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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

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 20 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:14:17 +0000

It’s been a few days since I was able to post the previous tip (How to build links) in the series, and in the meantime, I was approached by a regular reader as to what was the problem. I had gotten caught up in something (mixing up of 2 different businesses), but realized that I need to be regular in these posts (they also help me in terms of being a refresh of tips and techniques). So, here goes the latest post:
- Look for links from Government sites or other semi-official institutions such as Universities. Those are highly respected sites in terms of search engine rankings, and if you are able to get some link love from there, then it can work real good for you. One way of getting links from these places is through writing research reports, or writing articles on subjects that people post as references. For educational sites, search for user forums
- Use article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/ to post your articles too. You can find a good collection of such article sites on the internet where you can post your articles, and this will help you in getting some good links to your site
- Search for sites that syndicate news or articles, and become a regular writer to these sites. Many of them allow you to post information about your site; this helps in getting more link love
- Make sure that your Submit your site to many directories such as DMOZ, Alltop.com, etc. Some of these directories are very highly regarded by search engines. There are a huge number of directories out there, you need to search for the more highly regarded sites and post to them. There are tools that allow you to post to a number of directories, evaluate them, and use them if necessary.
- Use sites such as Del.icio.us for bookmarking your posts and Digg / Stumble It for posting your posts, so that there is a higher chance of people picking up these posts and linking to them
- Use Yahoo Answers – search for questions and try to give the best possible answers for queries in your area. People will slowly pick out the better answer as the best answer, and that should help you
- Search for business directories (including Yahoo directory) and try to get your site listed over there
- Write on forums related to your area with quality content, and post your site as your signature. Good answers on forum get picked up fast, including by search engines
- If you are writing about gadgets, or other stuff on Amazon.cm, then write reviews for these items and post links to your site / specific posts in them
- Don’t get scared with all the talk about link-swapping. If you avoid the large link farms, and instead focus on other blogs / sites that are small and focused, it can help in terms of getting some good incoming links.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 19 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:42:13 +0000

For the last couple of posts, I have been concentrating on strategies and processes on how to get more incoming links (build links for SEO), and it is worth a few posts to consider the possible strategies and techniques required to focus on getting more incoming links. Links are one of the most significant ways to get a higher search engine ranking. Here are some more techniques to move ahead on this:
- As part of link building strategies, there is not much focus on having internal link build strategies, you know, where you link to pages within your own site. However, research indicates that having a effective link strategy to your own pages helps in link love, and ensures that pages improve slightly in terms of ranking; this would mean that you would need to ensure that you can reach most pages in your site within a couple of links rather than having complicated linking strategies. This also means that if you have a cool JavaScript based internal page structure, you are worse off. In simple terms, the navigation system of a site should be easy and simple.
- Even if you do get links from external sites, it is becomes useful when such sites are recognized as valid sites in terms of linking; so such sites must seem like natural sites which are somewhat similar to what you are doing rather than unrelated sites that are obviously more of linking sites. Focusing on sites which are more of the former rather than obvious linking farm types of sites is much more useful
- There is nothing wrong in linking to sites that seem relevant to you and the subject that you are talking about. If you do link to external sites that are relevant, then it gives an indication of the validity of your site to search engines. In addition, when you link out unsolicited, and other webmasters see you linking to them, there is a high chance that they will link back to you. Hoarding your links does not earn you any benefits, neither does only trading links.
- Check out your the number of links that your competitor has, and then search for the higher value ranked site that links to your competitor (or if you don’t refer to other sites as competitors, consider other sites that offer content similar to yours) and start focusing on those sites to get links from.
- Keep in mind that link building process is a slow and gradual effort, and can take to achieve results. There is a temptation to try and take short cuts to get there faster, which means also using techniques that can cause problems, or to depend on consultants that can get you in problem with the major search engines.

Here is a Youtube video on Link building:

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 18 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:15:52 +0000

In the previous post (How to get links for SEO), I outlined some more steps to get good quality incoming links. Some of these may be something that you think that you can do, in other cases, you might be somewhat worried or embarrassed. For example, I know some people who are very embarrassed about the thought of writing lots of emails to other webmasters requesting for a link; for such people, it is important to keep in mind that getting links is one form of promotion and is also a marketing strategy. For any sort of marketing, even the most effective ones, people need to learn how to promote their own blogs and be not in the least bit afraid of doing useful steps if that means that promotion of their blogs happen.
- Look to find some experts in the field that you are writing about, and if you can get interviews or an explanation of their techniques, you will find more people linking back to your site. This may require some amount of persistence in getting these interviews or comments, but the result will be worth it.
- Court controversy. This is a controversial tip, and is more relevant if you are writing about some sort of news, reviews, or something where opinions can be strong. If you take strong views on a particular subject, especially if you are going against the majority opinion, then you will find a lot of people linking to you, even if these referred posts are critical of your viewpoint.
- Get in depth about the topics you write about. This is back to the viewpoint about writing posts that has a rich content, but this can be repeated again and again; if you do a lot of research about the topics you are writing about and come up with content that ir rich, you will find a number of people linking to you even without your needing to do anything about it. In fact, if you have a series of well written posts, then many people will start referring to you as a guru.
- Being quick on the take. This sort of tip is more useful for people who write about news related stuff. How many times have you seen blogs being referred to when a blog makes a scoop of some information that has not yet made it to the popular news – no need to answer, this happens many time. Conversely, If you write about a subject that has already been beaten to death, then you will not find many people even interested in this post, forget linking to your post.
- Encourage people to link to your post. In many cases, a large percentage of the people who think about linking to your posts don’t follow through for any reason (could be laziness, could be putting off the linking, and so on). What you need to do is to encourage people to link to your posts by proving a section at the end of the post (something like, if you like this post, why not link to this post -and create a small box where you provide the code to do this linking)
- Use Twitter and give an option to readers to re-tweet your posts. Once this happens, when people happen upon your posts, many of them will actually try to re-tweet your posts (when I say many of them, even 5% doing so is a good percentage); this in turn makes your post accessible to more people and increases the percentage of people who will link to your post.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 17 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:32:17 +0000

The previous post (Links for SEO) was an explanation about how to get incoming links for the purpose of SEO. However, this topic is too long to explain fully in one post, so this post will continue with the same topic, with more detail about how to get quality incoming links for SEO purposes.
- Search for quality directories and post your blog over there.
- Yahoo answers is a great initiative where you can earn quality incoming links. The idea of Yahoo Answers is that anybody can ask questions, and if you answer the question and it is judged to be a good answer, and the question itself is popular (and search engines also index the question and answer), then you can get some traffic coming your way
- Ask your friends and relatives (those who run sites and blogs) to link you; in this case, you should be able to get a high success rate
- Create a Facebook Page (How to create a Fan Page) and link up your blog posts to your Facebook Fan Page so that you can start getting Fans (and if you have good content, slowly you will start seeing an increase in the number of fans). On the Fan Page, provide a link to the Blog.
- Be active in forums and discussion boards related to the topic of your site. If your information is found useful and people value the updates your provide, then some of them will want to explore your site as well (make sure that your site is there in your signature) and many of them will also link to your site
- This one will take more effort, but many human edited directories ask for editors; become an editor and also take the chance to easily submit your own sites as well
- When you are writing a post that refers to another post of yours, then refer to that post using a link with keywords as the anchor text. You might think that an internal link does not matter, but you would be surprised.
- If you have multiple blogs and some of them are ranked higher, then you should have a link from these blogs to your other lower ranked blogs. Why not take advantage of some link love from your stable of blogs.
- If somebody has already linked to your site using some non-descriptive text such as ‘click here’ or something similar, request them to change this to something more descriptive – ideally supply them a short keyword rich phrase along with an already formatted link
- Keep on monitoring your logs to see which are the keywords that most people use to link to you, and then modify your posts that are on the same topic to become more keyword centric, and also focus on those keywords when requesting links from third parties
- Prepare newsletters and send them out on a regular basis to your subscribers, and at the end of the newsletter, ask people to link to your site if they feel that the newsletter was useful or informative to them
- If you are a product company that orders a lot of equipment from many vendors, then ensure that all of these vendors have provided a link to your site. Since you supply them business, most of them will indeed do that.
- Do a competitor search, and if you find sites linking to your competitors, then write to them requesting them to link to you as well. If you write politely, and if they don’t have any association with your competitor, many of them will honor your request.

As always, this post is getting about as long as I would like it to be .. so the next post will continue on the same line.