Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

If you are looking for some authentic information on SEO, Link Building, this is the right article. The information & advice written here is 100% accurate and can be implemented without second thoughts. This is a SEO, Link Building Advice given by Google, Yahoo themselves.

Google, Yahoo has come a long way from the days it used ignore webmasters when Google started out to helping webmasters/site owners with optimizing websites. Google has created a special channel of communication with webmasters/site owners for helping them design search engine friendly websites to make information available to users easily.

Link Building

Google clarifies Link exchange is fine as long as it does not look excessive and spam. This means the link exchange schemes & programs deliberately increasing links in attempt to achieve ranking is bad. Buying and selling links is bad. Any marketing done excessively is bad for websites. The discussion on this on webmasterworld can be found over here. Google in its Webmaster guidelines had stated that any link exchanges schemes, buying, selling links are not good for website rankings. As per Google the links are editorial votes to webpages and have to given naturally to add value to visitor.

A) Google introduces Paid Link Reporting service, find mattcutts story over here and here. Link selling sites loose the ability to transfer PageRank.

B) Google Introduces No-Follow attribute

C) Link Building with Google Bookmarks

D) Link Baiting Advice by Google & by MattCutts

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engines are interested in providing rich, useful & relevant content to end users. This can happen only when site owners publish rich content & design a search engine friendly site.

Search engines would want to index all the content provided by site owners. It is therefore in their Business Interest to help webmasters provide more content to search engines. Search Engines therefore encourage webmasters to publish more content online both quality & quantity.

Website owners are looking to drive traffic from Search Engines by optimizing websites. Search Engines are looking to provide relevant, quality results to end users. Therefore it is a Win-Win solution for both. The only glitch is Spam.. Spam is defined as any activity where this equation is disturbed.

Search Engine spam is defined as any activity by website owner which is in the business interest of webmaster but not in business interest of Search Engine. However there is no such thing as “Webmaster Spam” when the site owner’s business interest is not protected by search engines.

SEO Tips by Google

• SEO Basics
• Google Sitemaps
• Using Robots Meta Tag
• All about Robots.txt
• Quality Guidelines for Webmasters
• Duplicate Content Caused by Url
• Understand Duplicate Content
• SEO for Flash Files
• Server Location and SEO
• Using Google Webmaster Central Tools
• New Robots Meta Tag check: X-Robots Tag and Unavailable_after Meta tag
• Canonical Urls
• Google Webmaster Help Center

Some of the active channels the information & Tools online are:

A) Google Webmaster Central

B) Google Webmaster Discussion Group

C) Google Sitemaps

SEO Tips by Yahoo

Yahoo.com also offers extensive help and awareness program for webmasters for optimizing websites for higher ranking on search engines. In some areas like Dynamic Url rewriting they offer more advanced help than Google.com

• Basic SEO on Yahoo
• Ranking Factors on Yahoo
• Yahoo Webmaster Guildelines
• Yahoo Site Explorer & Sitemaps
• How Yahoo Handles Redirection
• Reporting Duplicate content through Urls & Faqs on Dynamic Urls. WMW Discussions on dynamic urls in yahoo is very useful
• Removing Urls from Search Index
• Yahoo Store Help

Web Master Tools offered by Yahoo

1) Yahoo Site EXplorer

2) Yahoo Search Blog

This is an article which is worth bookmarking for all SEO, SEM Managers, as the resources listed has to be referred by everyone in this field.

The golden fact is everyone (Search Marketing world) is aware of it but very very few people have the patience to constantly observe & learn for maintaining their website rankings on Top of Search Engines.

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In Pay Per Click Marketing through Google, Yahoo, MSN advertising is done on search and content websites. Users type in queries and find sponsored results for each keyword. Users then click on the Ads based on their liking.

In display marketing the websites you advertise on, provide extensive details like quality of traffic on their website, as a part of media kit. For example information on user’s geography breakup, economic class break up, age group breakup, gender breakup etc. However search engines never provide such details to advertisers. At the max they give search volumes, competition volumes, estimated clicks for each keyword, geography and ofcourse the hot keyword trends in the market.

In countries like India, where Google market share is about 80% and with Alexa rank in Top 3, you can safely assume all demography of people browse Google.com.

The keywords driving traffic to your website can give a lot of information about the nature of audience present in that particular market.

• Group campaigns, adgroups based on theme, product.

• Target each set of keywords in each location, content, language, Ad Scheduling.

Let’s discuss with an example of shopping site. Assuming shopping site extensively advertise on all products, in each location separately. Just by looking at your campaigns, you can identify:

1. The best performing location that generates traffic

2. The best performing product for each location

3. The least performing product for each location.

4. Location wise serious buyers can be identified, Looking at Avg time spent for each campaign in Analytics,

5. Time range with maximum activity on the site. Users are active from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm or throughout the day?

6. Which product page has highest bounce rate? Look at Campaign/Adgroup wise Bounce rate.

7. Which location has maximum repeat customers? Look at % New Visit for every campaign

8. Judge the competition in the market. Competition in Market is directly proportional to competition in PPC bidding.

9. Identify seasonal changes by change in traffic, location wise.

10. For B2B products or High Value products, if majority of conversions take place from content network. Quality of users buying your products is quality of users browsing those content sites.

11. Best location that generates maximum sales, you can do this if you set up E-Commerce Revenue Tracking in Google Analytics.

Your PPC Account can act as a pulse for your online business.

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Online Marketing Industry is very new compared to other industries including Information technology and Software development. People working in this industry especially successful people have some unique characteristics vis-à-vis other industries. Some of the qualities unique to the people working in this field are:

1) Innovative Skills: Believe it or not this is the industry which basically runs on innovation & new ideas. Every innovation can help a company grow only till it is widely followed and copied by everybody else.

a. This industry is an IP intensive industry, IP (intellectual property) is the key asset to any company operating in this industry. Here companies do not have inventory or physical assets; it thrives and grows by knowledge pool and talent of its people.

b. Therefore people who can think out of the box is essential in this industry.

c. The best example is Google & Yahoo; both the companies have a place in history only because they created great products for end users. They are popular not because of advertising or marketing, but because of the popularity of their innovative products.

2) Knowledge Skills: Technical know-how and methodology of working is very essential in this industry. The ever changing new trends in technology make it imperative for professionals working in this field to have latest knowledge to have technological advantage over others. For example Web 2.0, AJAX etc..

3) Marketing Skills: To efficiently market your online products with ROI oriented approach is very essential for your business. Deciding the right mix of media and external communication is the essential job of any online marketing individual. Manage, Monitor & constantly optimize campaigns to drive right traffic to the website and efficiently monetize it are the important skills needed for the individual.

The above qualities are some of the main qualities a person must have working in an online industry. However the most important aspect is to understand and believe in the overall vision of the company, the bigger picture which the company aims to reach. Consider the below example:

Compare a scenario where a person is walking today, tomorrow he starts to walk faster, 3rd day he starts to Jog, 4^th day he starts to run faster. Similarly there is another person who is walking today, 2^nd day he cycles, 3^rd day he moves in a two wheeler, 4^th day he drives a car. In the second case the person has grown while as in first case the person is in the same state but operating faster. Companies and individuals are also same. Most companies tend to operate in the same fashion but more efficiently as they progress, such companies were good in the traditional industries such as banking and finance however in online industries which are IP intensive they would soon die. The real growth happens to companies which follow the second path by moving up the value chain and not just offering a customer a better product but also to create a whole new set of customer base

Marketing, Knowledge & Other skills can make you No.1 in the game, but you need Vision, Innovation, out of the box thinking to Lift the Game to different level. Google was able to think Big, which clearly the other players lacked, this is the main reason why Google is in leadership position and is able to define the game.

Most online companies follow the traditional businesses and follow the Method 1 explained above. They have an idea, implement it, become successful and then want to become efficient in repeating it. They run out of innovation and startup spirit to create new things. They become busy implementing the same idea everywhere they go, even though the whole world has copied it. This is exactly Yahoo has been doing until recently they changed the organization structure to think differently.

But Google has been following the second path, they started thinking bigger and broader. They ventured into Radio, Newspaper, TV, and whole lot of acquisitions.

They bought Youtube, DoubleClick, partnered with myspace and other major online players.

This is the main reason why Google surpassed Microsoft to be the No.1 Brand in the world is less than decade of time, which Microsoft took almost 25 years to build it.

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Yahoo Search Marketing is very new in India after it parted ways with MSN in sometime June 2006

Yahoo launched its Ad program In India with new Interface for Advertisers to manage their campaigns and track/monitor results performance.

The Main features of YSM are:

1) Users add mainly Ads in YSM not keywords. This means that campaign is sorted by Text Ads

2) There is Advance Match (similar to broad/exact/phrase match in Adwords) & Content Match for every Text Ad.

3) Set Maximum position 1 for all Ads, this would automatically increase your CPC to give your Ad #1 on search results

4) Gives our your competitor bids and Top 3 bidders for your keyword

5) Generate daily, monthly, weekly reports on keyword performance.

6) Campaign Settings, Activate/Deactivate Campaign, Url, Category of Campaign.

7) Billing Report on predefined this month & last month stats.

The above are the main features on the YSM system. For more latest info you could visit the YSM blog

My personal opinion is that a company that is looking to compete with Google has to come with a system that is comparable by benefits & features vis-a-vis competitors.

As an Google Adwords user the main things that are visibly lacking in the system which catches your attention are:

1) No Conversion Tracking. How does yahoo justify users expenditure on their network without being able to track campaign effectiveness. This shows Yahoo is concerned about earning their revenue more than caring about users money.

2) No Advance Keyword/Ad Text editing. You cannot track down poor performing keywords & remove them. Similarly Text Ads.

3) No place for Image Ads. With content targeting options, having a Image targeting is a necessary feature.

4) No way to generate customized reporting tool. There is only a standard reports that can be generated.

5) If there are more than 1 campaign then there is no provision to find cumulative costs, clicks, bills etc..

6) There is a need to create an Ad every time your add a new keyword. This increases the time of the advertiser.

These are main features that are clearly visible in the account and definitely not helping the advertisers.

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Yahoo Pipes is definitely the most innovative product to be released in major scale in recent times.

This is a tool using which you can generate customized content by mixing RSS feeds in any order. You could send the output of one feed as input source into another.

For example you could create customized Pipes to suit your users needs and generate content that can be very useful to your audience. Hence can be a great value addition to your auidence.

Create a new section in your website where you can extract data from various related websites and create mashups and throw results to users. This data can be published on new web pages. This will help generate new unique fresh content not available anywhere on Internet and getting refreshed regularly.

Another way is to send these mashups again as RSS feeds which can be subscribed by users. These can be tracked and monitored to know its performance.

This is a wonderful tool for bloggers, webmasters who are constantly looking for fresh content to be published on their sites.

If you own a huge sites having traffic in millions you would definitely have an idea of the exact needs of your end users. These can met by creating mashups to generate most popular data users are looking for on your site. Hence you could increase the stickiness of the website.

This would be of major help to Technology NEWS sites, Real Estate Sites & all major Web 2.0 sites.

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