Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Advance Of Algorithms - New Keyword Optimization Rules

Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization is now more heavily guarded. Those who include keywords too often will have their sites labeled as sp@m, whereas not enough instances of the appropriate keyword means you won't receive the desired results. However, the algorithms have become particularly smart and as well as the keywords you want to target you should include other relevant keywords. Including inflexions of keywords is one excellent way to ensure that your site is deemed to be relevant. Inflexions are slight changes to your keyword. For example, inflexions of the keyword "advertising" include advertise, advertised, advertisement, etc...

Keyword Inclusion

Weight is also given to keywords that are included in certain sections of a page. These sections include the title tag, meta tags (only relevant to smaller search engines now), header tags, image alt tags and formatting tags (e.g. keywords in bold or italicized) of your text. With image alt tags and hyperlink title tags it is important that you don't simply fill these with keywords because this will be ignored at best, and penalized at worst.

Natural Content Writing

One of the most effective ways to ensure that your site is keyword optimized properly is to write the content naturally first.

Once you have done this, go through and ensure that any relevant keywords are included throughout the text. Only place them where they would appear naturally and remove them from anywhere where they appear awkward. Once you've written the content you should also check the remaining factors to ensure everything is ok.

SEO Keyword Checklist


Below is a keyword checklist to ensure that you have fully optimized your web pages to the current, generally accepted search engine algorithm rules.

URL: Get your primary keyword as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.

Title Tag: The title should be between 10 and 50 characters and include one or more keywords while still being descriptive.

Description Meta Tag: The description meta tag should be insightful and useful but it should also contain one or two of your more important keywords.

Keyword Meta Tag: It makes sense that you should include all of your keywords in the keyword meta tag. Do not include any words that don't appear in the body of your text.

Keyword Density: Your content should be made up of all of your keywords and other text. A total keyword density (all keywords) of around 15% to 20% is the maximum you should aim for and anything less than 5% is unlikely to yield good results.

Density for a single keyword should be between 1% and 7%. 1% seems too low, and 7% a little too high. Wherever possible aim for approx 5% with the primary keyword and 3% with secondary and subsequent keywords.

Header Tags (e.g. H1 and H2 tags): More weight is given to keywords that appear within H1 tags, then H2 tags and so on.

Text Formatting Fonts (e.g. strong, bold and underline): This may not offer much weight in algorithms, but generally if you bold the first instance of your keywords and the last instance of your primary keyword you should see some positive results.

Beginning Of Text: The closer you can get your keywords to the beginning of your page content the better. Try to include your primary keyword within the first sentence or two and also within the last paragraph.

Key-Phrases As Whole Phrases: If you are targeting Internet Marketing as a key phrase then do not split the words up if possible. Some effect is noticed if the words are split, but much more benefit is received by including the phrase as a whole.

Alt Text: Include your keyword at least once in the Alt tag of any images. Ensure that the text is relevant to the image and gives some information.

Friday, January 11, 2008

How to write a press release

Pay Attention to the Content of your Press Release

When we talk about content we refer to the news story you are telling. Keep the following points in mind when writing your press release.

Is your news "newsworthy"? The purpose of a press release is to inform the world of your news item. Do not use your press release to try and make a sale. A good press release answers all of the "W" questions (who, what, where, when and why), providing the media with useful information about your organization, product, service or event. If you read your press release and it reads like an advertisement, rewrite it.

Start strong. Your headline and first paragraph should tell the story. The rest of your press release should provide the detail. You have a matter of seconds to grab your reader's attention. Do not blow it with a weak opening.

Write for the Media. On occasion media outlets, especially online media, will pick up your press release and run it in their publications with little or no modification to what you send. More commonly, journalists will use your press release as a springboard for a larger feature story. In either case, try to develop a story as you would like to have it told. Even if your news is not reprinted verbatim, it may provide an acceptable amount of exposure.

Not everything is news. Your excitement about something does not necessarily mean that you have a newsworthy story. Think about your audience. Will someone else find your story interesting? This is a common problem. Let's assume that you have just spent a lot of effort launching a new online store. Announcing your company's opening is always an exciting time for any business, but the last thing the media wants to write about is another online store. This is old news and uninteresting. Instead, focus on the features of your online shopping experience, unique products and services. Answer the question? Why should anyone care? (Avoid clichés such as "customers save money" or "great customer service".) Focus on the aspects of your news item that truly set you apart from everyone else.

Does your press release illustrate? Use real life examples about how your company or organization solved a problem. Identify the problem and identify why your solution is the right solution. Give examples of how your service or product fulfills needs or satisfies desires. What benefits can be expected? Use these types of examples to powerfully communicate the benefits of using your product or service.

If you are reporting on a corporate milestone make sure that you attribute your success or failures to one or more events. If your company has experienced significant growth, tell the world what you did right. Show the cause and effect.

Stick to the facts. Tell the truth. Avoid fluff, embellishments and exaggerations. If you feel that your press release contains embellishments perhaps it would be a good idea to set your press release aside until you have more exciting news to share. Journalists are naturally skeptical. If your story sounds too good to be true, you are probably hurting your own credibility. Even if it is true, you may want to tone it down a bit.

Pick an angle. Try to make your press release timely. Tie your news to current events or social issues if possible. Make sure that your story has a good hook.

Use active, not passive, voice. Verbs in the active voice bring your press release to life. Rather than writing "entered into a partnership" use "partnered" instead. Do not be afraid to use strong verbs as well. For example, "The committee exhibited severe hostility over the incident." reads better if changed to "The committee was enraged over the incident." Writing in this manner helps guarantee that your press release will be read.

Economy of words. Use only enough words to tell your story. Avoid using unnecessary adjectives, flowery language, or redundant expressions such as "added bonus" or "first time ever". If you can tell your story with fewer words, do it. Wordiness detracts from your story. Keep it concise. Make each word count.

Beware of jargon. While a limited amount of jargon will be required if your goal is to optimize your news release for online search engines, the best way to communicate your news is to speak plainly, using ordinary language. Jargon is language specific to certain professions or groups and is not appropriate for general readership. Avoid such terms as "capacity planning techniques" "extrapolate" and "prioritized evaluative procedures".

Avoid the hype. The exclamation point (!) is your enemy. There is no better way to destroy your credibility than to include a bunch of hype. If you must use an exclamation point, use one. Never do this!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Get Permission. Companies are very protective about their reputation. Be sure that you have written permission before including information or quotes from employees or affiliates of other companies or organizations. Any dispute resolution will favor the other company, meaning that your press release may get pulled.

About your company. Your press release should end with a short paragraph (company boilerplate) that describes your company, products, service and a short company history. If you are filing a joint press release include a boilerplate for both companies.

Formatting your press release

How you present your news is just as important as its content. Some of these suggestions are specific to PR Web's distribution service.

Mixed case. NEVER SUBMIT A PRESS RELEASE IN ALL UPPER CASE LETTERS. This is very bad form. Even if your release makes it past AME Info's editors (highly unlikely) it will definitely be ignored by journalists and readers alike. Use mixed case.

Correct grammar usage. Always follow rules of grammar and style. Errors in grammar and style affect your credibility. Excessive errors may cause your press release to be rejected by AME Info's editors.

No HTML. Never embed HTML or other markup languages in your press release. Your press release will be distributed over a wide array of networks. Including such formatting will negatively impact the readability of your press release and slow down the process as the AME Info editors will usually need to strip the the formatting..

More than one paragraph. It is nearly impossible to tell your story in a few sentences. If you do not have more than a few sentences chances are you do not have a newsworthy item.

Summary paragraph. AME Info asks you to include a one paragraph summary. Some distribution points only receive your headline, summary and a link to your press release. If you fail to include a summary paragraph you may reduce the effectiveness of your press release.

Word processor. Write your press release on a word processor instead of composing online. Writing online will not achieve best results. Take time to do it right. Write, print, proof read. Rewrite, edit ...

Pictures and captions. Make sure you include a picture where possible - alternatively a company logo can be submitted. Images must be in JPEG or GIF format - and remember you are sending this by e-mail for publishing online so please don't send 10mb image files through. When you do send images, make sure you include a caption for the image - either in a separate text file or as part of the release.

Do not include your e-mail address in the body of your release. Do not include your e-mail address in the body of your press release. We have a special field during the submission process where we include your e-mail address to guard you against spam as spiders routinely scour the Internet harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers. Provide your e-mail address only in the contact information at the end of your press release.

Common Mistakes in press releases.

As the Middle East's largest press release publishing services we have seen some of the world's best and worst press releases. Below you will find some of the most common errors that we encounter on a regular basis. You do not get a second chance to correct the negative impressions left by a poorly written release.

All Upper Case Characters - Never submit a press release in all upper case characters. The headline and body of your press release should be in proper case. AME Info's editorial policy does not permit press releases written entirely in upper case characters.

Grammatical Errors - Even the best writers occasionally miss grammatical errors and typos. Please proof read, edit and reproof your press release. Obvious errors are easier to catch when composing your release off-line. Never compose your release during the submission process.

Lack of Content - We reject about 20% of all press release submissions for lack of content. Oddly, authors are particularly guilty of short press releases. (We assume that if authors can muster enough words to fill 300 pages they should be able to come up with a 300-400 word press release.) Please make sure that you answer all of the "W" questions, who, what, where, when, why and how to ensure a complete press release.

Press Releases that Scream BUY ME! - Do not write your press release like an advertisement. Remember that journalists are NOT your marketing partners. Their job is to relay information to their audience, not to sell. A good press release informs the media. If your press release screams, BUY ME, then you might want to consider reworking your release.

Hype Flags - This is a close cousin to the BUY ME problem. If your press release contains too many "hype flags" it will trip spam filters and intercept your press release before it reaches its destination. A "Hype Flag" is anything that challenges the credibility of your press release. Examples of "Hype Flags" include an abundance of exclamation points or wild product and service claims.

Funny Characters - On occasion strange characters and formatting can creep into your press release during the submission (copy & paste) process. Make sure that you press release is formatted as you intended.

Word Wrapping - Do not break each line at 70 characters. Let your sentences wrap naturally. Please do not place a hard carriage return at the end of each line. Include a carriage return only at the end of each paragraph.

Incorrect Usage of E-mail - This plagues about 30% of all press releases. Use a role account instead of a personal account. A role account is pr@companyname.com. A personal account would be pat@companyname.com. Using a role account allows you to redirect e-mail to someone that can respond while you are on vacation. After all, you do not want to miss valuable media contacts. You never want a journalist or a potential client to receive a message telling them that you are unavailable during the week because of your high school reunion or business convention.

Friday, December 7, 2007

How to create SEO friendly Blog???

How to create SEO friendly Blog???

One of the white hat SEO methods Matt Cutts suggested to bloggers during the WordCamp 2007 is to create a mobile version of your blog. He thinks this is important because, in the future, mobiles will be used to search for more content than now. So make sure you equip yourself for the big storm coming up.
Thankfully, Andy Moore has got a neat Wordpress plugin ready for us bloggers.The plugin even helps you to earn money from your mobile version, by displaying mobile ads.Also, it ensures that your blog is search engine friendly on the mobile too. It ensures the following -
• Automatic mobile phone & PDA detection
• Post & upload from mobile
• Supports comments
• SEO friendly titles and H1 tags

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

How can I improve my site's ranking?


How can I improve my site's ranking?


Sites' positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. These factors are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.



Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

* Design, content, and technical guidelines
* Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

* Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
* Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
* Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
* Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
* Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
* Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
* Check for broken links and correct HTML.
* If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
* Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

* Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
* Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
* Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
* Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
* If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
* Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

* Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
* Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don't send automated queries to Google.
* Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
* Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
* Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Bookmark Yourself To SEO Success

Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share, and search Internet bookmarks. In 2005 and 2006, social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, Diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz, and StumbleUpon became popular. Sites like reddit, Digg, Newsvine, and the new Netscape portal apply social bookmarking to news items. In 2007, IBM announced plans to enter the social software market.

There are a variety of ways to use bookmarks to improve your overall site popularity. What I personally like about social bookmarks is that it’s easy to do and very similar to other optimization methods I use. The way it works is as follows: A user registers for a social bookmarking site. Once they have an account, they browse the internet. When the individual identifies a webpage or piece of content they want to share with others, they bookmark it. Once that content is bookmarked, the bookmark site keeps a record of the bookmark and waits to see if others bookmark the same content or website.

When others bookmark or vote for the same content, that content increases in popularity and the social book marking site ranks it higher than other content on their site. Some of these bookmark sites also let you see the bookmarks of others. That’s what makes it a “social” bookmark. Not only is the general web populace rating Internet content collectively, but they can also see what others are book marking.

What’s even better is that you can use a site like Social Poster (free) found at http://socialposter.com/generator.php to post multiple bookmarks from one location. You will need to register for each of these sites, but once you do the submission process is simple.

After book marking your home page on each of these sites, consider book marking specific content of channel level pages of your site. Creating deep links into your site can enhance your overall Google rankings. And of course, make sure to use the proper link text in your site title and description.

One final word on social bookmarking. Now that you know how to bookmark your site, the next logical step is to make it easy for others to bookmark your site. To do this, simply add a Social Bookmark applet (free) to your site by visiting AddThis.com. They offer a small piece of Javascript you can add to your site in the form of a button.

When users click on the Bookmark button, they can select their specific book marking tool and book mark your content. This makes the process of book marking simple and easy to do.n its own terms.

The Author:

Michael Fleischner is a Marketing Expert with more than 12 years of marketing experience. He has appeared on the TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and Other major media.