Social Media Ruling The Trend

Social media is the new buzz in SEO fraternity. Started as a platform to get connected and be social, the media is now extensively used by SEOs and Internet marketers to promote the websites and increase their online visibility.

Today, social media optimisation & marketing has become an integral part of Internet marketing and web promotion strategies.

SMO is also an excellent source to acquire theme based back links for any website. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social networking sites can bring loads of traffic to your website and are immensely useful resources to spread word of mouth publicity.

Social media is going to rule the Internet marketing industry in 2010 and we, as Internet marketing strategists, need to exploit its potential to extract the maximum benefit for the websites we promote.

Human Emotions and Landing Pages

I just came across a very good article talking about how human emotions motivate the online business. Of course we do not always think or act rationally. Many, if not all, of our decisions depend on our intuitions and emotions. After all we are all humans, aren’t we?

This fact that our actions are based on our fundamental emotional motivations has provided a new area of consideration to us (Internet Marketers) for building and optimising the landing pages. As defined by Direct marketers Bob Hacker and Axel Andersson, several key copywriting concepts that motivate people to act: fear, greed, guilt, exclusivity, anger, salvation, or flattery. Not one of these motivations is rational -- all of them are rooted in our fundamental and unchanging emotional nature.

So the next time you prepare an Internet marketing plan for a website, along with the robots, take human emotions also into consideration.

Do You Really Need SEO for Your Website?

I have often come across clients / companies, who are doubtful or rather a bit scared to implement SEO for their websites. They are concerned about the delayed results achieved by the process. (We SEOs know that search engine optimization is not a rocket science and it takes a lot of efforts and patience to see the sites ranking on top search pages. Don’t we?) But people who are unaware of the potential of SEO are always reluctant to adopt organic SEO for their websites. Rather, they are happy with the instant results obtained through PPC.

PPC is good. In fact, while preparing an integrated Internet marketing strategy for any project / website, I always consider PPC as a major point as it helps your online business going until your SEO gains momentum.

But, one should never ignore the fact that SEO can do wonders for any business. The latest data of Hitwise shows that the share of paid search traffic has declined by 26% in the past year as compared to other traffic sources. But this should not be taken as a drop in paid search traffic. Rather the opposite is true. In fact, organic search traffic has surpassed that of paid search and the slice of paid search share has become smaller.

So, what do you think now? Does your website really need SEO? Would you really like to lose that major chunk of traffic coming through organic search?

Just rethink……

Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?

This is a very fast moving world and the technology is evolving every moment. This is a techno era and to keep pace with the ever evolving technology, we need to keep pace with the changing time.

When we create a websites, we do the cross browser compatibility check. But how many of us (please note the %age) really check the mobile friendliness of our site? We are happy, if our site is compatible with multiple browsers. But have you ever thought about those users who access your website from their mobile phones? Today, when the whole world has become mobile and nothing is static, we can not afford to forget the importance of mobile browsing.

One more reason to make your website mobile friendly is that in countries like India, where internet penetration is low, mobile penetration is quite healthy at almost 300 million. Estimates show that the number of web-enabled phones outnumber the number of PC internet users in India.

So as a webmaster, if you want maximum exposure for your website, don’t forget to make your website mobile friendly.

Image Optimization Tips for Search Engines

With the increase in the impact of visual trends, importance of images on a website and image search has drastically increased. Image search can be defined as query results that are accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users' search queries.

In this post, I have listed few points which will help you to optimize your images for Search Engines and rank them in the image search.

1. Places the images where image search results appear, and are indexable into general Search Engines' contextual results, including:

• Major Search Engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
• Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki)
• Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook)

2. Take original photos, so that you can brand them with your trademark, logo or url. At business listing sites, add your business logo to creates a more significant effect on users’ mind.

3. Use good quality pictures and images, and make necessary resolution adjustments between full size images and thumbnails. Pictures with good contrast tend to work better.

4. Save your photos as JPG files, and other graphic images as GIFs.

5. Give appropriate file names to your images that match and represent the theme. Image names should be descriptive such as mobile-phone.jpg rather than untitled1.jpg.

6. Give appropriate alt tag and title tag to the images.

7. Use clear images as distorted images are not able to speak their agenda.

8. Images should be less weighted as heavy images increase page loading time and also use extra bandwidth.

9. Always specify the width and height of the images when you define an image on webpage. If you don’t mention the same then html parser itself need to consider the image size and it’ll take some extra time to think.

10. If content rich pages are embedded with pictures then they have more chances of ranking for those images and web pages. Such as if you’re providing services then add smiley faces of employees OR if you are selling products then include all products images on site. So add images on to content rich pages.

11. Add map image or link to map from site page. It increases your site usability.

12. On alt tag of map images, add physical address of your business.

13. You can also add testimonials from customers, celebrities’ snaps or award winning snapshots. This will create trust and attract more visitors.

14. Add your logo on press releases and link them to your home page.

15. While submitting your site to directories, add logo to your profile.

16. Upload images to Google Base.

17. Include images and logo into your newsletter (email marketing campaign) and get linked from them.

18. Get more links from clients, partners or B2B sites through images.

19. Use thumbnails (i.e. small size images) instead of large images and get the large images linked from those thumbnails. It will decrease the load time of your web page and also increase its usability.

20. Enable enhanced image search in Google webmaster tools in order to add valuable tag to your image in Google image Search Engine.

21. Link every image as hyperlinked images have much better chances of being included in image searches even if they are linking to themselves.

22. Bookmark your images using social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg etc.

23. Search Engines also look at the text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy so take care of the surrounding text and use related text near the images.

24. Do not exclude your graphic images directory from search robots or limit search engine access to graphic-image files.

25. Don’t use JavaScript code to show up the large size of the image. As search engines still can’t understand JavaScript code completely so never do this.


Image Search Engines:-

http://images.google.com/

http://www.live.com/?&scope=images

http://www.exalead.com/image/results?q=

http://www.pixsy.com/

http://www.picsearch.com/

http://www.altavista.com/image/

http://www.ithaki.net/images/

http://www.graphicsfactory.com/

http://www.ditto.com/

http://pro.corbis.com/

http://www.animationfactory.com/en/

http://www.faganfinder.com/img/ (Specifies all search engines, Stock photographs, graphics and clip-art, photo sharing sites and artwork related images sites)

http://images.search.yahoo.com/

http://www.ask.com/?#subject:img|pg:1

http://www.fastimagesearch.com/

www.fotosearch.com

www.webplaces.com/search

Unlock Online Success with Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the process of selecting the most appropriate keywords and phrases that can help your visitors to find your website. The keywords and phrases you select to promote your website play a vital role in the online marketing of your business. They can decide the fate of your internet marketing strategy and can make or break your listings in the Search Engine Result Pages. Since the aim of any Internet Marketing plan is not only getting high rankings but to be able to generate maximum business via web. Even sites that have excellent rankings will not benefit if those rankings are for unsuitable keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying the niche target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site.

Keyword research is the core of SEO campaign and is very much similar to customer research, because you are studying and looking for the words that your potential clients use while searching for your services or products on the Internet. While selecting the keywords and phrases for your website, remember to select search terms that describe your products and services in the most logical, simple and specific way. This will not only ensure higher traffic but also targeted traffic for your site. For any marketing strategy to succeed, it is critical to know your audience and the means to reach them. A certain focus is required which could be location specific, region specific or country specific; it could be business, trade, service, product specific, since we are talking specific audience.

Since keywords are the foundation of Internet Marketing plan for any website, so always consider tapping numerous resources to locate a variety of keywords. Identify the best keywords and phrases that are relevant to the products, services, or information you are promoting. Also focus on the phrases which have high searchability with low completion. I know this is a difficult task, but trust me, the efforts are worth it.

There are various keyword suggestion tools like Google keyword tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Digitalpoint which can be used to research the potential keywords.

LSI and Synonyms: Today, Search engines not only look for the exact keywords but also for their synonyms due to implementation of LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. You can learn more about Latent Semantic Indexing at my previous post.

To make use of LSI for online promotion of your website, use a thesaurus to find terms that are related to your primary keyword. You can visit some good websites like Webreference and Merriam-Webster to get your desired phrases.

So, the whole idea behind the concept of Keyword Research is traffic optimization and not traffic maximization. A good and effective Keyword Research helps in bringing qualified, targeted and focused traffic to your website that leads to a higher rate of sales conversion.

Related Posts:

http://e-marketing-strategies.blogspot.com/2008/06/5-most-effective-tips-on-keyword.html

Social Media Optimisation and Marketing

Just a quick recap of Social Media Optimisation and Marketing

SEO Copywriting

SEO copywriting as defined in Wikipedia is "A technique of writing on a web page in a way that it can be read and understand by the surfer and it also uses the keywords and keywords phrases targeted for the websites. The purpose of doing copywriting that is SEO centric is to rank highly in the search engines for the given targeted keywords and phrases."

It can also be explained as the technique of writing the text on a web page in such a way that it reads well for the surfer or the user, and also targets specific search terms. The challenge lies in creating a content that is both user as well as Search Engine friendly. The purpose of SEO copywriting or Search Engine copywriting is to make a web page that can rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms and also conveys the message to the surfers in an effective and easy to understand manner.

While optimizing the websites, I have come across many situations where you are provided with a readymade website with very little or no content at all with a long list of keywords that are not at all related to the theme or goal of the website. What worsens the situation is that you can not find a single page which talks or deals about the search phrase you are provided with.

Generally, the novice users or users new to the world of Internet fail to understand the actual process of web development and the relationship between website design and Search Engine Optimisation. According to these users, SEO is all about creation and placement of title and other meta tags with stuffing of keywords within the page content. But the fact is that the task of an SEO expert starts right from the designing phase where the potential keywords are identified before content development and deciding the page url.

Search Engines look for genuine and unique content on the web pages that should be related to the search terms and the keywords used in the title and other meta tags. The content on any page should not be misleading for the users and it should reflect the correct picture and idea behind creation of the page. This ensures that the users are getting exactly what they are expected to find on a particular page. Search Engines ensure this by matching the words present in the text of the webpage with that of the page title and meta tags. LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a technique which helps them to accomplish the task. In this technique, synonyms of the search terms or phrases are also taken into consideration while generating of SERPs.

The task begins right from the designing phase before content development. Thorough keyword research is required for all the individual pages. Once the keywords are identified according to the theme of the page, content is developed with strategic placement of the search terms or phrases within the text and other on page elements. Synonyms of the search terms are also used to maintain the LSI ratio.
The reverse approach can also be taken for content development. In this case, first the target key phrases are identified according to the business, website theme and goal, and then web pages are created that can represent the actual aim of the website.

The URL is or the filename is also decided based on the target keywords to give more emphasis to the potential search terms.

This helps the Search Engines to know that the page is actually about the keywords and the users are provided with the correct information.

SEO copywriting is one of the major factors which decide the ranking of any particular page in the SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages. So, it is always a good practice to do SEO copywriting while creating any website or page, so that it can rank well as well as provide genuine and useful information to the users.

Social Bookmarking

Social marking, as defined in Wikipedia, is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. It is very much different from simple Bookmarking where you save the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. Tagging or saving bookmarks to a public website has become very common now-a-days. Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Simpy etc. have become household names.

Social bookmarking dates back just a couple of years, when these sites just began operating. Social bookmarking is particularly useful when collecting a set of resources that are to be shared with others. Anyone can participate in social bookmarking. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you need to register with a social bookmarking site, where you can store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Visitors to these social bookmarking sites can easily search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

Social Bookmarking provides an entirely unique way to organize information and categorize your resources. You can assign also use social bookmarking as a networking tool to make social connections with other interested individuals. Tagging information resources with relevant keywords has the potential to change the way how we store and find information. Social bookmarking helps in simplifying the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers and other resources.

The Significance

Social bookmarking gives you the opportunity to express differing perspectives on any topic or information. This process also allows you to connect with like-minded individuals and create new communities also known as folksonomy.

Move Over Facebook and MySpace, Here Comes Google Friend Connect

As announced last weekend, Google is launching the mother of all data portability features. After Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Portability announcement, here comes Google beating the two social networks with its Google Friend Connect features.

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community. Basically, with Google Friend Connect service, any visitors to any type of sites can see, invite and interact with each other within the boundaries of that site or through secured APIs with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Plaxo and others.

Google Friend Connect is set to be activated later tonight at this URL http://www.google.com/friendconnect/. Until then, we will have to wait and see how nifty this service would be.

Via [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/move-over-facebook-and-myspace-here-comes-google-friend-connect/6889/]

Squidoo

Today, everyone is talking about Squidoo lenses. Although it is not new for the regular web surfers and Internet user, but thought it might be of interest for those who are new to this field or by any chance have not come to know about this site.

Squidoo is a website which was launched in October 2005 by Squidoo.com, LLC based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Squidoo is a platform that is designed to make it easy for anyone, free of cost, to set up a single page on any topic one knows or cares a lot about. In march 2006, Squidoo came out of beta testing.

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses --single pages that highlights one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. These lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, hobbies and sports, people or places, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Squidoo lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content. More emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content that is present on the web. Annotation, organization and personalization deliver context and meaning.

Users who create these lenses are called lens-masters. A lens-master uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to any blog or Flickr photos, eBay auctions, Google maps, YouTube videos, and or other links. Lens-masters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, products, expertise, causes, and opinions.

Squidoo splits its revenue with its "co-op" of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the website are donating their royalties to any of 65 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.

Squidoo was founded by author, speaker, and notable blogger Seth Godin. On Godin's founding team was his book editor Megan Casey, Fast Company employee Heath Row, Corey Brown, and Gil Hildebrand, Jr. According to Alexa, Squidoo's traffic has grown more than 40% monthly beginning in the spring of 2007. It is now in the top 500 of all websites tracked worldwide.

What's A Lens?

A Squidoo lens is one person's view on a topic that matters to the lens owner or simply lensmaster. A lens is an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to favorite links, RSS feeds, blogs, Flickr photos, Google maps, Amazon books or music etc. That way, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, these lenses get him started and send him off in the right direction.

Building lenses is fast, fun, easy and free. (And you could also earn a royalty from each one--for you or for charity).

Why One Should Build A Lens?

• To share the knowledge: When you know a lot about something, it feels good to share. You can help other people discover what you found out the hard way.
  


• To increase the profile: A popular lens gives credibility to the Lensmaster. A popular lens on Squidoo reinforces your role as an "everyday expert." which makes you the go-to authority for those looking for help.
  


• To increase the traffic: Your lens points (if you want it to) to your blog and to your website. Lenses have huge credibility with search engines, so your lens can help your other sites rise to the top of Google searches.
  


• To earn a royalty: for you, your organization, or your favorite charity.
  

Who Should Build A Lens?

You should, if you...

• have a Website and want to increase its online presence and want more ways for people to discover it. A lens is another signpost online that can point people your way.
  


• have a blog, a lens is a great way to highlight your best posts or to feature a commented version of your blogroll. You can also point to the products and services that you write about, read about, enjoy, or want to see succeed. A Squidoo lens will allow you and your blog to have a bigger share of the commentary and influence on your topic of choice.
  


• are a yo-yo expert, your lens could be nothing but links to tricks. You'd rank your favorite 100 tricks and point, one by one, to the best examples of those tricks on the Web. And maybe you'd point to Infinite Illusions, the online yo-yo store.
  


• are a nonprofit or charity (say, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) you could invite all 45,000 of your most important donors to build sites on their favorite topics. The invitation would set the default royalty cash flow to "Donate my royalties to JDRF." If each lens generated as little as $2 a day, that'd be a whole bunch of money earned for the charity. You'd also earn a bounty on every successful lensmaster you brought in.
  


• are a newshound, a lens allows you to highlight important mainstream and non-mainstream stories for your readers. And if you go on vacation, RSS feeds can automatically update your lens with select news stories.
  


• are a podcaster, you should definitely have a lens. It would list the details of your podcasts, point to transcripts that some fan had posted, point to your six most recent podcasts, and include the RSS for subscribing to the podcast. The lens would also have a set of links for getting started with podcasting and getting a podcast reader.
  


• are a fan, a lens lets you share your personal take on the object of your affections—without the grind of manual updates. Automatic feeds could add current sports scores and headlines, music news and iTune releases and more.
  
  
• are an author, your lens could include links to all your books on Amazon. You could include links to other authors you admire. And an RSS feed from a Technorati search, showing surfers the recent blogs that have mentioned you. And links to conferences where you're speaking, and perhaps a top-ten list of the best ways to understand your writing. You could even have a box pointing to your best (and worst?) reviews.
  
  
• are an entrepreneur, your lens on a popular topic could generate two or five or twenty dollars a day in clickthrough and affiliate income. Which doesn't sound like much, until you start thinking like an eBay PowerSeller and build twenty or even fifty lenses on a variety of topics. Did you know that 750,000 people make a full- or part-time living on eBay now? The same effect will probably happen with lenses.
  


• are a person (and you are), you should have a lens about...you. A lens that lists your blog and recent posts and your bio and work history and your Amazon wish list and your Flickr account and whatever you want the public to know about you. Would you hire someone if he or she didn't have a lens?
  

What's A Module?

Modules are the building blocks of lenses. A module makes it easy for a lensmaster to point to links, images, blogs or even things to buy. Some modules are curated (you enter all the links and content manually) and others are automatic (you configure the inputs and then the lens draws on RSS feeds to update your lens without any work from you). Similarly, some modules are commerce-oriented and others are just content based.

What's This About Earning Royalties?

It's simple. You make a lens. You recommend great stuff. Sometimes these you'll recommend a product from Amazon or eBay or CafePress or one of our hundreds of other commerce partners.

Since Squidoo is free to use, but have to run a few ads on your lens in order to keep our doors open. So you'll see a few Google ads and SquidOffers on your lens.

Now, since you're the brain behind the lens, you should get a cut! And better than a cut: you get HALF. That's right. Any time someone stops by your lens and buys a product you recommended or clicks on a Google ad, you get 50% of the royalties.

Some lensmasters are in it for the content and not the money. Maybe they earn $0.50 a month. More often than not, they select one of the 80+ nonprofit partners to donate these royalties to. Other lensmasters make lots of lenses, work hard, and earn thousands of dollars a year. Still other lensmasters are here to fundraise for charity, and group up to send thousands of dollars to their favorite organizations each month.

What's Squidspam?

Squidoo passionately believe that everyone deserves a voice online, and a free service for sharing and spreading recommendations, ideas, products and passions. Not just the gatekeepers. Not just paid editors. Not just A-listers and marketers. They also believe that to be featured in Squidoo search results, and to there community, and to the rest of the world, is a privilege. Authentic pages built by real people with good intentions are the future of the web, and are more focused than ever before on making it easy for you to do that.

The Top 8 Reasons Your Account Could Get Deleted

Here's a quick overview of what is considered as SquidSpam. There's a lot more, but these are the usual cases.

1. Lenses that autoredirect surfers to another site. (No iframes, no other hacks, nada).


2. Lenses and accounts that just pump out uncurated, copied and pasted content.


3. Lenses that are egregiously irrelevant to the Squidoo category they're posted in.


4. Anything else that smells spammy to Squidoo official and the Squidoo community.
   


5. Spamming bloggers with trackbacks, comments, or links to your Squidoo lens.


6. Email spamming people you don't have permission to talk to, pointing them to your lens.


7. Spamming our lensmasters, via the Contact form, or in Guestbooks.


8. Hacking the Squidoo site in any way that outputs spam to people anywhere online.
   

What Will Happen To You If You're A SquidSpammer?

In short, hit the road, Jack. Your account--and all its lenses--will be deleted. If you come back and try it again, they'll just boot you again. And, if you spammed bloggers and other pages outside of the Squidoo network, they'll start booting you too.

So try and focus on creating something you're actually proud of.

Don't Do It!

They don't permit spam (the verb, the act of bothering people with messages they don't want to get, or blog comments they don't want to read). They don't permit misleading labeling or content either. They do permit junk. They don't like it, and they try to help people transcend it, but it happens. You are welcome to build a lousy lens, or a shallow one, or one that people are not crazy about. It will get ranked low, though, and no one will look at it (why should they?). BUT, they don't permit spambait. These are lenses about areas that are almost exclusively in the domain of spam. Don't go there. They have a team of people reading lenses, looking for spambait. They have an automatic filter that blocks spambait lenses. Every lens has a 'report this as spam' button on it. Not so people can flag pages they don't like. No, not that. It's for people to complain about lenses that were the subject of spam activity like email blasts, inappropriate comments, and blatantly misleading marketing.

Play hard, play fair.

How Can You Make More Money?

Every lens carries Google AdSense ads. Those are used to generate royalties for the whole co-op (ie, everyone gets a cut). If you want to increase your direct royalties, though, you should consider adding commercial modules that the visitors to your lenses will appreciate. Their top moneymaker modules include: Amazon, eBay, CafePress, and The SuperStore. Every single one of these modules generates directly attributable revenue for your lens, and they pay a royalty to you or to your chosen charity based on that income. Build good lenses, feature great stuff, share your lenses as much as possible, and earn more royalties.

Bottomline:

Squidoo is an effective method to increase the traffic as well as generate revenue but caution should be taken as it follows very strict anti spam rules.

Search Engine Submissions and Index Inclusion

Index inclusion is the first step towards practical SEO. It means ensuring that maximum pages from your website are included within the main index database of search engines.

It is very rare for a site to be dropped from the index of the Search Engines completely unless and until it has been penalised or banned. However, temporary variations in the number of indexed pages are common.

So it is very important to notify the Search Engines about a new website by Search Engine submission. Submitting your websites into Search Engines help them to get indexed by the Search Engines. However it is not necessary to submit a site into Search Engines because they tend to find a new site through natural links etc. but it is always a good practice to submit a website which catalyses the process.

Index inclusion is the first step towards practical SEO. It means ensuring that maximum pages from your website are included within the main index database of search engines.

It is very rare for a site to be dropped from the index of the Search Engines completely unless and until it has been penalised or banned. However, temporary variations in the number of indexed pages are common.

So it is very important to notify the Search Engines about a new website by Search Engine submission. Submitting your websites into Search Engines help them to get indexed by the Search Engines. However it is not necessary to submit a site into Search Engines because they tend to find a new site through natural links etc. but it is always a good practice to submit a website which catalyses the process.

What is Index Coverage?

Index coverage refers to the proportion of the pages of your site which are included in the index of Search Engines.

Google Sitemaps are very helpful tools for increasing index coverage and notify Google of the changes occurring on the site. Sitemaps do not guarantee to improve the rankings of your site for existing pages, but it can enable more pages to be included in the indexed database of the Search Engines which in turn increases the visitors. It can also determine the frequency of the visit of Googlebot.

Excluding Pages from the Site Index:

At certain occasions, you may not want the Search Engines to follow links and index certain pages of your website. In this case you may instruct the Search Engine Bots not to follow and index those pages by adding following code on robots.txt file:

User-Agent: * Disallow:/demo/

The above code will disallow all the robots from crawling the entire demo folder. Simply adding a / will disallow the robots from crawling of your whole website.

You can also restrict the robots from indexing a particular page by adding noindex, nofollow attributes.

Search Engine Optimization - A Step by Step Guide for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization, as the name suggests, is the act of changing or altering websites so that they can rank well in the organic, crawler-based Search Engine listings or Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The main aim is to get top rankings on the first page of Search Engine listings. The process of Search Engine Optimization includes - choosing targeted or theme oriented keywords or key phrases that are related to the website, and ensuring that the site shows on the top listings of SERPs when those keywords and phrases are searched. The process includes optimizing a site according to the criteria of Search Engines and increasing the number of visitors also called traffic to a Website. Normally, Internet uers do not click through pages and pages of SERPs, so the position where a Website ranks in SERPs is very important for generating more traffic for the site because, the higher a Website ranks, the greater is the chance of getting visitors.

SEO Ranking Factors:

• Planning and Strategy
  
• Search Engine Submissions, Index inclusion and Coverage
  
• On Page Optimization
  
• Link Popularity Building and Off Page Optimization
  
• SEM Process
  
• Conversion Efficiency

A. Planning and Strategy:

Planning is the first step to SEO. Never launch any strategy without proper planning. In this section, I will discuss the following steps:

1. Goal Setting
   
2. Keyphrase Research, Analysis and Selection
   
3. Competitors’ Analysis
   
4. Market Analysis

1. Goal Setting: Before starting SEO process, it is very essential that you set some realistic goals for the campaign. Common types of high-level goals used for Search Engine Marketing:

• Position Based Goals and Targets: It is important for position based goals that these targets generate high volume, high intent keywords and key phrases in the major search engines.
  


• Visitor Volume Based Goals and Targets: This includes getting a particular number of clicks from unique and returning visitors. For example to achieve 5,000 clicks from the targeted phrases per day, week or month.


• Outcome Based Goals and Targets: This includes setting conversion based goals. For example to generate 10,000 leads or sales from SEO per day, week or month.


• Market Share Based Goals and Targets: There are various tools such as the Google Traffic Estimator or Hitwise, which make it possible to calculate a ‘share of search’ within a product category with detailed keyphrase analysis. However, care must be taken while setting this type of goal with these tools because they may not be 100% correct being mislead by automatically submitted searches from rank-checking, link-building or click fraud software tools. For example to achieve 25% share of the searches within a year for a particular key phrase.

2. Keyphrase Research, Analysis and Selection: Keyword or key phrase analysis and selection are the core to success in Search Engine Marketing. Identifying the most relevant key phrases for a Website is the most important and crucial starting point as it forms the base of your SEO campaign. Since this is very important aspect of SEO, I shall discuss it in detail in a separate section.

3. Competitors’ Analysis: Comparing search performance of competitors against that of yours is a big part of analysis and improvement for SEO. The first step is to identify your online competitor types for search traffic. It is not always necessary that the competitors for particular keyphrases are your traditional competitors. For example, for a mobile phone retailer, when someone searches for a product, you will be competing for search visibility with these types of websites:

• Mobile phone retailers
  
• Network providers
  
• Handset manufacturers
  
• Affiliates and partner sites
  
• Gazettes and news sites
  
• Review sites
  
• Blogs and personal sites about mobile phone technology
  
• Mobile phone related articles

This makes it very important to identify your actual competitors and their SEO strategy to compete with them and beat them.

4. Market Analysis: Market analysis is very essential to get more visitors to a website and convert those visitors into long term customers.

5 Key Points for a Successful Internet Marketing Plan

To market a website on the internet successfully, proper planning is very necessary. You should always prepare the strategy before starting optimization and promotion of any website. I believe that search engine optimization and web promotion are two different concepts and we should not mix the two. Search Engine Optimization is the technique by which you prepare and optimize your website according to the guidelines provided by the Search Engines. Apart from this, SEO also includes other methods and techniques like building link popularity, enhancing website usability etc. I will be discussing all the steps and procedures for marketing of any website individually.

A. Multiple Marketing Strategies

Don't put all your eggs into one basket and employ only one marketing strategy. The strategies and plans differ based on the industry, the product or simply the company policy. So, ultimately you have to decide the factors to be considered and techniques to be adopted. Many website owners, who once had top rankings for their commercial sites in Google, were dropped from the results during latest Google updates, thus instantly losing sales.

By creating multiple or more than one online marketing strategy for your website, you can analyse and decide which one works the best for you by attracting the most visitors.

B. Be Consistent

Maintaining a balance between the techniques is very important. Also, consistency is the key to success. So whatever plans you make, stick to it and keep working on it. Always set a clear daily, weekly, monthly and yearly marketing plan for your website and stick to it.

C. Cross Checking and Test Marketing

Keep on checking and testing your web site marketing strategies continuously to see which one works best for you. Eliminate those that are not profitable.

D. Adopt New Techniques

Online marketing is a field which is continuously growing. Daily new things are evolving and a new methodology is invented. So be dynamic. Keep on adopting new methods as per the requirement and eliminate the outdated ones.

E. Stick to The Basics

Adopting new techniques and eliminating outdated ones does not mean forgetting the basics. Of course, the trends keep on changing but there are certain basic thumb rules which you should never forget. Use the new methods as enhancements of your marketing plan. Always stick to the basics.

The steps involved in online marketing of any website are:

1. Market research and analysis
2. Competitors’ analysis
3. Keyword research
4. Usability study
5. Content development with the help of SEO copywriting
6. Developing a Search Engine friendly website
7. Search Engine Optimization
1. On Page Optimization
2. Off Page Optimization
8. Site submission
9. Website enhancement
10. Marketing and branding

In my future posts, I will discuss one by one about all these techniques in detail.

25 Free Link Building Tips

25 Great Ways to Get Free One Way Backlinks for Your Website

1. Write articles and submit in niche article directories with a link back to your website in the resource section.
2. Write informative articles so that other sites reprint and publish it on their sites with your link in the resource.
3. Participate in forums and create a signature link that points to your website.
4. Comments on other blogs with a link back to your website.
5. Do viral marketing for your website.
6. Participate in yahoo answers and put a link to your website in the signature.
7. Participate in Google Groups.
8. Write news worthy press releases and publish in Online PR sites.
9. Submit your site to free web directories.
10. Create a blog and do the postings regularly. The most important thing is post great content which attracts visitors and gets you link.
11. Review a product or company and if your remarks are positive, email the company and ask to feature your remark in their press section.
12. Add a link for “bookmark this site” on your site.
13. Create a freebie product like ebooks, whitepapers, free and original tools etc. to give away.
14. Hold a competition or opinion poll for the Top 10, 50 or 100 (you can decide the number) websites in your niche. Post the result and watch lots of the sites giving you a link back to say what their position was.
15. Submit relevant and informative videos to video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe with lot of substance. Don’t forget to include a link in the description and within the actual video.
16. Create pages on places like Squidoo, Hubpages etc. and put links to your website.
17. Place free classified ads on relevant online classified sites.
18. Conduct an open survey and publish the results. Also make sure you let people know about it.
19. Try to get listed in Google’s News search but make sure that your site contains unique and quality content.
20. If your company is fairly good and reputed one, create a page about it in the Wikipedia.
21. Submit a story to Digg or del.icio.us that links back to an article on your website.
22. Publish RSS feeds for your content.
23. Review related websites on Alexa.
24. Swap some links (but make sure don’t over do it) with relevant partners.
25. Start networking and creating a positive buzz to attract traffic.