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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 1

ashish — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:54:37 +0000

What is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is called ? And more important, is this another Three Letter Acronym, or is this something important that you should know about ?
Well, Search Engine Optimization is important for everybody who wants more visitors to their site / blog through search engines, and given that for a large number of blogs, their visitors come through search engines, it makes a lot of sense to try and ensure that your blog comes up high in search engine rankings. You would have heard of people stuffing their site with keywords, with meta tags, using keywords in their page with the same color as the background so that they rank higher, and so on. Well, if you were upto date with SEO techniques, you would have learnt that many of these are liable to get you penalized rather than promoted in search engine rankings. After all, as a technique to game a search engine ranking becomes widely known, the engineers at the Search Engine stop the utilization of that technique, and in many cases, consider the sites using them to be unfairly trying to game the search engines and penalize them. Search engines get their credibility based on the accuracy of their search results, and look upon the misuse of such techniques pretty unfavorably.
If all this is true, then how does Search Engine Optimization work ? Well, the fact is that the operative word is “unfairly”; there are a number of techniques that are pretty okay by search engines and which a lot of site creators do not know enough about in terms of optimizations. So, for example if you have a site that has is linked to by other sites, search engines consider that a good think. But wait, if you go out and buy such links and these links are coming from places that search engines (such as Google or Yahoo search) know have low credibility, such links can hurt you.
What does all this mean ? Well, all this means that you need to be more attentive to the ongoing study of Search Engine Optimization, about what things work, and what things do not. In the next many posts, I will be laying out some of the techniques used (primarily with respect to blogs built on either WordPress or Blogger, but some of the techniques will be relevant to other blogs as well).
As a parting shot, here is something that is a quick solution, and works for a large number of blogs (but not for the Blogger platform). It is a tool called “All in One SEO Pack”, and can be found on this page (link).
Here are some details from the page:

Some features:
Advanced Canonical URLs
Fine tune Page Navigational Links
Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
Nonce Security
Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
Generates META tags automatically
Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs

Quick Security Checklist for Webmasters – from the Google Blog

ashish — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:54:25 +0000

For many people, getting content onto a web page is the most important part of developing traffic and ensuring that you increase the chances of earning revenue. However, consider that you need to ensure that your page remains on the internet, and does not get hacked, something that is happening with a higher frequency nowadays. But what can do you ? Well, you can find out more, learn about the steps you can take to increase the security level of your site, and you can read the information at this Google Help Page (link to article)

Check your server configuration.
Stay up-to-date with the latest software updates and patches.
Regularly keep an eye on your log files.
Check your site for common vulnerabilities.
Be wary of third-party content providers.
Try a Google site: search to see what’s indexed.
Use Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Use secure protocols.

What to do if your site is hacked and Google penalizes your site

ashish — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:32:13 +0000

Sites getting hacked is not something that is so rare nowadays. You have a good site that is getting more viewers, but have not kept your site (maybe built in WordPress) totally safe in terms of frequent updates, security patches, and so on, and you find that your site behaves a bit strange. However, once this happens, a lot of bad karma happens to your site
- It could have bad software loaded that infects viewers computers, and now browsers are quick to catch that and warn users, and there go your page views down to 0
- You have some small changes in the page that are not fully visible, but these are picked up by the Google crawler (some porn words, or links) and these in turn reduce your Adsense earnings and reduce your site viewers; in addition, some sites may flag your page as ‘adult’, thus ensuring that your viewers go down
What do you do in these cases ? Well, Google (and other search engines) would have a list of things you can do after something like this has happened. In the case of Google, here is the relevant page (link to article)

1. Getting your site off-line:
Take your site off-line temporarily, at least until you know you’ve fixed things.
If you can’t take it off-line, return a 503 status code to prevent it from being crawled.
In the Webmaster Tools, use the URL removal tool to remove any hacked pages or URLs from search results that may have been added. This will prevent the hacked pages from being served to users
2. Damage Assessment
3. Recovery
4. Restoring your online presence

Read the full article if you are in the position of having had your blog hacked.

Why your site may not be appearing high in Google Search – some tips from the Google blog

ashish — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:10:00 +0000

A site needs to appear high in Google Search in order to generate a high number of visitors. In fact, a number of onliness businesses consider visitors from Search Engines (particularly Google) as a significant source of their visitors, and consequently, of the revenue that they will make. Getting your site high on Search Engine Ranking is a big quest, and needs considerable work and effort. Paying some expert on Search Engine Optimization is something that you should really consider on priority, and at the same time, also try to figure out whether you will benefit by reading any of the guidelines on this Google Help page (link to article). This site talks about problems that the Google crawler may be having with your site:

Is your server treating Googlebot like a normal visitor?
Does your website have systematically broken links somewhere?
Is your website redirecting some users elsewhere?
Is your server unreachable when we try to crawl?
Has your website been hacked?

For example, if your website has been hacked, then the recommendation is to make sure that you clean your site, and plenty more information. You also learn some tips about how to detect if your site has indeed been hacked, and this can greatly help if you this is indeed the case.

How to plan for a trip when you are used to writing a blog post every day

ashish — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:30:39 +0000

Most people recognize that to increase the number of users coming to your system, and being sticky in the sense of keeping your subscribes as regular readers, you need to ensure that you are providing regular content that is rich and somewhat unique (that you are a presenting your own opinion, not simply copying something from somewhere). One approach that seems to work is that you provide content on a daily basis. This approach ensures that you readers get something to read every day, and works well for many publishers. Doing a daily update also ensures that search engine bots come to your site on a daily basis, and also increases your rank in Search Engines.
However, not all of us can spend 365 days in a year near your computer, sending out updates and post. You do need to plan for days when you will not have access to a computer, or are otherwise indisposed (you could be enjoying some travel with all the money you make blogging, as an example), but you need to ensure that you still churn out those regular daily posts that your readers have got used to. Well, you can do all this by scheduling your posts for the future (and you can do this whether your blog is on WordPress or on Google’s Blogger).
What you need to do is to plan for the number of days that you are going to be gone, and have that much extra posts written up, make sure that they are all in draft status, and then you should setup them for future publishing. Refer to these 2 articles (for WordPress and for Blogger).