Archive for March, 2007

SEO Tips for New Site Creation

New Sites are launched at the rate of 1 in every second approximately. But how many do you think really think about creating a search engine friendly website. Most people create a site, keep it live for few days/months or sometimes years without changing anything. Once they have consider bale business built up they hire a SEO specialist and pay huge amount of money optimizing the website.

If webmasters or site owners are proactive, they could save huge money on Web site rebuilding/redesigning if they are aware of certain search engine friendly guidelines initially.

Below are certain Tips for new site owners before making live their brand new site:

A) Minimize the use of Flash Content. Do not use Frames.

B) When creating file names use keywords. Suppose a page on Buy-Widgets will have Purchase-widget.html.

i. Use hyphens in file names not underscore if you wish to.

C) Create a page on Privacy policy and Disclaimer.

D) Create static URLs for individual user profile pages, these pages to be light and crawl able. For example http://www.domainname.com/username.html

E) Include Address or Contact number on every page of the site in the footer.

F) Validate pages with W3C CSS validation. Include the sign W3C validated on the page.

G) Use Compressed Image Format to reduce the web page weights.
i. The Total web page size must be maximum 100KB.

H) Include Content of about 300 words on every page

I) USE H1, H2, H3, H4 Tags wherever required. But just one 1 H1 tag per page

J) Use appropriate Titles & Heading describing the content

K) The Site must have text links linking to other pages. Do not make navigation in JavaScript. Make static text links to inner pages. If you are using images then give Image Alt, Title with keywords.

L) There must be a link to home page from every inner page of the site both from Logo and Home anchor.

M) Do not use extensive JavaScript in the HTML. Keep pages simple HTML, keep a tab on average load time. Remember even if the site is not very attractive it is fine but if takes longer time to load then it would not be good.

N) Use CSS instead of tables in HTML, avoid the nested table structure.

O) When linking to different pages, use the same urls. Avoid canonical urls. For example, use either http://myworld.com/ or http://www.myworld.com/ or http://www.myworld.com/index.html. Do not use all combinations of them in the HTML.

P) Use both Header Menu as well as Footer Menu.

Q) Create a Site Map. Use the word Site Map instead of Site map

R) Do not use hidden text links, comments in HTML.

S) Keep all JavaScript in the external include files

T) Keep all CSS in the external Include files.

U) Try to free the HTML page from code as much as possible.

V) Use meta name=”Robots” content=”Index, Follow” on every page of the website

W) Use XHTML format for developing web page only… (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/)

X) Do not increase the directory structure by more than 2 levels. Try to keep all pages in the root directory on the site.

Y) Please do not keep pages with no content.

Z) Do not use Meta Refresh Redirect or JavaScript Redirect to any page.

AA)Do not copy the content that is already present across any other site.

BB) Remove redundant files present in the server. It reduces the downtime in searching the file name…

CC)If a redirect needs to be placed, place a 301 permanent redirect. Using Domain Level mod_rewrite function to redirect.

DD)Kindly ensure the text of the page in the top portion of the page.

EE) The Brand Name should be visible in Big Bold Text.

More detail on the above broader points in my future posts…..

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Classified Sites & PR sites

If you are an avid internet researcher or an SEO then you surely would have found that Classified Sites and PR sites keep growing on Internet. Almost every major Internet based company has either of these sites. The similarties and differences between classified sites and PR sites, because these 2 types are the most common sites which are found on the internet and are fairly simple in business model as compared to rest of the sites.

Similarties between Classified sites and PR/ New sites:

1) Both sites depend heavily on user generated content. Classified sites accept Posts/Ads by external users & news sites accept new stories & articles.

2) Both classify the information present on the website into categories.

3) Search & Browse are 2 main features necessary in these sites to enhance user activity.

4) Revenue model is basically through subscription of content/database and Advertising.

5) Both sites need heavy online/off line promotion to gain online popularity & brand value. This is because there are already numerous websites in this domain.

6) Only Top few players, which have become an authority attract most of the traffic and revenue. There is a wide gap between new small sites & big sites.

7) Both of the sites have to depend on content marketing and syndication

8) Content on both sites are perishable.

Dissimilarities between Classified Sites and News/PR sites:

1) Content on PR/News sites are news to audience and hence can act as link bait. Content on Classified sites are basically advertisements by users.

2) Users can bookmark individual content on PR sites. Users do not have reasons to bookmark advertisements.

3) Classified sites remove the Ads/Posts every 30 days or after certain time period. PR/News sites archive content on regular basis

4) PR/News sites gain Top Organic rankings faster than classified sites, as fresh content replaces old content, which are archived by date.

5) PR/News Sites gets crawled by search engine bots frequently, faster and deeper more than classified sites. This is because their content gets refreshed very soon.

6) Classified Sites are more likely to run paid campaigns on search engines. News/PR sites generally do not advertise on search engines or on other websites.

7) News/PR sites get more organic traffic than any Classified site. PR sites are more likely to advertise off line.

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SEM & PPC Campaigns - Analysis & Reporting is the Key to Effective Management

There are lot of companies such as Pinstorm, Group M & other agencies managing Search Engine Marketing Campaigns on Google AdWords, Overture, MSN Ad center & other smaller PPC Engines.

The Key to effective management is strong reporting and use of analytical methods to mine history data and generate reports that can effectively help in better improving campaigns.

Analysis using excel is good enough for most campaigns by using built in excel features such as Pivot Table, V-look up etc.

The main benefits of analysis can be very interesting such as getting an insight into the user behaviour and their nature. For instance suppose your analysis shows that your brand term generates most clicks then your offline marketing is helping to generate more online visitors.

Also it can show that some set of keywords on your AdWords Accounts have more conversions or clicks from your content target ted campaigns. Then you could approach websites that have similar theme to these keywords for online display advertising, since you are confident of receiving quality traffic.

Similarly by digging into the keywords in your accounts & campaigns and analyzing your inferences can benefit other forms of advertising/marketing.

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Internet Businesses in India

Internet businesses in India is at growth phase, some businesses are decade old such as Naukri.com, but most are very new such as travel portals, ecommerce portals.

Online businesses succeed only with a strong revenue/business model that creates a genuine value to the consumer/user by making a strong impact in reducing the demand and supply gap in the industry.

Online businesses cannot grow just on advertising revenue that relies on worthiness of their website content. Neither it can grow by generating traffic and selling their webspace.

I am a regular reader of the latest happenings on online world, both in India and world wide. ContentSutra and Alootechie are some of the sources that provide upto date information on the latest news on Indias Online Industry.

Recently you could read about companies getting funds from various VCs for their businesses. This is the time where everyone and their mom and pop are looking to start a online businesses. We need to wait and see how many sustain and how many fall back.

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Wikipedia Installing NoFollow on External Links

This hardly matters for a SEO promoting using White Hat techniques. Also getting your post on Wikipedia is more difficult than getting 100 backlinks with PR 2-3.

SEOs would spend the same amount of effort building backlinks through article submissions/Pr submissions and persuading webmasters to post a link on their site than spend the effort in creating wikipedia posts.

You find their reasons here, this would hopefully be easier for people to post genuine articles on en.wikipedia.org

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