SEO – Do’s and Don’ts

Do’s

• Always work in user point of view. Focus the users, not search engines.
• Navigation paths in your site must be clean. If a visitor explore your site, he should feel very comfortable.
• Apply labels for all the pages very clearly. Give a brief about it so that your users will understand the page better.
• Be sure about the information you are publishing in website. All the contents in your website must be helpful for users.
• Submit sitemaps if you add new pages. This will let the search engines to know about the new pages and getting crawled.
• Apply text in non-textual content areas such as images, videos etc….
• Keep an eye on the impact of organic results for your website regularly. Always analyze before and after implementing any SEO factors.
• Your code must be simple and clean. If it is vary tidy, it is a setback for your website.
• Instead of targeting homepage for each and every keyword, Create unique page for important keywords and target those pages.
• Get direct links from sites that have same theme as much as possible.
• Make sure your site files and folders were following a hierarchical structure. This will increase the visibility of site to the user and as well the search engines. All files were interlinked and you can avoid orphanage files.
• Search engines won’t crawl script. So make use of CSS more and JavaScript less.
• Be tolerant until you get the result you expect. Good rankings may take more time. Even if you achieve better rankings quickly, it will vanish soon.
• Always keep in your mind that each one connected with your business is possibly a link partner, including your customers, your affiliates and your advertising partners.
• Always read blogs, participate in forums which makes you updated and stands you on top in SEO.

Don’ts

• Do not duplicate your content. Each and every article in website must be unique. Through carelessness you may lead to create duplicate pages. It will always happen in dynamic websites.
• Don’t use parameters in the url. If it is needed, don’t use too many parameters. Always rewrite urls structure using .htaccess.
• Don’t have any 404 page in website. Always create custom 404 pages and redirect dead pages to new pages relevant to that old page.
• Don’t use too much Flash. Search engines will not crawls flash codes. Also it consumes more load time.
• Don’t have many outgoing links (links to other sites).This will drain the link power of your page.
• Never involve in any black-hat SEO techniques that will lead your search engine rankings down.
• Don’t contact vendors for SEO problems and ideas. Their main motto is to advertise a product, not to boost up your rankings in search engines.
• Don’t fear if your rankings went back. Rankings will fluctuate sometimes, and if your rankings did not bounce back quickly, you need to analyze and implement a better strategy.
• Don’t rely on untrustworthy expert advice while selecting keywords for your website. Use data.

TAGS: google seo, search engine, search engine wars, search engines, Search Results, SEO

Can you kill your competitor?

Google has been claiming you cannot kill your competitor just by adding a few backlinks from a negative network or a list of strong links say 25 which would mean a sudden boost of backlinks for the site.
There was also one interesting webmaster video from Laurence, London who asked

Can I flag spammy links to my site that I didn’t create?
“Is there a process through which a site owner could flag spammy links being built to their site by third parties (by a competitor for example)? How do you protect against sites being penalised for bad links which they have not built?” Laurence, London

Well though Matt and the search team try really hard to identify GBL from BBL. May be the manual team may take over this department of monitoring links along with duplicate content generation.
Check out the testing results here:

Operation Kill Competitor – Successful

But note these test results were able to affect micro sites… i.e a comparatively newly built site which has not seen the old faces of Google algorithm. For the keyword it got shuttled to NF. But for a site that has aged with cloaking techniques, hidden links, bad network of links, link farms… and that which also have a clean set of good back links as backup was not affected.
? Good luck with some competitor *** kicking.

Can I Get Ranking report from google?

TAGS: Google Ranking

Google Sitelinks

What is google site links?

Sitelinks are created robotically, and are intended to offer search engine users with more valuable search results.

When it is orginated?

In the year 2005, Google go ahead by researching with an improved listing in their organic search results that can enhance a site’s visibility and reputation, and drive more traffic.

Sample snippet of google sitelinks

How to access sitelinks?

How google site links benefit websites?

TAGS: Google Sitelinks

Verizon.net Hacked – Malicious hacker hacks verizon official website

If you did not trigger this lockout, please visit Citibank at
http://static-70-22-153-55.bos.east.verizon.net/cgi/1/web-us.citibank.net/cards/
and follow the steps on the website in order to unlock your account.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

___________________________________
Citibank Credit Cards are issued by Citibank (South Dakota), N.A”

Can we believe Verizon atleast? Which websites are still safe?

SEG Blogger.

[plus1 count=”true” size=”standard”]

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-8

Feedburner is another nice tool it will tell you where people are coming from, how many visitors you are getting, traffic data etc.

Ok I have 5 more minutes now let me tell you something which you probably should not do. ( screen shot here ) This is one email I got like in September 2008 be a Google millionaire wow, I have been with Google for 9 years I could filled up and bought their product and made cash if only I had known right. If something looks too good to be true it probably is.

Anyone heard of this Google money tree thing consumer court got about 478 complaints about them and about 460 has not been still responded to. So they claim you can make 107,000$ just doing searches in Google and yahoo.

This stuff is not endorsed by Google it’s incredibly spammy you join 3$ 78 cents to join and every month you are charged 75$ till you opt-out. That is how it works and that is how it usually goes on with these money tree systems. So don’t be stupid believing all these stuff. There are people who can even claim you can make 107,000$ by tying shoes. People are sometimes dumb they think it’s from Google because they use Google anabolic plans NO it’s not from Google don’t do these kind of stuff. One thing I always saw if you are blogger is, don’t spam. Don’t do things like paid posts it pisses off your users and it’s against Google guidelines and right on top of this slide it clearly says don’t advertise 3rd party sites for search engine ranking purposes.

One other important thing you need to know is keep you wordpress blog updated. We just don’t have time to show an example of this. American Nazi party, is anyone here a pro-nazi any big fans of the Nazis in here. I did think I am bit not a nazi fan myself. SO you see nice things on the American nazi party website you see these 88888888888888888 looks cool huh. See our site is better we have lots of eights but when you scroll down to the bottom of the page you see cialis and other links. What, the Nazis when did they start selling cialis. So now whom do you blame the Nazis or the hackers who added the cialis links on their site. I don’t know it’s not sure Ha ha. Yeah it happens so it’s better that you have good security yourself and prevent such kind of vulnerabilities on your website.

In particular there is this really cool site called save the internet they talk about net neutrality and all sort of stuff but recently when you go to blog/wp-content/uploads/authors/pletal.html you can buy Viagra from this Canadian pharmacy.

And it got to be trust worthy because it claims to be the No.1 drug store in internet LOL. It’s very easy wordpress got methods to do automated updates. Latest versions have much, much better security and because of automated updates it can easily get new versions easily. You just need to take advantage of the latest updates. And if you are a super power user you should be saying I know that but no you don’t. Here is one power tip add a .htaccess to your wp-admin and add this simple code

Well this says that only allow the above Ip addresses to access your admin area you can modify the IP addresses to your own IP addresses. So if they hackers try to exploit and try to hack into your blog they cannot do it because their IP is blocked on your server.

I take this opportunity to thank automattic and wordpress for doing a wonderful Job. They have come a long way from what it was in 2007. Almost all my wishes are already happening with wordpress.

All of them are already pretty done, automatic updates, protected wordpress content directory and rel=canonical. Well I am not going to talk about rel=canonical because there is nothing to talk. It just tells Google that this is the only page that needs to be taken into consideration and avoid other duplicates formed by similar but different URLs. Rel=canonical is coming with wp 2.8 and above inbuilt so you don’t have to worry too much about it. It just helps you with search engines so that your PageRank is not split between different URLs.

For more information on Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript click here

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-1 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-2 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-3 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-4 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-5 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-6 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-7

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-7

Ok let me show you a few quick screen shots

I did a post in my blog where I wrote about how to get free links, how to get free great links, which ofcourse everybody will like free links. The trick was we have something like Google.com/webmasters will show you the posts on your site and who links to it.

Example: the link in purple ie7-promo-page the one with parenthesis Jeremy is the one who was formerly with yahoo and now with craigslist linked to my blog and the link was broken. Jeremy has got a lot of PageRank and we definitely want that PageRank it’s good to drop him an email to fix the link. You can say hey Jeremy you want to take that parenthesis off and if he does you get a free link. The point is he is already linking to you just the link is broken and needs to be fixed, you can help yourself, so this is a completely free service which you can make use of to get free links. Here you can find out about all kinds of people who are linking to your sites or pages on your sites that don’t really exists. One more quick thing about google.com/webmasters we give you all sort of crawl stats.

For example this is how much time Google takes to crawl your website, here you can see it shows a huge drop down its because I changed the site theme as it does better CSS here

It You can see the amount of changes the amount of pages being downloaded it is pretty handy and will help you diagnose your issues. And Google also helps you set www.mattcutts.com or Mattcutts.com which is also very handy.Here is a quick question anybody uses Google analytics? Ah great that’s lot of users I love you guys. Ok here is something you don’t know about Google analytics. You can click settings on top of the links and this will tell you which blog post gets the most visitors.

This one hacking an iphone anyone want to guess when I wrote that? You know I wrote that in 2007 so how come still in 2009 it’s the No.6 most viewed page on my site? What does that tell me? May be I should go back and update that post because everything in that is probably wrong or may he I should write an other one. Ok here is an other one, one of my top 10 post ( gmail tips ) it’s a old tips page, oh people already know this now so ill throw it down No, people still love it so may be I should write 5 more gmail tips. So when you are sitting on a blank screen and thinking what should I do today?

You can talk a walkthrough in Google analytics and see what are the pages people like on your site and make sure they are well built and ideal for them. And what about bounces yes, bounces tell you how often people land on your page and then leave. If people come from DIGG they come on your page and then leave so if you try to reduce the bounce on your site that means it will be more visitors and that will be more Business for you if that is what you are looking for. It will result in bringing more clicks to your ads, bring more site usage and bring more business all those stuff. One simple trick which I have on my template is show me the leading posts to my visitors right, someone has just finished reading your blog here is a great article they have one happy feeling about you, what do they do now they leave why because you didn’t give them anything else to do show them some related blog post. There is one blog post they like it, read it if they find something links more from the bottom they might click and read some more. So that is the simplest way to reduce the number of bounces and can lead to people staying longer on your site.

For more information on Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript click here

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript   |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-1  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-2  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-3  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-4  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-5  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-6  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-8

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-6

Life Hacker – Anybody knows him?

I don’t think you know him because you spend more time how to be more productive than the actual productive that you get. You like to read about productivity all the time ? big may these guys. Now that life hacker has time they have high quality tutorials and guides. Creative niche, man if you got one good idea that could take you so so, far. Love cats yeah rock on I made it that I love cats. Same way you should google all these stuff all the stuff in this slide ( slide here ) and look at them, these are some of the best ways to burn time in your life they write so funny. One says like they are having sex and their mother walks in and stuff and the other says they have one creative sense so that’s really, really fantastic. So people can draw but this guy can’t actually draw but he is really funny and he knows a lot of science and that kind of stuff and he can just create a niche. Open source can be a fantastic way to get links in my idea. Write a good project people will use it. Case of point wordpress, right? We know how many use word press these days. WordPress doesn’t need any PageRank has an amazing amount of PageRank. Like blogging so any of you guys are blogging this its cool. So some of you are blogging and you get a chance to get 3 or 4 good links while others are just sitting and watching. So did any of you guys imagine what you guys should do when you are in a recession? You should write about it. If you are too lazy you can just write whether you loved this camp or you just hate it. People will love lists so if you write a list of 11 reasons why wordcamp rules you can get links.

Create controversy if you want to write and be creative writing negative stuffs then its fine people are ready to take your negative energy and link to you. And you know twitter, facebook there are lot of people who get to know each other on these social networks and it can make a lot of difference. So I had the pleasure of speaking to you in this Wordcamp 2009 and one of my funnier paper glance was could you do a podcast. Everyone can do a podcast probably those people are downstairs listening to the other session. But the bigger question was should you do a podcast or should you do a video I bet your picture is hotter than that if you are 6 and above you do a video and if you are 5 and below you do a podcast right. I already said this is a very attractive audience so you are going to publish it on your video.

Now if you see this flip mobile phone, these flips are just couple 100 bucks ( dollars ) and you can make a video in 2 minutes and it can be any kind of creative as you want hot casting or podcasting I really recommend doing video these days because its not that much harder to make a video than it is in a podcast. And lot of people like watching videos this one is like around 15000 views in a day and we literally threw it up and this was just want tweet. I can post a video I didn’t even blog about this and yeah its really easy to do videos and you can drive a lot of attention to your site. And videos tend to rank pretty well in Google.

I am going to say you this I am not selling anything here I am here telling about wordpress not about blogger and I am not saying Google is the best always use Google go for Google. But there are few tools you need to know about ill just show you few of them. 1st up is website optimizer you should have already heard of them if you are already into power blogging you should try different types of templates and see which one works for you and see which one on investment gives you better conversion. Then you know about custom search engine then you know site search. Here are something very few people know, you can use these 2 tags it will help adsense in your blog post you can place it where ever you like, in archives or where ever you like. So if you are using adsense I highly recommend you add these tags around your post because your ads will become more targeted , people will click on your ad more and you can make more money.

For more information on Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript click here

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-1 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-2 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-3 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-4 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-5 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-7 |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-8

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-5

Now this is my favorite slide in entire talk because I am going to tell you the real true deep sea type of blog and that is Katamari. Has anybody played katamari, so what is katamari its a Japanese game where you start with prints, the prints have what you call a katamari and its only 3 cm tall and he roles up things. It rolls up paper clicks it rolls up recordings eventually it can hold up a block it can hold up a big gum.

And when you are done you have Katamari 100s of meters tall and you can roll up buildings, roads in 100s. And when you see these people roll up buildings they scream aiyaaaaa. Lot of people play katamari, I play katamari and I love it. Ok the Katamari Philosophy is this. Start small start in a niche where you can do well and that might be a very small niche it might be a small niche like how to put a default printer in Firefox or Linux. But then build up, build up, build up and you will make it big don’t over reach. In Katamari when you roll up a thing you can’t role up skyscraper in a thing you need to start from scratch and get there gradually. If somebody tells you that you will be the NO.1 Gadget blogger in 3 days and you can be engadget.com in 3 days laugh at them and send them packing. It doesn’t work that way, but one thing in Katamari is you always roll and make it bigger. You always make it role and make bigger and bigger things. So if you want to be a real good gadget blogger start out with a small niche ok i am going to write about a particular type of phone.

The Google android or the blackberry or the palm creak. And then you can work on en-beginning, En-beginning that niche write about more and more important things and bigger niches and over time people get to know you people tend to link to you people start thinking and reading about your blog, people start sending links your way. Then later people start sending things your way and life is good. The katamari philosophy works very well. What else we can do about gaining reputation. Oh yeah this is the only slide where i have cool dissolves and stuff. There are so many other ways you can get links you can provide useful service.

There is a law professor named Eric Goldman. He is a blawger you guys ever heard of blawgers? The law blawgers yeah I like it, he wrote about how people have adwords trademark policy but not everybody cares about that but he got his niche, he knows better he is a law professor he knows things that regular people do not know. So you can provide useful things like a newsletter. Original research or reporting is huge there is a guy who writes about search his name is Danny Sullivan he is very respected because he has written about search for more than 10 years and one thing he does is like what is the spam level at Gmail, Yahoo and hotmail and for a month he tracks all the spam that he got which will be the most annoying thing to do in the world correct?

Here is another 400 spams and here is another 800 spams this day, he tracked it at the end of 30 days he was able to say which service had less spam. It was gmail, YES; . But that was great original research anybody could have done it, anybody could have monitored the spam folder and would have done that. Now have people heard of louis grey? Yeah he is a great writer, one way he does is he looks at his referrals and referrals are like search engine logs, like web logs where people are coming from where they are visiting from. And he does notice some strange useragents like readburner and he is like what they heck is readburner and blogs about it and in 2 days people notices it and they say yeah we are trying a totally new service and you found us out. And he did that in like 3 times in a row. So just by looking at the bots, the bots that was visiting his site he was able to bring really cool stuff and from there he really just hustled his blog. I like blog and respect it a lot.

For more information on Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript click here

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript   |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-1  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-2  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-3  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-4  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-6  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-7  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-8

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-4

Look at that he got ing different throw him in the click. That’s not the way it works but making small changes like having words in title and a bit different in URLs will give 2 different opportunities to put few keywords in now you can make it changing and change. I am making it look simple but lot of people don’t think that much in detail so if you doing a post its worth doing a post and going to the Google keywords tool think about the words you want to rank for put those words in make sure those words are in your post. This is a little bit of in detail but you can also have your categories which can have good keywords it just makes the categories cooler stuff.

My categories are like Linux, search, SEO so if somebody has that category say search then you have to put in that keyword Search in your post since it’s in your category. If you are going to put keywords in your URLs like I showed its better to do dashes so like my-dash-keywords. Underscores can work, dashes are a little better but no space. Spaces are pretty bad. Has anybody seen a site experts-exchange.com. Some people like it, some people don’t if you see the word experts exchange in it then you can see experts exchange. You don’t want to rank for experts exchange right? So if it’s all one word hmmm i might read it in a different way so put some dashes in there search engines look at dashes as separators like that.

Now if you do underscores or if you do spaces until now should you go back and change every single thing on your previous post will you rename all the old URLs as dashes No that is unfair to the law. Don’t you think it changes the whole URLs structure. Search engines are relatively good at separating words but spend your time on better things like writing contents, spend your time better you can keep this in mind going forward in future. And finally talking about relevance talking about onpage stuff don’t overdo it don’t stuff it. This was the site that was put for review and can you guess what’s it about its SPAM. I understood it’s a lot about furniture infact did you notice this page is all but makes no sense. Oh yeah we deal all kinds of indoor furniture, office furniture, Indonesian wooden furniture etc. Its over doing Google never said if you have so many instances of furniture in your post then it is very relevant ill tell you there are posts 400% better than that one which has mentioned furniture only once.

So if you have mentioned furniture once or two times may be you got furniture in mind that’s ok. You don’t have to say furniture as every 3rd word. Also you don’t need to bold it right like this oh man users don’t like this believe it or not. Other than that on this site the term furniture they have misspelled it some times. Yeah I know judging from the website you don’t need to do this. Mention furniture 2 or 3 times and that’s enough. So onpage being relevant being on topic talking about things that you really care about, find something that you are about which makes you write more often, make the pages accessible so that search engines can find it. Pay attention to mechanics but don’t over do it. If you are reading it loud and if sounds stupid you are overdoing it. Ok that’s half the battle now let us see how you gain a reputation, how do you get more known, how do you get more PageRank by people linking to you.

Be interesting, have anybody read the book of Steve jobs any body bought it? It was good i was like this one good gimic cannot last for an entire book it can it’s a lot of fun. He was like I fired at this idiot Jerry young wow, His words are great sometimes it’s pretty mean but it’s great, he writes great.

This week someone started a fake blog for carol pots who is the CEO of yahoo the 1st post I was on the floor laughing so, I instantly added it to my Google reader I want to see what they have to say. Right; so being interesting is very important, so if you are a guy who writes with technique, oh I want to write about technical news, celebrity news, I want to talk about John mayor, Jennifer anniston, I am going to write 88,000 times and I cannot write anything new to it don’t bother writing you want to be interesting. And again it helps the more you write by practice you get into a habit of writing. This is the blog of Sergey Brin (Co-founder of Google).

Do you know this guy even has a blog he does he had only 2 posts. I never asked Sergey about his blog, on one hand it is cool he has written 2 posts on the other hand his last post was September 12th 2008. People are going to Sergey Brin’s blog to see, hey I want to see what Sergey brin wants to say something new but if Sergey is posting everyday or Sergey is posting every week people will come and check. So people will be interesting to see what it has to offer so you need to write often.

For more information on Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript click here

Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript   |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-1  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-2  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-3  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-5  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-6  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-7  |  Matt Cutts WordCamp Transcript Part-8