Best Practices : Social Bookmarking

Internet has always been a great place to do business in; with social bookmarking it has just gotten better. People from around the world are bonding on these websites.  

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources.

Few best practices listed below :

• You must create an account on various social bookmarking websites that interest you. Ensure that your nickname remains the same on all these websites. You easily make an account on StumbleUpon, Digg or any other social bookmarking site and quickly start adding links.

• Give priority to those websites that attract high traffic. Check out their enrolled membership numbers. That will give you an adequate indication of its popularity.

• Don’t submit every page of your website, one after the other. Most sites aren’t keen on this and users may see it as spam. Instead, submit the valuable content and blogs or article you may have on your website. Include photos from the webpage as well.

• Concentrate on building your reputation in your chosen area of expertise. Start interacting with other members. Make sure that you export your personal bookmarks to those social bookmarking websites.

• Look out for some other relevant services. You can promote each other’s products that way. This method is called cross-social bookmarking.

• Once you start submitting your content to these social bookmarking sites, you can start following other users. Developing a presence on these websites will help your visibility and the visibility of your content. Users can “like” or “vote up” your content on some sites, suggesting it to their followers. Once you get the hang of a few of these sites, you can start exploring others!

• Take care in adding tags of your most relevant keywords in order to make the link easy to find within the site. Social Bookmarking helps to increase sales because it increases the number of visitors to your site and provides another way for potential customers to find your content.

• Organize your tags well. Try and keep them simple. That makes it easier for the other users to find you. Your bookmarks should leave a trail that they can follow to locate you.

Best Practices : Directory Submission

Directory submission is one of the off page optimization method used for building the marketing plan for your website. However, the main goal of directory submission is to create backlinks to a website. In turn helps to get targeted traffic towards your website and improves the search engine rankings.

What exactly you do in Directory Submission???

In a directory submission, you place your website details (like website URL, Title, Description, Meta tags and many other details) into the most appropriate category and sub-category of the directory. The directory will then check the content of your website before it will be listed. Once published, your website will have a link back from that particular directory in its appropriate category so that customers can find you more easily. 

What are different types of Directory Submissions??

Basically, there are two types of directory submissions.

• Automated Directory Submission – It is done with software.
• Manual Directory Submission – It is done manually by human.

It is very well agreed that, the task of directory submission requires more time and effort. It is time consuming and therefore many people take help of automated submission software. However, manual submissions are proven to offer more beneficial results than automated submission. 

What are the benefits of Directory Submission?

• Back links: Generating back links are the major benefits of web-directory submissions which in turn results in more traffic flow towards a website.

• Indexing: It ensures guaranteed search engine indexing. Search engines crawl through the links, add the site pages to their index and ranked them accordingly. If your website’s link is discovered on the directory site, the spiders will follow the links to your website, thus results in increasing the visits and indexing in the databases of search engines.

• Anchor Text: Directories allow links to the site with keywords describing your site. Therefore, search engines rank the site higher than other for the given terms. Hence directory submissions using keywords as anchor-text will boost your link reputation.

• Save Cost: Most directories are free to submit to. It therefore makes business sense to submit to as many directories as possible.

Relevancy is extremely important in directory submissions; otherwise, it will be a waste of time and effort. As there are many rules and regulations when it comes to directory submissions, and you need to make sure that you are following these rules otherwise you may find your submission being rejected, or in spam, not being listed in that directory at all.

Best Practices : Image Optimization

Image optimization is nothing but optimizing your images to make them more search engine friendly. We can minimize the download time and save bandwidth by using thoroughly optimized images i.e. most compressed yet visually acceptable image in the proper file format.

If a user is made to wait for more than 10 seconds, he is most likely to hit back button on the website, or he may click on content that’s loads first instead of waiting for the entire page to load or he may leave your site entirely. Bandwidth costs money, and if you are using large size image without optimizing them, you are going to wastes a precious bandwidth that will end up costing you money, customers or both.


Important aspects of Image Optimization :

Alt Text

Alt tag help search engines to know what your image is about and to understand images better and rank them. For e.g., <imag src=”kids dancing.jpg” alt=”Kids Dancing”/>

File Size

You should make the image file size as small as possible without sacrificing the quality. You can use an image editing program to make your image a desired size. Do not let your browser resize a large image to look smaller. When you have a large image, and input height and width tags on that image to make the image smaller, people load the large image first, and then the browser resizes it.

Anchor Text

Always use descriptive anchor text that describes the image. If you are linking images with a text, anchor text will help your images ranked for particular keywords.

File Name

Always make sure to give a descriptive filename for your images while uploading them. Using keyword-rich words in your image filename is important for helping search engines determine relevancy.

Captions

Image captions are also very important as they are one of the most well-read pieces of content on your entire site.

Best Practices : Link Optimization

Linking is the action where, one page is linked via either text or an image to another page within your website. How do you link your website from page to page? 

• the frequency of links,
• the total volume of links from which pages
• and the proximity of the link

3 of them plays important role in link optimization.

Even more challenging is finding a way to have the keywords that you're focused on in the anchor text of those links. Anchor text is the text contained in a link. Getting your keywords into the links is an important factor because search engine spiders read the links as they crawl the Web. They can understand the association between the words in the hyperlink and the page that it's being linked to.

It is important to optimize your internal & external outbound links for search engines as well as to give your visitors a better navigation.

Important elements of Link Optimization:

• Try using good Anchor Text when you are linking to other people. Include the appropriate keyword in the anchor text which gives the outbound link a ‘proper meaning’ and value.

• A good & clean Internal Link Structure with proper use of anchor text will definitely help. E.g. “Buy Now” or “Learn More” is a better anchor text compared to “click here”.

Best Practices : Keyword Optimization & Synonyms

When optimizing your site for the search engines, you should spend some time in figuring out exactly what keywords, or what key phrases, you are going to target. Search engines are an excellent source of traffic, but in order to utilize them to their full potential, some effort is required.

A good combination of primary keyword selection supported by secondary keywords will ensure a well optimized page for that particular keyword. For e.g., Primary keyword for earning money online would be, "Make money online" and secondary keyword would be "Make money online with adsense"

Primary keywords appear on the most important areas like the header, footer, inbound anchor text, H1 tags, Meta tags etc. and are given much important. Primary keywords should be repeated with a certain amount of keyword density throughout the page. The reason why some keywords are considered primary is because those are the ones that are marketable online and has a niche market. Probably those are the ones that are not used by other sites and are yet to break into a niche.

The secondary keywords are given less important and support the primary keywords for its marketing. They are many a times combination of one or more keywords and can be used with or without more combinations at different places. They form the lesser proportion of keyword density. They are keywords that other sites have already optimized for and therefore may be difficult to break into the top 10 search engine page results.

Keyword variations and synonyms are to be taken in to consideration.

Keyword Variations - This is just another way of saying that not each Internet searcher uses the same words to find information. You need to think like your visitors and create some different variations of your targeted keyword phrase adding words at the beginning, the end, the middle, etc.

Keyword Synonyms - These are words that have similar meanings and the search engines are looking for word association within your content.

Well, It is possible to make a single web page rank for several search terms with good keyword research. Each page should ultimately have 1 primary keyword with a few other secondary keywords.  Once your page begins to rank, you will also find that you will receive traffic from other long-tail keywords.  Long-tail keywords are keywords that contain several words within the search, in which your website ranks for.  Long-tail keywords are not competitive, but if your page happens to mention a specific keyword that someone is searching for, it will rank very easy for that term.

Some best practices listed below:

• Determine your keyword phrases
• Sort by popularity
• Refine and combine keyword phrases
• Sort by popularity again (repeat steps 2 and 3 as needed)
• Write a title using your top two to three phrases
• Write a description meta tag
• Write a keywords meta tag
• Add keywords into key tags and attributes, and mix well

Best Practices : Important HTML Tags

Here are some of the most important html tags for you to consider in optimization.

Title Tag

<head>

<title>keyword</title>

</head>

Choose a title which best describes your website. It should be 60-65 characters long, as this will be displayed in search results page by Google.

 Header Tags – H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6

<h1>Most Important</h1>

<h2>Second Most Important</h2>

<h3>Third Most Important </h3>

<h4>Forth Most Important </h4>

<h5>Fifth Most Important </h5>

<h6>Sixth Most Important </h6>

The h tag defines the heading in html. h1 is most  important one, and should always be used for the title of the page. The second most important is h2, the third – h3 and so on, they should then be used to define sub headings, or sections on a page in order of importance. Usually web pages won’t go beyond the <h3> tags as they will instead feature multiple <h2> tags, providing that the sub headings are of equal importance.

Bold OR Strong

<b>keyword</b>

<strong>keyword</strong>

These tags are also used to help emphasize more important keywords on your webpage to the search engines.

 Image

<img src=”picture.jpg” alt=”keyword” />

To tell search engines what your image is, you need to include the “alt” section of the code. The “alt=” section of the code is what a search engines will actually be indexing and help to get good ranking in Image searches. Just make sure your images’ keywords are placed on the webpage.

Hyperlink

<a href=”http://www.webinfo.com/page.html” title=”keyword”>keyword</a>

Hyperlinks are a key element and play a vital role in search engine optimization; with the amount of links and the anchor text that is being used have a large input in how relevant search engines find your site to be to a particular key phrase.

Hyperlink (No Follow Variant)

<a href=”http://www.webinfo.com/page.html” title=”keyword” rel=”nofollow”>keyword</a>

The nofollow tag in conjunction with a robots.txt file can prevent Search Engines from indexing pages on your website. As hyperlinks increase the referred page’s ranking, there are times that you may wish to use no-follow links, such as when you place paid advertisements on your webpage.

Best Practices : Meta Tag Optimization

With many search engines, information displayed on search results pages comes from two places: the HTML title tag and the meta-description tag. 

There are many extensive factors that Google uses when determining website rankings. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags.

A meta tag is an HTML tag that provides information about Web page’s content, such as what HTML specifications a Web page follows or a description of its content. A meta tag doesn’t affect how a Web page is displayed in a browser window.

Benefits of Meta Tag Optimization:

• Help obtain a good ranking in search engines that use meta tags to determine relevancy. Including some of your keywords will give you some advantage in Google’s relevancy algorithm.

• Elicit a call to action, that is, encourage people to click the link to your Web page. If your number appears in the Meta description some of your customers might just prefer to call you directly instead of going through your site.

Best Practices : Title Optimization

Search engine like Google gives a lot of weight to the title of webpage; hence it required to be optimized very carefully to achieve top search engine ranking. The page title is, what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser Favorites. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your website can give you better SEO results.

Some best practices listed below for you:

• Make sure your web pages have a unique title.

• Choose keywords that relate best to your product or service and use the form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on their search volume.

• Don't repeat your keywords more than 2 - 3 times in the title.

• First letter of each word in the title must begin with a capital letter following by small letters.  For eg., Web Design Service In India

• The length of the title is also very important. Ideally it should be maintain within 60-65 characters (including spaces).

• A title tag can provide the maximum advantage only if it focuses on a specific keyword which is most important as far as the webpage is concerned. In addition to this, loading titles with keywords makes them look unprofessional and could lead to “Keyword stuffing”.

• If your title uses a keyword which is not present in the content, it adds no value to the title. Search engines gives a much important to title tags and treat them as a word that describes the entire webpage. So make sure you write a title in relation to the webpage content.

• Keep your title tags simple, meaningful, keyword specific. Many webmasters use descriptive tile tags as it helped them to get better click-through rates even when their page was at the very bottom of the results.

• Lastly, if you wish to include your company name, then put it at the end of the title.

Key Factors : On Page & Off Page

On Page SEO

1) Title Optimization

2) Meta Tags Optimization

3) Important HTML Tags

4) Keyword Optimization & Synonyms

5) Link Optimization

6) Image Optimization

Off Page SEO

1) Directory Submission

2) Social Bookmarking Submission

3) Blog Posting

4) Article Submission

5) Press Release Submission

6) Forum Posting

7) Footer Links

8) Affiliate Marketing

9) Blog Commenting

10) RSS Feed Submission

11) CSS Submission

12) Video Submission

Need of Serach Engine Optimization

For modern businesses, having an online presence is as imperative as having a physical presence today. Want more customers? More leads? More sales? The internet is a huge marketplace and there is huge completion too. Search engines are now becoming the starting place for a product search, and they’re getting more popular. More than 70% of online consumers start their quest for a product, service or support call using a search engine.

SEO which stands for search engine optimization is the act of making ones website content more search engine friendly to make it rank higher. The central idea behind search engine optimization is to ensure a high ranking for a website in search engine result pages. It involves many techniques that allow Google and many other search engines to easily find and index your web pages. SEO helps internet marketers and online business owners build a good reputation and this in turn furthers their business prospects.

SEO is nothing but the process of implementing techniques that will have an effect of your organic (FREE) search engine rankings. This will result in more targeted traffic to your websites which in turn will result in an increased number of sales or income from your websites.

During SEO, you will come across two most important terms: ON PAGE SEO and OFF PAGE SEO

What is On PAGE SEO?

Onpage is where you work on website content. Here, sometimes you need to do changes in your source code to make it more search engine friendly.

What is Off PAGE SEO?

OffPage is where you work hard on building quality and relevant backlinks for your website. Link-building is an effort-consuming, repetitive task.

Next post will provide you more detailed knowledge on "ON PAGE SEO" and "OFF PAGE SEO"