Digital Marketing

Showing posts with label Online seo training. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online seo training. Show all posts

Feb 17, 2010

How to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page & Get Lots of Fans


The most effective, not really difficult to implement and quite obvious ways to promote your fan page

Round 1: Create fresh content for people to want to join:

  • Aggregate your blog feed. Simply RSS allows to automatically update your fan page wall with your blog RSS. You may also want to import your blog feed to your fan page notes (for that go: “Edit page“, find “Notes” under “Application” and click “Edit“, then “Edit import settings” and at last provide your feed URL).
Promote Facebook fan page: import blog feed
  • Try Static FBML is another app to keep in mind: it adds advanced functionality to your Page using the Facebook Static FBML application. This application will add a box to your Page in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customization.
  • Add a personal note: Add your personal photos, personal welcome-videos are also great (create a short video welcoming your fans and describing what they can do on your page);
  • Provide a place for interaction/self promotion: Start a thread on your Discussion Board that allows your fans to promote their sites or inviting to share Twitter IDs and to follow each other.

Round 2: Invite your friends to join

There’s no way to invite all your friends in bulk but you can spend a few minutes to select (all) your friends and send an invitation to them;


Promote fan page: invite friends
Now, once you are done, go ahead and ask your best friends to invite people as well


Round 3: Try social ads

The best thing about Facebook advertising (well actually there are two: one is that you can pay as little as $1 per day to test it and the second one…) is that it can be very well-targeted (still, it won’t work for all niches and campaign types but sometimes it works quite well). The Facebook ad campaign can be targeted to:


  • Location;
  • Age group;
  • Sex;
  • Education;
  • Keywords;
  • Work place;
  • Relationship status;
  • Language;
  • Connections (fan page, event or group) – this means you can for example target fans of your competitor;
  • Friends’ connections:
Promote Facebook fan page: social ad

Round 4: Promote on Twitter

If you (or your friends) have solid following on Twitter, promote your Facebook fan page their.
Besides, you can link your page to your Twitter account by simply clicking this link:
Link Facebook page to Twitter
There you can select to share status updates, links, photos, notes, and events with your followers on Twitter, directly from your Facebook Page thus promoting it to your Twitter followers:


Promote fan page: Twitter

Round 5: Leverage your email contacts

Doing business and networking on the Internet, you are likely to have a huge number of contacts in your email address book, so why not take advantage of that:


  • Include your page URL in your email signature for business correspondence;
  • Include your page URL in your email signature for Customer support, customer status updates and other automated messages;
  • Leverage Gtalk status: let your facebook fan page URL display whenever your IM contact hovers over your profile name:
Promote Facebook fan page: Gtalk


Feb 15, 2010

Top 10 Firefox Addons for SEO

Firefox, currently in version 3.5.3, is a free yet highly secure search engine from Mozilla. It works on Windows, Linux and Mac and is attested by its many users, including me, to be very user friendly. What is more interesting about this search engine is that, you can customize it to fit your unique requirements through additional themes and addons. For bloggers or webmasters who are are looking to increase the traffic to their blog, search engine optimization is one of the major aspects that they have to work on. To save time and make it easy to implement most of the SEO required for websites, there are actually a number of Firefox addons for these specific purposes that are easy to download and use.

Here, we are going to list the best 10 recommended Firefox addons that you can use with your Firefox browser to make your link building and search engine optmization life simpler when searching, browsing and comparing. Using these Firefox addons will surely cut the time you spent on searching for data and give you more time optimizing your sites.

If you don’t already have Firefox installed, go grab it!

Firefox addon 01- SEO for Firefox
SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results. The data that you could view using this tool include page link data or the estimated total number of links pointing to pages in Yahoo, how many sites in Google are indexed, Alexa site rankings, the Page Rank stats (Google PageRank) as well as the number of subscribers of certain blogs.


Firefox addon 02 – SEO Quake
SEO Quake works almost the same way as the first Firefox addon but with a few twists. Very handy if you have limited time (which is lamost always the case) but you needed to do a competitor search such as in cases where you need to check a webpage’s Google PageRank, number of pages indexed by Google, MSN, number of backlinks indexed by Yahoo Site Explorer, Alexa Ranking, Domain Age, Whois and other SEO-related statistics. Once activated, it can be integrated on Google SERPs.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 03 – KGen
Keyword generator analyzes a page for keyword frequency and placement. It allows you to see what keywords are strong on a website you are visiting. Since the addon offers transfer to clipboard, it is easier to use these keywords as tags when promoting posts in social media sites or webmastering/SEO or when tagging bookmarks.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 04 – Firebug
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a number of essential development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. You can also find and edit DOM (Direct Object Model) quickly.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 05 – YSlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 06 – Foxy SEO Tool
Foxy SEO Tool is a free, open source toolbar that provides quick and easy access to a multitude of search engine functions such as Google Site, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Live Fromlinks. Also included are famous web traffic analysis sites such as Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, popular statistic aggregators like Quarkbase and WebSite Outlook. You can check a site’s listing in important directories like Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory, buzzing Web 2.0 sites such as Technocrati, Wikipedia, Digg, Delicious and links to useful network functions like Whois, Geotool, Internet Archive, etc.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 07 – Search Status
This Firefox addon allows you to display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank of any website in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 08 – Flag Fox
Flagfox is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that shows a flag icon indicating the current website’s server location. It uses relatively little resources, and works by accessing an IP address location database contained within the extension rather than relying on top-level-domain roots like “.com” or “.uk”. Clicking the icon loads Geotool, which provides a map of the location as well as more detailed information such as the ISP, city, and local time. The context menu also provides quick access to information about the country of origin, as well as the ability to lookup the domain’s registrant via Whois.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 09 – User Agent Switcher
This Firefox addon lets you switch or view the current page as in a different browser such as Internet Explorer (IE), Opera, NetScape, etc. Comes in handy when you want to check for Cross Browser Compatibility issues or how your site displays in other browsers.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Firefox addon 10 – Web Developer Toolbar
This is the most popular addon for webmasters. So I assume that it is most likely that you are already using this Firefox addon. This toolbar has all the tools that a designer would require to test the design and layout of a webpage such as in  analyzing style. It also allows you to view the site without images, shows the layout format, outlines tables, forms etc, validates the code, among the many other things that this addon can perform.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX ADDON

Feb 7, 2010

Search Engine Optimization is an Art

The search engine job is to find the content that closes matches the search. The goal of SEO is to have your website show up as high as possible in the search results. It involves editing website content, keywords and HTML.

SEARCH ENGINE optimisation is an art or an Internet marketing strategy to drive volume of traffic to a website. It is unpaid medium. More a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. Search includes image search, local search, video research and specific search. The search engine job is to find the content that closes matches the search.

The goal of SEO is to have your website show up as high as possible in the search results. It involves editing website content, keywords and HTML. Search engine optimisers are consultants market agents and will do work for you. They optimise your site by using methods such keyword stuffing, articles sniping and black hat or spamdexing. They do keyword research and find out what words people are typing in search engine. Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines all gather and release keyword data in aggregate.

If you want to increase traffic, ‘pay per click’ (PPC) advertising may be an easy option, but SEO is better option over your PPC strategies.
Website traffic is essential for more leads, more sales and more profit. Search engine optimisation helps in development of the website and attract visitors and also give the company a top ranking.

Feb 2, 2010

How to Get Website Traffic

Website traffic proves to be an extremely difficult task for webmasters looking to get the word out about their site. I bet almost all webmasters would agree that their site would be successful or their idea would generate a ton of money if only they had enough web traffic. Well today is your lucky day because after you learn these five tips you will be on your way to generating web traffic to your site so you can make money or provide your visitors with what they want and expect from visiting your site.

Tip #1: Article Marketing
To generate traffic to your site write a minimum of 300 word articles that explain your site and how it will benefit the visitor or if you are selling a product set up the article to provide advice or techniques similar to those explained or facilitated through your product. After your articles are written, submit them to article directories (like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, articlesbase.com). You should write at least 5 articles initially then follow up with an article a day for the highest level of efficiency or at least a new article a week.

Tip #2: Backlink Building
Getting links on sites outside of your own is a strong way to move up search rankings which subsequently leads to traffic increases. There are services such as those on submitedge.com that will submit your site to link directories to get links built up, but keep in mind that a ton of links in a short period may cause search engines to penalize your site’s rank for link spam.

Search for websites similar to your own and propose a link exchange to their webmaster because search engines love when similar sites link to each other. Also, type in Google “link:http://www.competitorssite.com” replacing “competitorssite” with the address of top sites for your site’s topic on Google to see what sites link to them. Once you see what sites have links leading to a competitor’s site, seek to get links on those sites as well, copy the competition and do better.

Tip #3: Search Engine Optimization
This is the best method for those without a budget who want to get traffic without spending a lot of money or using services to submit your site to an assortment of directories. The first thing is to set up meta tags on your site. Search Google for a meta tag generator and make sure you use targeted keywords in your description, title and keyword tags in your html head.

Once that is done seek to have 5-7% of your site’s content including targeted keywords, this is known as your page’s keyword density. Follow tip #1 and tip #2 which will boost your website’s rank along with bringing in traffic. This is a time consuming method but once you get on page one of Google, your site will have countless traffic.

Tip #4: Social Bookmarking
This is a relatively new method of obtaining web traffic and can be extremely effective when done correctly. There are a variety of sites that provide “social bookmarks.” Social bookmarks are simply enough when a visitor to your site likes your sites content and goes to a social bookmarking site (like digg.com, del.icio.us, etc.) and they tag your site’s content with keywords in which others can then find your site through that tag.

The best thing to do to get social bookmark tags from visitors is to place bookmark scripts to your site which can be obtained at the Digg website and addthis.com for delicious bookmark buttons. Your site can initially be submitted to Digg.com yourself and to many other social bookmarks through onlywire.com, which is a site that allows you to submit your site to a dozen or more social bookmarking sites.

Tip #5: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
The last tip of the article is paying for web traffic. This can be very expensive, but if done correctly can produce revenue far beyond your advertising costs. The leader in PPC advertising is Google AdWords. AdWords allows users to set up a small ad set up around keywords that are displayed as sponsored links when a user searches for a topic on Google. Keep in mind that the higher your budget the more traffic you will get, and that low budgets make it very difficult for your ad to produce conversions.

Secondly, keep in mind that extremely broad keywords likely have a lot of competition for ad slots and would be very expensive, so seek to have highly targeted, tightly targeted keyword phrases that target visitors that have the highest potential of becoming customers.

Jan 26, 2010

Top 25 Websites for every SEO

1. http://www.seomoz.org – seomoz have not held back over the last year and 9 months, most notably the addition of Linkscape and Rand’s constant travelling have done nothing but push this company to the top of the industry.

2. http://www.linkdiagnosis.com – this website has also come a long way since I first started using it back in early 08, this link analysis tool is actually quite accurate although the results are only taken from Yahoo, link building can be very effective using this site

3. http://www.twitter.com – Twitter was a must in my previous list and it’s a must now. Any budding SEOs can learn a lot from following some of the leaders in the industry and seasoned SEOs can get a lot of good stories aggregated straight to your twitter home with absolutely no effort.

4. http://www.wolf-howl.com – A search blog with a different stance from many other industry leaders, not always agreeing with Google tactics and methods Michael Gray provides a good contrast in perspective and a sometimes light hearted Friday afternoon read.

5. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com – The official Google webmasters blog, there’s always a lot of activity happening over at the big G, it pays to keep on top of developments.

6. http://www.huomah.com/dojo – I can’t stress enough how good this website is, recently voted as number 1 for the “best paid subscription SEM community” by readers at Top Rank Blog. I’ve spoken to Dave (the ninja boss) many times and the amount of SEO he knows is scary!

7. http://www.sphinn.com – Sphinn is the equivalent to Digg for anything search related, the community has continued to grow over the last few years and although some recent technical decisions have caused some negative chatter – it still feels ace.

8. http://www.seobook.com – Aaron Wall has been in this business a long time and SEO Book provides great resources for SEOs around the world, I especially like the tool “Rank Checker” for snapshot views into ranking performance.

9. http://raven-seo-tools.com – The Raven site provides excellent SEO tools in the form of benchmarking, I used the site in it’s early days and it’s continued to get better and better – solid SEO blog too.

10. http://www.seo-browser.com – It’s important to know how search engines view your website, using SEO Browser can easy display what’s working and what’s not, very useful for performing site audits.

11. http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp – A lot of good SEO questions have been answered by Matt Cutts and co through the video format on YouTube, great watching, even if you just want to find out what T-shirt colour Matt wears.

12. http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories – Link building from authority based directories does still hold SEO value – fact. Aviva Directory created this list a while a go but many listings are still valuable, decent bookmark to have.

13. http://www.google.com/insights/search – Alas another Google link but extremely important for identifying keyword opportunities on generic and local based levels, although take a pinch of salt with the data provided.

14. http://searchengineland.com – one of the most important search blogs online with great insights and in depth discoveries, it would be rude not to include these boys.

15. http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog – This website has grown in authority and reputation over the last few years with much deserves. Constantly providing good SEO blog posts, free e-books and valuable insights, you’d be crazy not to be subscribed to this blog.

16. http://www.seounique.com/blog – I felt the need to add my blog on the list because I do run tests which may provide insights, I’m by no means like the others on this list but I’d appreciate the signup to my feed!

17. http://www.seroundtable.com – Great site for breaking SEO news stories or developments within the industry, plus they have great resources and a forum

18. http://www.bruceclay.com/blog – Solid SEO advice and one to keep on top of.

19. http://www.reelseo.com – Video SEO is something that’s been “around” for a while but never implemented to the full potential. Learn how to maximise this at this great site.

20. http://www.mybloglog.com – Essential for bloggers and online community builders.

21. http://technorati.com – I don’t think I need to explain why you should be aware of this site, news is information, knowledge is power.

22. http://econsultancy.com – An absolute must for any internet marketer. Community content, breaking stories, industry insights and a gazillion more things related to SEO.

23. http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/ – I’ve been in contact with Jeffery for a long time and his blog has never stopped producing quality SEO insights, theories and discoveries over the last 20 months, I suggest those of you who aren’t signed up do so!

24. http://www.google.com/analytics – This is quite an obvious one really, analytics packages are the backbone to any good online marketing campaign as they show the results and RIO for campaigns. The positives include extended insights and functions, landscape benchmarking, in depth data breakdown and its free!

25. http://socialmention.com/ – Brands are becoming more important in natural search and from social aspects, this website helps you monitor brand mentions online through various channels, best thing about this site – it’s free, unlike competitors.

Jan 21, 2010

How universal search is changing the SEO industry

Universal search a.k.a Blended search is something that every person (who depends on internet for his daily and intellectual needs) experience every time he submits a query on his favorite search engine. The idea was first thrown in the year 2001 by Marissa Mayer, VP – Search Products & User Experience at Google who also wrote an article on the topic back in May 2007, when Google officially rolled out the concept on its search engine – Google.com. Today we see all major search engines have adopted this revolutionary approach to make search experience even richer, and yet simpler for the user who is looking for most relevant information on web in the least possible time.

But what exactly is Blended Search?

As the name suggests, Blended search is the process of blending or mixing content from multiple sources and displaying them together on one page. When the idea was launched around two and a half years ago, the main sources of the content were – news websites, videos, images, local and books which are still independent vertical search engines. But today, we have started seeing more results from social networks like facebook & twitter and press release website which are updated more frequently than any other online media.

Universal Search is also known as Blended Search

Universal Search is also known as Blended Search. Click on image to expand

And how is it changing the SEO industry?

Earlier, website owners used to optimize their website with only focus on relevant content so that search engines can rank their websites on top of search results. It doesn't work the same these days now since search engines do not only rely on your website content. Instead, they have started looking for varied sources of information where they can find more relevant and updated content. News websites like CNN & Reuters; Social networking sites like Facebook & twitter; and Press release website like prweb.com etc are some of the sources that search engines rely heavily on for their content.

Please note that this doesn't mean you should stop optimizing your website content. On the contrary, you need to start updating your website content more frequently now since search engines love new, updated & relevant content. This is probably why many company blogs and press releases have become so popular these days.

But is it really changing the SEO industry?

Yes, it is. Because people have really started publishing their content on all the types of online media which has slight chance of being crawled by search engines and get ranked on first page. Here are the few examples -

  1. Image results – All the search engines already have image search as an independent search engine which drives more than 10% of traffic for website owners. People have been focusing on optiming their images by using alt tags and more proper image names for quite some time now.
  2. Videos & Slideshows- YouTube, owned by Google has the highest number of videos uploaded on the web. People have started publishing a video presentation of their company or products demo. They, then promote it on YouTube by writing comments, adding ratings and sharing with more people so that it gets enough popularity to get ranked on first page of search results. Then these videos or presentations are pushed on to other popular aggregator sites like Vimeo, Slideshare etc.
  3. News Results – Press & news websites are the most hit upon source by website owners. There has been an evident surge in press releases published in last few years by website owners. The only reason being the importance given to such sites by Google.
  4. Local business listings – Google, Bing and Yahoo show their respective maps to show local business listings. Hence, every website owner makes it a point that their business is submitted in local business listing directory. They strive hard to promote it by adding more ratings, comments and sharing with friends & existing clients.
  5. Three blogs a week has become a reality. Website owners do not miss a single news however trivial it is, just to have something new up on their company blog. [Don't worry this post is not one of those ]
  6. Social media marketing (SMM) – SEO Companies have started offering a new service called 'Social media marketing' wherein they promote their brand on social networking websites like – Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Myspace etc. They do it by submitting their brand name, linking it to their website, building network of friends and by commenting on other blogs.
  7. Google Product search – Online shop owners are utilizing this feature to promote their products on increase sales from Google organic search result. Google offers merchants a separate place to submit their products individually with prices and description. Google then shows their products on top of search results for the relevant query.

Clearly, the focus on just your website's content is the thing of the past. In order to maximize your chances to be on the top of the search engine rankings and drive more traffic, you have to be on your toes all the time and exploit every source of data that major search engines scour today for their search results.

Jan 3, 2010

Going Beyond Banner Advertising

A major stumbling block for many internet marketing newbies is the false belief that the placement of a banner ad on a web page is all that’s required to immediately start making a few sales. This is a false premise.

There are a couple of key principles of internet marketing that can prevent any newbie from falling into this enticing trap.

No. 1) Choose A Relevant Affiliate Program

Let’s hope at least that as a newbie you have chosen an affiliate program to promote that has relevance to your online interests.

As an example, if you have placed a website online that discusses the care of young infants, it is certainly easy enough to find affiliate programs that deal with infant health, nutrition, clothing, or even security, such as baby monitors.

The affiliate program doesn’t have to exactly match your website content, but it should be very closely related. If your site is about infants why on earth would you want to promote rock videos? Only perhaps, if you think your own child is a future musical prodigy.

Yet, many first-time internet entrepreneurs make just such a mistake. Even an affiliate program that deals with teens or preschoolers is not close enough, because the people coming to your site, presumably are not seeking information about those subjects. Tiny infants are not preschoolers.

Of course you might make a sale or two, by virtue of blind luck, but that is not the way to run an internet business.

You want at all times to be lean and focused. Don’t waste effort promoting anything that is going to be a hard sell. Your effort is best spent elsewhere.

No. 2 ) Write Informative Articles and Testimonials

Using the same example above, let us propose that you have wisely chosen an affiliate program that relates to young infants. Now what? You’ve had your banners up for a month or two, and you just aren’t making many sales. This despite the fact that your site receives a reasonable amount of traffic.

One of the problems you’ve unwittingly created for yourself, is that banner ads are too easily ignored. They are like background music.

Each hour online, anyone who surfs the web is going to be bombarded with banner ads, such that they become invisible. And it doesn’t matter even if the banner ads are of excellent quality.

They are still banner ads.

Text-based ads are a much more effective advertising method, although at first glance it would seem exactly the opposite. But, let’s look at this idea more closely.

Banner ads say out loud that you’re attempting to sell something. One of the major precepts of internet marketing is that people DO NOT WANT TO BE SOLD.

People are online to gather knowledge. Even if they are online as a time for recreation and pleasure, they are still interested in learning.

Human beings are innately curious. This is a plus for you, as you attempt to make a sale.

Here’s how.

One way to introduce text-ads into your web site is to write articles. Or to write a review of the very product that you’re trying to sell. { you aren’t trying to market something you haven’t purchased yourself, are you? }

Testimonials are an extremely effective advertising device.

That’s why so many web merchants place testimonials on their site, and frequently on the very first page of the site, where the testimonials are most likely to be viewed.

Also, testimonials are a form of “aggressive” advertising, that doesn’t look aggressive at all. This is because testimonials deliver valuable information to the consumer. Thus, the consumer is more likely to make a purchase because they never form the negative impressive in their mind, that they are being SOLD something.

A person who is feeling negative is much less likely to decide to make a purchase.

~~~~~~

One final point before we conclude this article. Banner ads are not going to disappear. They can still serve a useful purpose. Sometimes a banner ad or two, can help dress-up a drab,
uninspired-looking site. You don’t want your website to resemble a plain white term paper.

A little sizzle is okay. But, NEVER let banner ads be your main advertising method.

Also, if every other affiliate is using the same banner ads, then the impactof the ads on your site will be further lessened. The key to online marketing success is to be unique.

Online, as opposed to the offline world, uniqueness is an endearing trait.

Don’t plaster those same ads all over your pages everyone else in your marketing niche is using.Write your own articles. The customer will become comfortable that you know what you are
talking about. This gives them a reason to return. { a key factor as people rarely make a purchase the first time they ever visit a website. }

Stay on your toes, don’t become complacent, and never miss an opportunity to improve the content, relevance, and usefulness of your site.

If you have a thought or an idea about something. Then place it online. You’re always more likely to receive a click-through from a well-written informative article than from some flashy banner ad. Give the customer more of what they want, without trying to sell them.

That is the simple key to increasing the overall marketing effectiveness of your website.

Dec 20, 2009

SEO advice: URL Canonicalization

Before I start collecting feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, I want to talk a little bit about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc. so that we’re all on the same page.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

  • www.example.com
  • example.com/
  • www.example.com/index.html
  • example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?
A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Q: I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head?
A: Actually, it’s on purpose. I noticed that several months ago but decided not to change it on my end or ask anyone at Google to fix it. I may add a 301 eventually, but for now it’s a helpful test case.

Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?
A: Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too. Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct).

Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?
A: Nope.

Q: I have some pages in the supplemental results that are old now. What should I do?
A: I wouldn’t spend much effort on them. If the pages have moved, I would make sure that there’s a 301 redirect to the new location of pages. If the pages are truly gone, I’d make sure that you serve a 404 on those pages. After that, I wouldn’t put any more effort in. When Google eventually recrawls those pages, it will pick up the changes, but because it can take longer for us to crawl supplemental results, you might not see that update for a while.

May 20, 2009

How To Optimize A Dynamic Website

Internet technologies and e-commerce are advanced now and still developing day by day. As a result people prefer to have a dynamic website for their businesses or their online presence. So for some webmasters or new search engine optimizers who have experience in doing SEO for a simple static websites becomes necessary to know also about how to optimize a Dynamic Website?

For successful search engine optimization (SEO) of a dynamic website it is require to have some complex search engine technology and methods that are substantially different and much more sophisticated than the SEO techniques used for ordinary, more conventional "static" web sites.

In this article you can find some useful and important tips for how to optimize a dynamic website but first I would like to describe about what are Dynamic Websites?

Introduction to Dynamic Websites:
Now days often business websites are dynamic means that the web pages are dynamically built pages that allow user interaction and online shopping cart is an example for that.

Dynamic websites are websites whose pages are generated on the fly and usually built with a programming language such as ASP, PHP or JAVA. Often Dynamic sites are database-driven means that the site content is stored in a database and the dynamic code "pulls" the content from a database.

Problems in indexing Dynamic URLs:

It is really difficult to get dynamic web sites properly indexed in the major search engines unless they are professionally optimized. Even most search engines claim that they now index the majority of dynamic web sites but still only in some cases and it is limited to a number of URLs.

One of the most important reason behind having problem with dynamic sites to get indexed by major search engines is that Search engines often consider a dynamic URL as a set of infinite number of links.

Now days often dynamic web pages are created "on the fly" with various technologies such as ASP (Active Server Pages), Cold Fusion technology, JSP (Java Server Pages) and so on. Now all these pages are user friendly and works very will for real users actually visiting the web site, but they usually create a mess with most search engine spiders.

The main reason behind it is because all dynamic pages do not even exist until a user actually goes through a query or variable that generates the pages. Often search engine spiders are not programmed to select or choose any of query or variables. In this way, those dynamic pages do not get generated and that is why do not get to be indexed.

One of the main difficulties with search engine spiders are that they cannot read and are not trained to understand any of the dynamic databases of URLs which either contain a query string delimited by a question mark or any other database characters (#&*!%) that refers to as "spider traps." Once a search engine spider falls into any of those traps, it usually spells bad news for that dynamic web site.

As a direct consequence that most search crawlers have significant problems "reading" any level into a typical dynamic database, most of these search engine spiders have been programmed to initially detect and then ignore most dynamic URLs.

How to optimize a dynamic website to get it indexed by major search engines:

1. Using URL Rewriting Tools or Softwares - There are some URL Rewriting Tools and software available on the web that converts a dynamic URL to Static URLs. So it is better to use these tools to convert a dynamic URL of your site to Static URL.

For an example- Exception Digital Enterprise Solutions offers software that helps to change the dynamic URLs to static ones.

In this way, changing a dynamic URL to static one helps it to get easily indexed by search engines.

2. Using CGI/Perl Scripts - Using CGI/Perl scripts is one of the easiest ways to get your dynamic sites indexed by search engines. Path_Info or Script_Name is a variable in a dynamic application that contains the complete URL address.

In order to correct this problem, it is needed to write a script that will pull all the information before the query string and set the rest of the information equal to a variable.

When you are using CGI/Perl scripts, the query part of the dynamic URL is assigned a variable. So, in the above example "?id=586" is assigned a variable, say "X".
The dynamic URL www.xyz.com/abcproduct.asp?id=586

will change to- www.xyz.com/productname/A

through CGI/Perl scripts that can be easily indexed by the search engines.

3. Managing Web Servers-

Apache Server - Apache has a rewrite module that enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. This module however, isn't installed with Apache software by default, so you need to check with your web hosting company for installation.

ColdFusion - It is needed to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so that the "?" in a query string is replaced with a '/' and pass the value to the URL.

4. Static Page linked dynamic Pages - Creating a Static Page that linked to an array of dynamic Pages becomes very effective especially in case you are the owner of a small online store. Initially just create a static page linking to all your dynamic pages. And optimize this static page for search engine rankings.

Make sure to include a link title for all the product categories, place appropriate "alt" tag for the product images along with product description containing highly popular keywords relevant to your business. Submit this static page to various major search engines including all the dynamic pages as per the guidelines for search engine submission.

In this way if you are going to optimize a dynamic website then all above tips can help you to successfully optimize your dynamic website and your site will get indexed by major search engines without facing any problem and you have a great chance to take your site among top ranks on major search engines.


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