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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 10 – Evaluating and finding keywords

ashish — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:03:38 +0000

The previous post (Identify more Keywords) talked about how to identify the relevant keyword phrases for your site, including using some tools to identify alternate keywords.
This post will have more information on the topic of finding relevant keywords, and deciding the keywords to use. Consider the alternate keyword phrases to be synonyms, since it is true that not every user will use the same keyword while doing search, and it is very effective for your site if you are also able to rank high on synonyms. So, continuing with the camera example from earlier posts, you would like to have rankings for keywords such as ‘buy cameras’, ‘digital cameras’, but would you also consider some other keyword phrases such as ‘purchase camera’, ‘buy old camera’, ‘compact camera’, etc. These are all slightly different versions of the same keyword, and show up when you use tools to find alternate keywords.
In some cases, you should even consider using keywords that are a bit niche, in the sense that they are not searched for by a large number of users; the disadvantage is that a lesser number of people search for those, and the advantage is that your competitors will not be attacking those keywords with so much passion as they would be for ranking the more searched keywords. Having some keywords that are niche does not harm you in any way, since even with a lesser number of searchers, you can still get enough visitors to make it work your while. In fact, if a user searches for a specific keyword, it is more likely that he is actually interested and will click through to maybe even click on an ad or purchase something from your site.
What else helps you in determining which keywords to use ? Well, if you are running some sort of advertisements (such as Adsense by Google) on your page, then it is likely that you will be interested in knowing whether different keywords can result in different revenues for your ad clicks. And you should not be surprised by what your discover – different keyword do in fact have different rates assigned to them, and since you are in the business of making money, if by small changes in the keywords, you can earn substantially more money from your ad clicks, why not learn more about this ? If you use the Google Adwords tool (located at this link), you can enter your desired keywords, and then in the place where it says “Choose Columns to Display”, select ‘Estimated Average CPC’, and you will start to see which keywords are rated higher.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 9 – Tools for keywords

ashish — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:32:32 +0000

For the first time since I began this series about Search Engine Optimization, I started talking about keywords and their importance in the previous post (Keywords and SEO), with the post explaining what keywords and key phrases are, and what are some of the ways in which you should put yourself in your readers shoes to figure out keywords / key phrases to use.
In this post, I will get deeper into the use of keywords and key phrases, where all to use them, and how this impacts your Search Engine Ranking. There are multiple places you can put your keywords / key phrases, but putting them in your meta tags is not going to get your much benefit (by all means, put them, but make judicious use of them). More important is learning as to where all putting them can benefit you.
The most important of course (and as has mentioned previously) is to have a good keyword density in the content of your article. Going by the example of the camera in the previous post, let us consider the case where a person makes a website that tries to sell cameras and camera equipment (and this can be a challenging area since the number of sites selling the same stuff are pretty large). Ideal would be to high rankings for the keyword ‘camera’, but this is going to be very difficult since this is a very hotly contested keyword and the number of people trying to rank high (and making sustained efforts to achieve that) is pretty large. It is better to also look for multiple work keywords (or keyword phrases) that people would use to search for. So, you would want to select keyword phrases such as ‘Canon Camera’, ‘Sony Camera’, ‘Nikon Camera’, ‘Digital Camera’, ‘Cheap Camera’, and so on.
One way to identify more keywords that you can use, as well as identify the number of times those keywords are searched is through the use of tools. They also give you a reality check, since you may think that the keywords you are using and focusing on are the one that your potential readers will want to also search on, but it is best to verify this through some keyword suggestion tools. You can refer to your site, or just give a few keywords, and the 3 tools (and there are a large number of other tools available for the same) will identify the alternate keywords and the number of times those have been searched by (in one case, I was very surprised, since it seemed to me that I was writing about the wrong specialty, since most potential users were searching for a slightly different set of keywords). So, here goes:
2 tools by Google and 1 other tool:
Google Adwords Keyword tool (link)
Google Search-based keyword tool (link), allows you to refer to your site as well, and is based on actual Google search queries; very useful for those with an Adwords account, although useful to other people as well
FREE keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker (link)
Go ahead, give these tools a whirl, and you might find that some of the keywords that you thought are very relevant indeed are, while others are not so important.

Next post, we continue on the topic of keywords..

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Using the TwitterCounter to showcase your visitors

ashish — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:13:02 +0000

Twitter is a pretty powerful social networking tool, that allows users to quickly get updates when you make a post. If you are writing a blog, and have good, rich content, using Twitter is pretty important to gain readers. There are a huge number of readers out there, and if you are writing content that is rich, and useful to readers, then there is no reason why you cannot increase the number of Twitter readers you have out there. As recently as the controversial election in Iran from several months back, Twitter was one of the tools that was used to spread awareness and communicate information between users.
There are numerous tools that allow you to quickly post your updates to Twitter whenever you post to your blog, and the one I use is called “TwitterFeed“. However, this post is not about how to post your updates to your Twitter account, instead it is more about show-casing your Twitter followers on your account. Suppose you have readers who are following your posts on Twitter, would it not make sense to showcase these followers on your blog itself. If you have a number of Twitter followers, it increases the chances that more people would consider your tweets worthy of following and add themselves on as subscribers. Further, the widget + site also provide statistics such as the number of followers over a period of time, the number of tweets your followers have made, and so on.
How can you do this ? Well, there is a site called Twittercounter that provides a widget that allows you to do this. How do you do this ?
1. Go to the following site (link)
2. Click on the “Generate your widget code” tab on the site
3. Add the details such as your twitter name, the size and color of the counter you want, the width, and so on.
4. You will be able to see a preview, and code will be generated that you need to add in your site.
This will provide you a widget that will show you the followers to your Twitter account.
Why not try it – you will see an increase in the number of Twitter followers.

Using Yahoo! YSlow to analyze web pages for performance (and more tips)

ashish — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:18:22 +0000

Improving the speed of your pages is normally pretty critical. If your pages are slow to load, then people quickly switch over, and even viewers who find the information on your pages useful tend to hesitate to come to your page more often; as for casual viewers, you can be pretty sure that they will switch fast if they find your page taking a lot of time to load.
You can take a number of steps to improve the performance of your page, but before that, you should be spending time to determine how the performance of your page actually is. You can get some idea just by loading your page and comparing the loading times of other pages, and there are a number of other tools that can help you determine the performance of your page. Many of these tools also help in giving you more details about which sections of your page cause overall bad performance.
One tool that can help you evaluate the performance of your sites is called Yahoo! YSlow (link to page):
Details about the tool are below.
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.
Details about performance optimization at Yahoo Developer Tools (link)

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.
Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.

The article above (link) contains a lot of details about how to increase performance, so make sure that you have read the page and evaluated which of these apply to you.

WordPress security tips (part 5) – Plugins to secure your blog

ashish — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:14:29 +0000

There is a huge amount of information available on the internet for helping to secure your WordPress blogs, including using plugins that have been shared by helpful people. What is required is for you to be vigilant, read up current WordPress security issues, and keep your blog updated to the latest WordPress version.

Limit Login Attempts Plugin:
Wordpress currently allows anybody to attempt trying to login multiple number of times, and this can be seen as a problem in terms of security. Major ecommerce, banking and other such sites have restrictions that accounts get locked if people try to use a wrong combination of account ID and password, and this is very useful since it prevents people from trying to do a brute force attack. However, with WordPress not having such a restriction, it becomes difficult to prevent this type of attack if somebody is trying to attack you. However, there is a Plugin that allows you to restrict the number of login attempts. This is the “Limit Login Attempts” plugin available at this location (link).

Features
- Limit the number of retry attempts when logging in (for each IP). Fully customizable
- (WordPress 2.7+) Limit the number of attempts to log in using auth cookies in same way
- Informs user about remaining retries or lockout time on login page
- Optional logging, optional email notification
- Handles server behind reverse proxy

Semisecure Login Reimagined Plugin:
This plugin needs JavaScript to work, and if JavaScript is enabled, it will encrypt the password from the client end before it is sent to the server, and is then decrypted at the server end. If no JavaScript, then the password is sent in clear text. Available on this site (link)

Is this really secure?
Short answer: No, but it’s better than nothing.
Without SSL, you’re going to be susceptible to replay attacks/session hijacking no matter what. What this means is that if someone is able to guess or learn the session ID of a logged-in user (which would be trivial to do in an unprotected wireless network), then essentially they could do anything to your WordPress site by masquerading as that user. The point of this is to prevent your password from being transmitted in the “clear.” If someone is in a position where they can learn your session ID, under normal circumstances, they’d also be able to learn your password. The proper use of this plugin removes that possibility.