Is Reciprocal Linking really useful

How useful is Reciprocal Linking

We had a big debate in my office last week regarding the effects of Reciprocal Linking. I just thought it might be the question in most of the minds of the optimizers today.

“Is Reciprocal Linking really useful???”

If you ask to the SEO community the instant reaction will be “Yes”, but not as before.

So what type of Strategy changes we need to adopt for making Reciprocal Linking bit effective:

There were days when reciprocal linking was useful, some webmasters use to link everything that would link back, even if there was no relevancy from site to site. In the recent years due to advancements in Search Major Google’s Algo, many of those reciprocal links were not as reciprocal as they used to be, as other webmasters became savvier and realized there was likely no value in these links.

With this being the case, if you have a website with more number of reciprocal links pointing back to your reciprocal websites, there might be few questions in your mind. Should I dump all the links or should I check for the links which don’t reciprocate and remove those.

The best possible solution would be removing the links which are irrelevant to your website and inform all webmasters that their links are to be dropped.

Linking Strategies are changed don’t always look for 100 % reciprocal ratio instead look for 30 – 80 % which shows the search engines you are linking for your end user and not necessarily for reciprocation.

Optimize your images for Search – Search Engine Optimization tips for Image Optimization:

Optimize your images for Search

It is really painful to sit and wait till the images load on the webpage. Especially in the scenario where websites are built on Web 2.0 techniques, you have only got a couple of seconds before your user hit that back button….

 

 

 

Here are 10 quick tips for decreasing the load time on your images and graphics.

 

1. Use Height and Width (Size) Attributes.

 

Example: width=”144″ height=”259″

 

Every time a browser loads a webpage it looks for the height and width attributes (size) of each image in your html code so it knows how to lay out the text and the graphics on that page. When the proper attributes are used, the browser loads the text before the graphics. If you don’t use the attributes, it causes a delay waiting for the browser to download the images first and then lay out the text. The browser has to play catch-up game. It can’t load text onto the screen until it has figured out the exact size of the graphics.

 

2. Size Your Image Correctly

 

Use an image editor to change the size of the image to the correct dimensions first. Then use the correct size attributes in your html. By resizing the image before you plug it into your html code, the file size will be smaller and the browser will load it quicker.

 

3. Animations

 

Animations are attention getters, but they quickly become annoying. They also slow down the loading of your page. Limit the number of animated graphics on your page and set your animation at a specific number of repetitions rather than allowing them to loop endlessly.

 

4. Use the Correct Image Format

If your image is simple with a small numbers of colors try converting it to a gif format. Good choices for this are clipart, bullets, buttons, charts and such. Not all images are suited for the gif format. Complex images, photos or those with enhancements such as reflections and drop shadows don’t display well in this format. The jpg format is suitable for complex images with lots of color variations.

 

5. Slice Those Images

 

Image slicing is a technique used to breakdown a large image into smaller pieces to make it load faster.

 

6. Limit the Number of Graphics you Place on Each Page.

 

If your pages are loading too slowly, consider removing some of the images. Keep only those that absolutely necessary.

 

7. Use Thumbnails

 

Use a java script to display a thumbnail and load the larger image only when the reader rolls their mouse over the thumbnail.

 

8. Browser Cache

 

Graphics and text are stored in what’s called cache on your hard drive. This makes it easier and quicker to load files that are displayed in your browser. It loads them from the cache rather than over the net each and every time, if it’s available. To improve your visitors experience, take advantage of their browser cache. The best way to do this is by not putting identical images in more than one folder, subfolder or directory on your server. If the browser always calls the image from the same folder, it loads much quicker.

 

9. Optimize Your Images

 

Optimizing your images is a great way to reduce the load time. Greater percentages of optimization may leave your images blotchy with speckled blocks of color. It will often make your colors look washed-out and you may lose some of the fine details.

 

10. Progressive Optimization

 

A sneaky little trick we can use is to select progressive settings when you’re optimizing your images. This doesn’t really make your images load faster; however, they do load first at a very low resolution and continue to load progressively, with more detail, until they are fully loaded.

 

Your visitor at least has something to view and content to read while the loading process finishes up.

Don’t loose your rankings in Search for the sake of Revamping:

Web Portal Redesigning and Revamping is something you cant avoid as the user need and the meaning for the portal to the targeted audience keeps on changing its mandatory to revamp the portal. But we often loose out in Search Engine rankings while we revamp our site. Let me list some of the essential things to be considered before revamp so that we don’t loose much:

 

• Check the Sections / Categories that are removed from the Portal – List down the pages that are waiting to be deleted.
• Check the Keywords affixed to the particular pages that are in plan for deletion –Check the ranking for the particular keywords in major search engines.
• Check out the Internal Links that we are going to loose because of the page deletion
• Check the alternative URLs that are assigned to be redirected to the deleted pages. Use 301 Permanent Re-direction.
• Check if the Site Architecture is changing. Plan based on the new Site Architecture
• Check out the pages that have prominence in the new Site Architecture. You’re your URL Structuring based on that.
• Check the loss in Internal Links to each page and make a plan for the compensation so that we don’t loose a lot due to revamp.
• Check the Title tags and Meta tags for the pages that are changing. Ensure that the pages are tagged properly based on the Keyword Architecture after the revamp.
• Check the Images/ Graphics and their corresponding tags, so that we don’t loose the traffic from them after revamp.
• Ensure that none of the page hits 404 Error after revamp. Ensure that the URLs which are deleted are redirected to the corresponding pages in the new structure

 

These are some of the factors that are to be considered before revamping any portal. Inspite of considering all these factors there will be a drop in Search in traffic when ever the Site Architecture changes radically. But if we consider these factors and manage them effectively Search Engine crawlers will locate the new pages and get our rankings back immediately.

 

 

Follow me in Twitter @ Balaji

 

Make it Unique, Content the key for Search Engine Rankings – SEO

Content the key for Search Engine Rankings

Content is always the king to make your site appear in SERPs. Google and most Search Engines love content that are fresh and unique to the internet. Search Engines still lacks quality content for various searches happening, so Search Engines always looks for some unique fresh content to throw up when searched for the particular keywords.

 

 If you are running a portal for Business say a News portal or any Information portal, it becomes very difficult to provide the content unique and fresh to the internet as you always rely on Third party news agencies which supply the news. The ultimate problem is almost all the News & Information portals get the content from the top news providers, so the same content floods across different portals. This really makes news articles from new Portals or Portals without proper architecture almost out of the SERPs.

 How can we handle such Situation???

For this we can’t write every story fresh and unique which will be really a time consuming and a tedious task for the Editors. The simple solution will be don’t create unique content atleast make the content look like unique for Search Engines. Edit the Article title and give a fresh new title this will solve fifty percent of your problem. Change the Image alt to suit for your title. It would be better to Edit atleast 100 + words of your article to make that look fresh, as Google treats this as a different article atleast if there is 100 words change (I am quoting this is out of my personal experience).

With this you can relax a bit, these changes will tend Google to atleast look at your website without unique content.

Managing www.xxx.com and xxx.com – Domain name Vs the Universal Sub Domain

Domain name Vs Universal Subdomain

Last week one of my friend was asking me about managing www.xxx.com and xxx.com,  Few days back one of my blog follower raised the same question through chat, so i felt like answering the question through this blog post.

For eg: xxx.com is the domain name and www.xxx.com is the Universal subdomain for xxx.com. www was used by domains to connect the domian name to the world wide internet sphere. Now with the advancements in internet technologies www is not required. But as a practice we still us the domain name as well as the universal subdomain. So it is clear that for every website we create we obviously get two URLs generated (xxx and www.xxx).

Search Engines treat www.xxx.com and xxx.com as two different indiviual websites mostly with the same content. Usually Search Engines treat these two URLs with same content as duplicate content and it is not advisable too. So i its always good to redirect www.xxx.com to xxx.com because xxx.com will be helpful in building Sub domian architecture ie., we can build the site as news.xxx.com or movies.xxx.com

MSN also allows checking Back Links – MSN Back Link Checker

MSN Backlink Checker

MSN Back Link Checker provides admission to added abstracts about the links referring to your website. This tool is extremely critical for the Webmasters who are looking to rank high in MSN as Back Links are one of the most critical parameter considered by Search Engines to rank a particular website top in the SERPS.

Way back in 2007 webmasters who wanted to check their Back Links in MSN used to Shutoff this query feature of linkdomain, But for this they have to login to MSN Webmasters Panel. Webmasters can download the file in excel, Once you know who is linking to you and what are the type of web pages on your site they are linking to, you can further research those sites to determine the worth of those links, as well as opportunities for promotion.

Effective Keyword Research and Alternate Tagging

Effective Keyword Research and Alternate Tagging

 

The value of any SEO effort lies in the keywords (Key Phrases) we choose related to the particular page we optimize. Keywords you chose for a particular page must be staying long enough to get that page indexed and help to develop links that utilize the keyword in the anchor text of the page.

 

 

 

 

 

Keyword Research should be an iterative process, the trend and user pattern for selecting the keyword is dynamic. So Alternate Tagging plays a very crucial role in selecting the latest trend of keywords that will bring more Targeted users to the page we optimise.

The Keywords we choose must be relevant to the products or services represented on the page we are optimizing. Keywords, which include single- and multiple-word phrases, should also be assigned to pages that are most relevant. Make sure that keywords chosen are actually popular, and will bring you quality traffic.

Keyword Research Process:

 The chosen keywords must satisfy two major criteria: Relevancy and Popularity.

•  Competitor Website Analysis.
•  Consumer Focus: If we’re designing or redesigning a Web site, the creative and marketing teams have often discussed and documented much of the desired product or service focus.
•  Analytics Review: Analyze the Web Analytics tools which you use for tracking your website performance like Web Trends, Omniture, or Google Analytics. This will provide granular keyword information, including conversion data for the past keywords used.
•  Assistance from SEM:  This is the most valuable information you can get for predicting volume. If you have PPC Campaign running for the same website, analyze the keywords used. The impressions served for keywords per day will give you a fair idea on the Search Volume happening for the particular keyword.
•  Tools: The use of keyword research tools such as Wordtracker, and Keyword Analyzer, Google Adwords – Keyword popularity Tool.
•  Anchor Text Analysis: Analysis of inbound link anchor text to client and competitor sites.
•  Industry Stats: Evaluation of Forrester research data, Com Score data, Google Adplanner data etc around the industry or product lines.
•  Social Sites: Evaluation of social sites. Looking for competitor or industry pages within social communities such as MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn can yield additional keywords through the analysis of consumer interaction with these portals.
•  Trends: Evaluation of trending tools, e.g., Google Trends and Google Insight provides Trend for the keywords. These tools also provide additional insight into the demographics and Web habits of target demographics.
•  Use Your Logic: This is the most important tool in keyword research, and this is where the you can put together all the above options and choose the best possible Keywords for the particular page.

Create a Structurally Sound Website

Site Architecture

You’ve decided to build a website. Great! Your first step is to determine its structure – the pages you want to include and the information you want provide to visitors.

But how to begin????

Your first instinct may be to make your site different from everyone else’s. After all, trying to differentiate your business is what you’ve been doing throughout your branding process.

Building a Website is Like Building a Custom Home

When you create a custom house, you can arrange your floor plan however you want, paint the walls as you please and fill the house with furniture you love. Your goal is to create a unique space that stands out from everyone else’s. 

In the same vein, there are elements of your website where standing out makes sense. For example, the overall look of your site and your copy should be different from other sites – especially those of your competitors.

Differentiating your website is good for your small business – to a point. What you don’t want to do is reengineer its basic structure.

Standing Out Isn’t Always the Stable Way to Build, Underneath it all, even the most unique custom home has the same foundation and spacing between studs in the wall as every other house on the block.

By following underlying principles of construction, builders help ensure that the house is structurally sound. Why not use the same approach when it comes to your website? That way, your site is far more likely to work well for you.

To use site building rules, of course, you need to know what they are.

Rule 1: Do Competitive Research

Before someone sets out to build a custom house, they’ll probably do quite a lot of research—looking at other houses, determining the architectural styles that appeal to them, and perhaps even checking out homes in the neighborhood where they want to build.

The same goes for your website. You need find out what you’re up against. Once you’re familiar with competitors’ sites, you can make sure that your site will not only be different in the right places, such as look and feel and content, but that it will also be comparable in the right places.

Most likely, your competitors have been building their sites for some time – and probably updating them to answer customer questions and market their businesses more strongly. You don’t want prospects to pass you by because your site doesn’t answer an important question that a competitor has addressed.

Visiting other sites and making notes of basic structure, business information presented, customer questions answered and even relevant tools and articles gives you a jump start on creating a site that facilitates apples-to-apples comparisons.

Rule 2: Plan Your Site Architecture

As you may suspect, planning your site architecture is like drawing up architectural plans for a custom house, where you plan just what you’ll include and what will go in each space.

For example, do you want a Pooja Hall? A formal Dining room? And where will you put the TV?

Similarly, for your website, you must decide the pages you’ll include and the information on each page.

When planning your site architecture, think about what you’d like your website to do for your business. Do you want it to bring in clients and close sales? If so, pricing information and even a shopping cart can help do that. Do you need your site to get media attention? Then a Media Room might be the key. Make sure to include the pages and content required to get the job done.

In addition, think about how you plan to expand your website in the future. At the beginning, designing a website of more than 10 pages can overwhelm a small business – both in terms of budget and time required to write the content.

But, if you create an expanded site map at the beginning – a website wish list if you will – then you and your website strategist can determine which pages will be most important in helping you reach your goals. You’ll also have a clear roadmap you can use to add on to your website as your budget and schedule allow. For more about the pages to include on your website, see this article: Pages To Include On Your Website.

Rule 3: Name Your Pages in a Way That Makes Sense

Have you ever walked into an unfamiliar house and been unable to find your way around? You probably asked the hostess where the kitchen was so you could drop off your pot luck dish or the way to the bathroom.

On a website, though, visitors don’t have the luxury of asking where things are. So you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find the information that they need.

Some small businesses want navigation button names to be clever or interesting. But, it’s important to think about the website visit from your customers’ or prospects’ point of view. They often come to your site looking for specific information. Even if they’re just browsing, they want an organized way to look around – where clicking a link takes them to the page they expect. Remember that visitors don’t have a lot of time or the patience to bumble around your site.

You see the same navigation buttons on every site you visit for a good reason. Established usage conventions have trained visitors to look for names like “Services,” “About” and “Contact” when they’re out browsing around. Capitalize on this and your visitors will be able to find what they’re looking for quickly – keeping your site and your business in their good graces.

Following these three simple rules makes it much more likely that your website is structurally sound and that your visitors will have a great experience there instead of a frustrating one.

Optimize the Search Engine .. Best SEO Tips

Best SEO Tips

Achieving success through Search Engine Optimization is highly dependent on a wide range of factors. Some rules will apply to your website and some will not. But even when everything is done correctly, ranking well doesn’t happen overnight as some sites lead you to believe. It takes time but if you’re willing to be patient, search engine optimization will help you and your business achieve its goals.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

1. Know Your Target Audience – Before any code or content is written for the site, think about your target audience and keep them in mind at every stage of site development. Consider age, gender, and especially, think about the things that will make your target audience want to visit your site often.

2. Build a Clean, User-Friendly Site – Web users have very short attention spans and the decision to linger at your site or clíck the Back button is made in a few seconds. Build a site that’s easy on the eyes and structure it so that information can be found quickly and easily. Use bulleted lists, subheads, bold important text but don’t overdo it, and use clean, intuitive page layouts. Avoid building pages with frames, .PDF’s, and Flash. By the time these pages have loaded, your viewer is probably long gone.

3. Well-Written Content – Make sure the content on your site is well-written, gets right to the point, and doesn’t insult the intelligence of your readers with wild claims and hyperbole. Good content encourages readers to explore the other pages of your site and creates high-quality inbound links.

4. Let Keywords and Keyphrases Occur Naturally – Both search engines and readers alike will notice obvious keyword stuffing immediately and your credibility will suffer. Let the words and phrases that you want to optimize occur naturally in the content without overdoing it.

5. Use Short, Relevant URLs – Give your page URLs good file names which include the keywords optimized for that page and definitely avoid query strings. Try to limit page titles to relevant words separated by hyphens. For example, instead of “.com/seo” try “.com/search-engine-optimization-tips” or “.com/seo-tips. “

6. Good Meta Descriptions – Keep meta descriptions between 200-250 characters and make them relevant to the page and informative. Good meta descriptions raise confidence that the page will contain the information that web users seek therefore making it more selectable.

7. Quality Inbound and Outbound Links – The quality of your inbound and outbound links far outweigh quantity for SEO purposes. Link farming is frowned upon by search engines and readers alike. If someone clicks on an outbound link from your site, make sure that it takes them somewhere interesting and informative or they’re not likely to clíck on another.

8. Limit Keywords and Keyphrases – Feature two or three optimized keywords and phrases on each page and again, make them occur naturally in the content. If you want to rank well for other terms, simply build other pages optimized for those terms.

9. Update the Content Regularly – Add new content to your site on a regular basis. It gives your site visitors something new to read and the search engines will be inclined to index your site more frequently.

10. Avoid Unethical SEO Methods – Link farming, duplicated content, cloaking, spamdexing, and other attempts to fool search engine crawlers will get your site penalized and buried where no one can find it. Search engine algorithms are increasingly sophisticated and Black Hat SEO methods will destroy any possibility for ranking well.

These are just a few search engine optimization tips for you to consider that will help your site rank well and there are many, many more.

Key things to be considered before hiring a designer …

Key Things to Look for in a Good Web Designer

10 Key Things to Look for in a Good Web Designer

The pace of business today is positively supersonic. There doesn’t seem to be enough time for anything anymore, and businesses of all sizes are working harder and faster all the time.

It’s important to work smarter, too. And that means when you have to choose an important vendor for an essential service, you need to slow down and make a deliberate, careful decision. This is particularly important when you are getting ready to put your company’s face on the World Wide Web in a new or newly-refurbished web site.

Before listing the ten key things to look for in a good web designer, let’s define a few terms. Even though you may encounter variants on the name – like web developer, web artist, webmaster and so forth – we’re talking about an individual who, alone or with some assistance, is going to “get you up and running.” This means more than simple design.

You may need someone who can help you conceive and write copy. You may need someone who can plan smart site structure. You may need help getting a domain registered, files uploaded, e-mail accounts set up, and other technical details. You will definitely need someone who can do just about anything, or quickly find out how, or have an associate who can at the ready.

With these caveats, and serious encouragement to shop around for price and professionalism, here are the ten things to look for, in rough order of importance:

1) Experience
You will need someone with all the techniques, tools and tricks that will help you prepare your web site and accomplish your online goals. You should confirm that the candidate knows the entire alphabet soup of protocols, web markup languages and coding utilities: HTML, XML, CSS, PHP and so on. Ask all prospects for a portfolio, ask if they can “hand code,” find out how many years of experience each has, etc.

When you interview designers, on the phone and/or in person, you will get these answers swiftly enough. But take due time to get more important insights as to the individual’s character, level of expertise – and how well your personalities mesh. You will be working closely together, after all.

2) Customer Service Orientation
As important as experience is a mindset and attitude of making customer service a priority. If a designer/developer is too busy to answer e-mails or phone calls, will they be able to keep the production schedule? Ask for references, and make a point of actually calling them. Ask the prospect’s previous clients if the web developer was responsive, on time and effective.

3) Original copy and Graphics
Creating professional and 100% original web graphics separates the adults from the kids every time. Most anyone can do some “quick and dirty” copy writing and slap it on a page with some pictures and hyperlinks. On the other hand, a talented and veteran designer will demonstrate knowledge of page layout, have a way with color and know how to place elements on a page for best appearance and web site performance. Take a good look at a number of the sites each prospect has built, and make sure no one is using “templates” or “starter pages” that come with some software programs or are available (even free) on the Internet.

4) Creativity
You need to decide right away (before you even start talking to designers) just how much the designer you find will be involved in the conceptual process. Your designer may need to help you with some of the “big picture” questions, such as marketing, web copy writing (for search engines) and how to generate traffic. You want someone creative, but not a “diva” who won’t follow instructions or work with your ideas to bring them to fruition.

5) Marketing Experience
The easiest way to find out if your prospective web designers are good at marketing web sites is to view their site and their portfolio. That you are considering selecting them to design your site is a good first indicator that their designs convert. You’ll further want to ensure that you can find what you’re looking for on their site quickly and easily and that you can do the same on some of the sites in their portfolio.

6) Cost
Pricing for a professional web site of 10-15 pages with the standard features runs all the way from $500 to $5000. It may be that your idea is so complicated that you might have to pay for an estimate. For a full picture of all the costs involved in the project, ask for all the costs to be broken out individually – domain name and hosting, graphic design work, marketing fees and web development matters.

You may need to place a deposit if the job is large enough, and you should have all payment terms worked out before work starts. You can work out an hourly rate, a flat fee or some combination of the two. Leave nothing unstated or assumed: Get every detail in writing, including deadlines and how many revisions are included.

7) Job Timeline
After you ask the developers how long the process will take, make a point of asking references if the project was, in fact, completed on time. A basic web site may take as little as a week, while more involved and technically challenging sites could take a month or more. You need to know what the real-world turnaround time is for the specific people you are considering.

Communication Skills
Don’t hire anyone who insists on speaking to you in “computer-ese” or won’t explain unknown terminology. You have to communicate with this person about things that are important to your very survival, so you need to be clear at all times. If you cannot establish a good working relationship, it won’t matter if you have Leonardo Da Vinci working on your code, it just won’t work out.

9) Full Service
There may be one or two things that your designer/developer cannot do, but for the most part you should be able to find a reasonably-priced professional who can handle just about everything. If the designer needs help installing a particularly complicated shopping cart, or your site requires some heavy database programming, it is reasonable to expect that your designer might need some assistance.

10) Availability
Are these prospects full-time web professionals? Or are they moonlighting from some other job, even a completely unrelated one? It may be that a part-time web designer can do a great job for you, but will he/she be available to meet with you during normal business hours?

Finally, do you homework before speaking with anyone. You don’t need to be an expert – after all, you’re hiring help, because you’re not – but you need to know enough to know what you’re hearing. If you are uncertain of your ability to keep on top of what’s going on, get a fríend with at least basic web knowledge to help you locate, interview and assess candidates.

Use all of this “head” knowledge to narrow down your list of candidates, but don’t be afraid to use your intuition (“heart” knowledge) to get a feel for each person’s honesty, integrity and character. Using this mix of study, inquiry, discussion ,and feel, you will start to develop judgments about the candidates. Following this procedure thoroughly should result in your finding a good match for your Internet needs.