself, but this is not free either. You would need to identify the right directories to submit, spend the time and effort required for the directory submission, and then monitor back about the success of the directory submission. If you are hiring somebody, then here is a checklist that that you should have handy:
- There is an option of manual directory submission vs. the software based directory submission. Over a period of time, it is becoming more obvious that search engines are able to differentiate between automated directory submission and manual submission, and prefer manual submission (where a human being does the actual directory submission, for each directory)
- Don’t go simply by price. Take the effort to find out the past successes of the firm offering the directory submission, and then decide whether the price for the firm or person who meets your requirement is a price you are willing to pay
- Many firms will quote submissions to 200 / 500 / 1000 / 2000 directories. Again, don’t go by sheer numbers, identify the directories to which they are submitting, and compare that to a core list of directories to which you would desire to submit your site. When people talk of 2000 directories, many of them are duds with no value, and you would be wasting time by submitting to such directories.
- Identify whether the submission service would be willing to submit different sets of keywords, description and tags to different directories
- Check whether the submission service will provide you a running list of directories to which they have submitted your site along with the status of these submissions (this is critical as sometimes, the directories could reject the submission for something minor and you would want your site re-submitted after taking care of the error)
- You would want a directory submission service that is able to provide you the ability to submit to only those directories within a specific PR range (even if they are a bit more expensive), since these are the links you would treasure highly
- With regard to the PageRank of specific directories, remember that the individual category pages of such directories (where your site would be placed) may be ranked much lower than the PR of the directory itself, so consider the claim of posting to high PR rank directories with a pinch of salt; the submission service may be technically right, but you may not be getting what you thought you were getting

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 23 – Understanding the robots.txt file

ashish — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:44:55 +0000

In the previous post (All about Crawler), there were a lot of details about what a search engine crawler is, what it looks for, and why you must welcome this crawler to your site. Well, let us move further in this regard, and understand what a robots.txt file is, and what it has to do with search engines and the crawler.

What is a robots.txt file ?

Well, a robots.txt file is actually not about those robots you read in science fiction, instead it deals with those script robots / bots that you read about in the previous post. As per the search engine crawler protocol, a robots.txt file is a file that you put on the directories of your site with instructions on how you want your site to be read by the bots (and not all the search engine crawlers obey it, but the major ones do). It is a very simple text file that you can create in Notepad (or any other text editor, so if you are a vi fanatic, then use that by all means). You can use this text file to even ask the bots to prevent certain sections of your site from being copied, which means that those sections of the site will not be visible in search engines (and why would you want this to happen ? Well, one example is when you use this set of instructions to prevent duplicate reading of your site, so for example, the you want all the archive section of your site to be read, but not other paths to the same parts of your site (to prevent the duplicate content penalty), then this is a good way to do this (and the All-In-One SEO Plugin does indeed do that)).

Some scenarios in which you want to use the robots.txt file

- It is a matter of good protocol to have a robots.txt file since search engines expect these files to be there (but this is not a necessary condition)
- If you are in the habit of building different doorway pages of a site, with customized versions of the doorway page for each search engine or platform (a different doorway page for the iPhone, for example), then you would want to customize the search engines entry into these doorways (for example, if the Google search bot found its way to all off these doorway pages, they might consider you to be trying to hoodwink users). Alert: Doorway pages are now under alerts by search engines and you should consider your policies and intent in this area carefully.
- if your page has many sections that are still under construction, then you would not want the search engines to crawl and show these not-ready sections of the site. In such cases, you can prevent the spiders from reading the site and showing the result in search engines
- There are some sections of your site that are meant for individual persons, and you are not really interested in making them available for wider reading. Other people can access these if they go through the whole structure of your site, but there is no reason to show the results in a search engine result.
- You have created a print friendly version of your articles, but really don’t want search engines to go there (to avoid the duplicate content penalty and also to prevent users from directly accessing the print friendly versions). So you can enforce this in the robots.txt file.
- Keep the robots away from such content as has no value for the bots, such as directories with flash content, with JavaScript, and so on.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 22 – Understanding the search engines crawler

ashish — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:59:35 +0000

In quite a few posts on this site, I have mentioned terms such as search engine crawler, bot, etc. Many readers who are somewhat new in this field will not know what these terms means, and why they are important to you. So, a simple description of how search engines operate, and what do these crawlers do. When you enter a term in a search engine, it does not go searching off into the internet to find what you want, instead the search looks at a huge database owned by the search engine company and finds the relevant search terms. To make it even more clear, your site needs to be in this index, else you can forget getting visitors from search engines. So, how do the search engines create this index, and how does your site end up in this index ? Well, this is achieved through what are called search engines bots or crawlers, or robots. No matter what the term, these are automatic scripts whose primary function is to crawl through the internet, using the links present on web pages, and keep on making a copy of all the content that they find. These are very simple scripts, which really do not have the intelligence to be able to process Javascript, or images, or any other complicated stuff used on sites. Consider the experience as similar to using a text browser on your site, and then reviewing how your site looks on this text browser.
You can actually try this, look for a browser called Lynx (Wikipedia) and view your site on it. You will find that all your complicated JavaScript / DHTML / Flash based navigation is unrecognized by this browser, and it can get stuck. Similarly, if your site does not have easy ways of finding all the posts you have done (such as a sitemap or a simple navigation method), then many of those will not get indexed, and can prevent search engines from finding such posts and making them available to search engines.
So, this is one simple lesson. You need to make sure that whatever nice jazzy stuff you show to your viewers, you should have a way to let the search engine crawlers easy access to all your site, including setting up robots.txt file properly. Further, since the search engine crawler makes it way across the internet using links, you should be linked from other sites, and you should also be linking to many relevant sites.
Once the content is available in the search engines, they rank these based on extremely secret algorithms that constantly evolve. This search engine ranking is what determines how many people visit your site from search engine results, and also means that you need to be constantly at work to ensure that the search engines rate your site high, and any changes in how they use their ranking logic (including frowning on many practices) should be incorporated in your techniques.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 21 – How to select the right SEO consultant

ashish — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:20:27 +0000

By now, you would have learnt that Search Engine Optimization is one of the most critical items to ensure that your site / blog is popular, and there are a number of techniques and optimizations that you can do to increase the page ranking of your site (as well as some of the items you should avoid). However, many of you would have also learnt that it is not easy to do all this, with the techniques that are relevant getting modified over a period of time (and some of them turning negative over a period – as an example, earlier it made sense to pack your site with keywords, but doing so now can get your site penalized by Google and other search engines). Hence, it is fairly easy to rely on professionals to do this for you, and this is where SEO consultants come in – these are people or companies that promise to ensure that your site can do wonders in terms of increase in search engine rankings and in turn, some of them can be fairly expensive. However, hiring SEO consultants can do wonders for your site, subject to certain conditions and checks:
- Before you start hiring a consultant, do some research on your own, in terms of where your website ranks as opposed to your competitors
- Determine the keywords you want to rank for, find out where your website stands in terms of ranking for such keywords, and where your competitor stands for. Explore alternative keywords that are less sought after, but are still good enough to draw traffic
- Do a search for various companies and individuals who are involved in the business of SEO consultancy, including reading about their success stories and projects that they have worked on
- Talk to the company or individual and find out about their success stories, including whether they have managed to get their own SEO site listed in top ranks of Google. If they quote sites as as part of their success stories, then check for the ranking of those sites
- Ask the experts for the steps and processes they will take to promote your site, and find out whether they will be following White Hat strategies, or dubious strategies. Be very wary of experts who promise to bring your site to the front page results within a matter of weeks
- If a consultant or company claims that they will submit to thousands of directories and link farms, find out more. Many link farms are not rated well by search engines, and you can suffer if you are listed by such search engines
- Evaluate the performance of the consultant, and set out goals. Also talk to multiple consultants in terms of defining a possible time based strategy and result matrix before selecting one of them