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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 14 – The advantage of links

ashish — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:14:30 +0000

In the previous post (Don’t over do SEO), I focused on what are some of the things you should avoid doing if you are focusing on SEO. Some of those include not stuffing too many keywords, avoid SEO consultants who use black hat techniques, and so on.
This post will focus on the power of links. What are links ? Links are the connection between sites, such as when a site refers another site by using the URL of the other site. Seems a fairly simple practise, and why should this affect your site. Well, trust me when I say that for search engines, having some good links pointing to your site is a very important part of your strategy. To explain further, if multiple sites refer to your site, then it is beneficial to you. So far so good, right ?
Is it that simple ? Well, there are a great many factors that go into the benefits of having links, but some of the important factors are:
- Linking is used as a method to indicate that other people trust you, and the more links you have, the more your content can seem to be trusted; it acts like a vote that other people have reposed in your site
- For Google specifically, if a site with a higher Page Rank links to your site, then the benefit is greater. Since a site with a high Page Rank has some amount of credibility with Google, it’s linking to you means that there are some benefits that flow to you. For example, if a popular site such as cnn.com or nytimes.com or similar links to you, those are very valuable links.
- If your site is linked by many sites, it makes it easier for the search engine crawlers to find your site
- This one is not totally a SEO tip, but still very beneficial. If you are linked by other sites, then a user from those sites has a much higher chance to come to your site once they have finished reading whatever they wanted from those sites
- The reverse also works. Google and other search engines are pretty much aware of various schemes such as purchasing links, participation in link rings and ring farms, and so on, and frown on such techniques to game their search rankings. It is very much possible that if you are trying such methods to optimize your search engine ranking, you are basing your strategy on much older information, and this could actually harm your rankings
- The exact algorithm about which strategy for buildings links (commercial, higher rank, link exchange programs and similar schemes) works depends on search engines, one strategy for one search engine may fail in another search engine
- Links are much more beneficial if the remote sites that link to your site use your keywords as the anchor text for the link. For example, if you have a site about cameras, then it is far better to have a link on the other site such ‘for more information about cameras, click her’ rather than ‘click this link for external site’

In short, links are very beneficial to you, and the more you have from reputed sources, the better.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 13 – Steps to avoid for SEO

ashish — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:06:03 +0000

In the previous post (where to put keywords in the post), I wrote about where keywords need to be included in the post, including the title, the headings, near images, and so on.
In this post, let us take a negative point. Sometimes people go overboard in trying to influence their search engine rankings, and end up making changes that have a negative effect. As I have said earlier, search engines look for posts that are relevant to their users, and if there is a page that has characteristics such as over-stuffed with keywords or keywords phrases, then these are really not liked by search engines and they can even penalize such sites by reducing their position in the rankings. In extreme cases, search engines can even remove such sites from their index altogether, and such a situation can be a death knell for a site in terms of the number of visitors that come to a site.
There are also sites that resort to techniques known as ‘black hat’ techniques for SEO optimization; consider that search engines also have skilled people dedicated to learning about techniques that people use to try to game the search engine, and when these cross a certain line, the search engines start reacting. Some of the techniques that can cause an adverse reaction from search engines are:
- Keyword stuffing. In previous posts, I have emphasized the fact that keywords should be used in the content to between 5-7%, not more. Beyond this, the text becomes unwieldy, and search engines react negatively. Write your text in a way that it makes sense to your readers, making sure that keywords are there in the content
- Duplicate content. Duplicate content, especially when search engines are able to determine that the content is duplicate and meant to try to increase occurrences in the search engine results, can result in the search engines lowering the ranking
- Sites that link to you can increase your chances of getting higher in search results, especially in the cases when the site ranking to you is highly ranked; however, if your site seems to be linked from link farms, or from sites that charge for linking, or other such unnatural linking, then this can count negatively against you. Of course, you cannot stop a site from linking to you, but search engines such as Google have addresses of link farms and other commercial linking networks, and your site appearing on them is not a positive sign
- Using techniques such as leading search engines to one page optimized for them, and normal users to other pages is not recommended at all, and can again cause problems to your site
- Using text in the same color as background, repeating keywords at the bottom of the post, and other similar techniques may have worked a long time back, but now serve to have a negative reaction

If you use an external consultant to provide you SEO services, then remember, it is your site that is getting evaluated by the search engines, so make sure that you have some knowledge of search engine optimization techniques, learn about what your SEO expert will do, and ensure that they do not use Black Hat techniques.

Protect your Blogger post – Use Tracer to add your own link back to the copied content

ashish — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:56:18 +0000

It remains difficult to protect your content. You can take measures such as adding a Javascript that will prevent people from being able to right-click, or which will prevent people from being able to select content from your blog, but there are ways around that. Such controls do prevent some people from being able to take your content, but there will be people who are more technologically competent, and they will be able to beat your controls.
The method to be used is to detect when somebody is stealing your content, and then confront that person. The main point in this approach is to find out when somebody is stealing your content through the use of tools such as Google Alert, through some smart searching through using Google, and through some other plugins. However, if you have a blog on Google’s Blogger interface, it will get more difficult to use such measures. One such tool however that you can use is called Tracer, and can be downloaded from this link.
The way that this tool works is that you can set it up on your Blogger blog through a HTML/Javascript gadget, and then the tool will add a back link to your site when somebody selects content from your site and copies it. There will be always some people who will notice the back link, but for those where a tool is used to copy, or when somebody is not careful enough, the back link will let you easily detect when somebody has copied content from your site.

Have a Blogger account: Protect yourself from comment spam

ashish — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:57:14 +0000

Worpdress is a blogging platform that provides you the ability to extend its functionality through the use of its plugin. So, if you have a WordPress blog and want to fight the plague of comment spam, there are a number of plugins that you can use for this purpose. There is Akismet, Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, and other such plugins that give you the ability to block comment spam.
However, if you have a blog on Google’s Blogger platform, the ability to have such plugins is lost. There are widgets that allow extension of abilities, but the amount of flexibility you can get is reduced. For fighting Comment Spam on a Blogger blog, you need to look at the tools that Blogger itself provide. These are the following:
Controlling who can add comments: You can set such a policy on by Logging into the Blogger Dashboard, then going to Settings -> Comment, where you can select multiple options. You can select from the following:
1. Anyone – includes Anonymous Users
2. Registered Users – includes OpenID
3. Users with Google Accounts
4. Only members of this blog
These settings help control who all can comment on your blog. So if you feel that you are getting too many spam or junk comments on your blog, you can select that only Registered Users, or users with Google Accounts or even only Members of the Blog can add comments.

Further, you can even select to have comment moderation on your blogs by setting that option in the same page. You need to enter your email address, and then you can get an email whenever a new comment has been added to your blog.

Finally, you can enable a Captcha (also known as word verification)

WordPress Plugin: Using bad behaviour plugin to stop spam

ashish — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:16:38 +0000

As your blog becomes popular, one problem that seems to cause a lot of concern is comment spam. You must have seen them, comments with long lists of URL’s that advertise items that you would rather do not appear on your blog, or medicines that you are not interested in buying, or other similar comments that have no relation to your blog. What do you do ? You search for some way to stop these spam. Akismet is one option, but even with Akismet, you get a lot of spam that needs to be cleared out regularly. Once I missed out clearing the comment spam from Akismet for several weeks, and when the auto-cleaning for Akismet happened with around 20,000 such spam comments, it created a performance hit on my shared server (and the steps I had to take after that are not something you want to repeat on your own blog – I had to get my account re-activated).
Read (and download) the plugin at this location (link)
Bad Behavior prevents the spam from even making its way onto your server or blog, thus ensuring that you do not have to fish among all the comments filtered by Akismet to search for genuine comments. From the site:

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
Bad Behavior also transcends other link spam solutions by working in a completely different, unique way. Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behavior can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.