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SEO Tips: Part 36 – Optimizing Post Title for Search Engines

ashish — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:46:39 +0000

In this post, we talk about how the Title of the Post is something that needs a lot of careful attention. Till the time that I learnt how to be effective about the title of a post, I used to use large post titles, something that I learnt could be a waste of effort, and in some cases, could cause a penalty from the search engines (related to keyword stuffing). Let me provide an example from this post itself. If I was using my previous process of defining the title of a post, the post would have the following title “Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 36 – Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. I used to think that the more descriptive a post title along with keywords in it, the better would the reception in the search engines. And I knew about keyword stuffing, and how search engines are using penalties for such stuffing rather than getting the user the benefit that they expect.
So, what is it about the title of a post ?
Well, most search engines look only at the first 60 characters of the title of a post, and ignore whatever comes after that. So if you consider the alternative lengthy title that was there in the previous paragraph, the search engines would have ignored the actual title of the post, which came near the end “Ensuring the post title is optimized for Search Engines”. Instead, the first part of the title, dealing with Optimization Tips and Tricks would have been used by the search engines, and we know how hotly contested those keywords are. Instead, by changing the post title, it is more likely that users searching specifically for why the post title is important for SEO would find your post, and they would also find the content valuable.
Next, if you look at the earlier proposed title, it contains the keywords ‘Search Engine’ 3 times. This is an absolute no-no, since search engines are getting much more efficient about penalizing sites that seem to do keyword stuffing, and this case would have fallen right into that bracket. Why take that chance, especially when you are not likely to get any benefits from this. And then the title is so long that it would get wrapped in many instances, especially if people are looking up search results from mobile phones and tablets, and likely to make it more difficult to read. You want people to be quickly able to read the title of your post when the search engines display a long list of search results, so that it is more likely that they will come to your site.
So, if you want your post to have a higher chance of being picked up in search engine results and also being selected by users peering through a whole page of search results, learn how to optimize the title of your post. Trust me, it will be well worth it, especially since the effort required is very minimal.

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 25 – The importance and the need of Directory Submission

ashish — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:10:05 +0000

In the previous post (Need to have fresh content for SEO), we talked about the importance of having fresh content on a regular basis for your blog (and given that I suddenly got very busy, I had to break this rule and not post anything for 9 days). Anyhow, am back to regular posting.
This post and the next one will talk about Directory Submission, and its relevance to Search Engine Optimization. In previous posts, we have talked about getting inbound quality posts to your site making a huge difference to SEO. One way to do that used to be to buy links or go for link trading or go for link farms, but these sort of inbound links that are obviously not relevant / natural links are getting frowned up by search engines (although many people still believe by those concepts).
In such cases, one example of inbound links that are relevant and still relied upon by search engines are the public directories. These are lists of links categorized by the type of sites; so for example, if you have a site about software, a directory would list down the names and URL’s of sites (along with a brief description) that talk about software in its software section. It is these directories that over a period of time start developing Page Rank for these categories, and if you have your site listed in these categories, then it is very beneficial for your site. These directories in fact exist so that they can provide a number of relevant links to users, and in most cases welcome your efforts to add your site to their (as long as you have a valid and effective site) categories. And some directories are much more important than other directories. For example, DMOZ is a site that is used by many of the popular search engines as well, and getting your site in their is pretty useful. Another example is where this is this directory created by Guy Kawaski called alltop.com. Alltop.com has a Page Rank of 6, but its individual sub-categories also have a good PR. The Photography category, listed at http://photography.alltop.com/, has a PR of 5, and I have 3 of my blogs over there (‘5 Photo Tips‘, ‘Ashishs Photos‘, and ‘A lot of Photos, no touching up‘). Getting sites listed gets some good link love back to my sites, all the more so because these have been added after editing by a human editor, which makes the search engines depend on these directories even more so.
And there are many directories that are referred by other directories as well, so adding your sites to these directories will give you a lot of SEO benefits (and most of these links from the directories do not use the ‘nofollow’ tag which would prevent you from getting some of the link love).
One more advantage for getting listed in directories is if your sites have a lot of rich media content that search engines are not able to properly index and hence you do not get a benefit from search engines. However, when directories start listing your site, then you do end up with an advantage.
I will continue with this topic in the next post as well, since there is a lot to write about in this topic ..

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 24 – Making sure that you have fresh content on a regular basis

ashish — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:12:57 +0000

The previous post talked (Understanding the robots.txt file) about learning what the Robots.txt file is, and how you can use it to tweak the way that search engines index your site.
This post will move onto one important area that I have talked about briefly in other posts before (having regular content), but it is important enough that we talk about it again. So, here goes. What do we mean by regular content for your site ? We mean content that is fresh, is something that does not like it has been copied from a million other sites, and seems interesting to your users. When search engines find new content on your site on a regular basis, this results in an increased ranking of your site. However, this new content needs to be fresh, and not copied from other sites, since the search engines will not rank sites higher if the content is copied (and can actually penalize sites). For example, I had a site which was a content aggregator for my other sites, and apparently Google believed that the duplicate content on the site was actually an attempt to deceive the search engines, and had marked this aggregator site with a penalty. Even though I started adding new content to this site after this warning, Google still has not ranked this site with any kind of PageRank, and I believe that the site has some time to go before I can start getting some PageRank. This is an extreme case of the duplicate content penalty, but any site that seems to have willfully copied the content from other sites face such problems.
In addition, your readers would expect regular content on your site. People who subscribe to a site can be very fickle, so if you are irregular in terms of adding content, then expect many readers to move away from your site, and even people who subscribe to your site will not be sticky. I have found that as long as you have a regular pattern of new content, and your readers know this pattern, you will have readers who tend to be more sticky (and this is increased when you have content that is interesting to your users). I have also found that getting new content updated on a daily basis ensures that your content is updated very frequently, and search engine crawlers come visiting to your site frequently (which is important, since you do not want your content to show up on search engines with a lag).
If you are not able to generate the required amount of fresh content, then look for more ways to get such content. This can be through hiring people to generate this content, or trying to get people impressed by your content to write their own articles. Look for such options to generate more content for your site.

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.