Digital Marketing and SEO Blog: February 2015

Saturday 28 February 2015

Blogs - What Are They and How Do They Work?

As blogs become more relevant and popular online, you may be asking yourself, "How do blogs work?" Blogs are basically simplified websites that just about anyone can create and publish.

What Is a Blog?

The term "blog" is short for "weblog," which refers to an online journal. Blogs began as personal mini sites that people used to record their opinions, stories, and other writings as well as photos and videos.

As the web has grown and changed, blogs have gained more recognition and merit. Nowadays, blogs can be for businesses, news, networking, and other professional means. There are still plenty of personal blogs out there, but overall blogs are being taken much more seriously.

Blogs versus Websites

Websites are generally made up of many pages linked together through a home page. They are divided into logical sections, and visitors can navigate through the site in a systematic manner.

Blogs, on the other hand, are based on frequent and timely updates. Visitors often don't move through the blog past the main page, since subsequent pages become outdated quickly.

How Do Blogs Work?

Blogs consist of a series of posts made by one or more bloggers. The posts appear in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post at the top of the main page. All posts are archived, and are usually sorted into categories. Readers can browse these categories or page back through the blog to read older entries.

Blogs can focus on a single topic or contain a wide range of themes and ideas. Some of the most common blogs focus on things like:

Small businesses and their products
Various aspects of parenting
Food and cooking
Celebrity sightings and gossip
Professional sports and specific teams
Product reviews
Career advice

The easiest way to get started and to create your blog, go to Blogger It is also a great idea to use wordpress to sign up and create your blog and keep it going on a regular basis.This will put you rightin the midst of social networking with web 2.0 technology.

Writing in simple understandable language would be sufficient to begin with. You can put your website link in your blog if you have one. The more you interact with your audience the better it is for you to understand one another and provide better dialogue and material as you go forward.

Blogging for Fun

Most blogs are started by people who want to share their ideas and thoughts. They post updates about themselves, their jobs, their families, and any hobbies or interests they might have. These blogs usually have limited readership, since most people aren't interested in the day-to-day lives of strangers.

Niche blogs that focus on one specific topic have a wider range, and these can become very popular. Like-minded people with similar interests become regular readers, and sometimes small communities are formed this way.

Blogging for Profit

On the other hand, many blogs start up with the hope of making money. Advertisements are placed on the sidebars and posts, and bloggers are paid per page view or per click. While there are many successful bloggers out there making a hefty profit through blogging, the vast majority make mere pennies.

Some businesses also start blogs to promote their products. These companies generally try to make things lighthearted and fun, holding contests or getting potential customers involved.

The 10 Best Free Blog Sites

http://www.blog.com/

http://www.blogger.com/

http://www.wordpress.com/

http://www.edublogs.com/

http://www.tumblr.com

http://sites.google.com

http://www.weebly.com

http://www.webs.com

https://svbtle.com/

http://hubpages.com/

Friday 27 February 2015

What is Keyword Prominence?

Keywords prominence is one of the various important factors for search engine optimization. It means, your keywords should be at prominent area in content of your web pages. To make higher prominence, you need to keep your keywords close to html tags such as or <strong,>, <body>, <Meta tag>, <Title>, , , or .

By practicing this method of optimization, you create weightage of your web page by keywords. Keep in mind that you should not target unique keyword on every page. While targeting keyword on page, you should follow right method of keyword targeting.

Example of Keyword Prominence:

Keyword = Keyword Prominence

<body> Keyword prominence is to place keyword near tags. </body>

Here we’re using keyword “Keyword Prominence” absolutely close to body tag. It will make prominence high and will help to optimize web page with keyword.

Monday 23 February 2015

What Is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is the practice of inserting a large number of keywords into Web page content and meta tags in the attempt to artificially increase the page's ranking in search results and drive more traffic to the site. A keyword is a significantterm that is relevant to the content in question.

Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical SEO (search engine optimization) technique at best and an attack technique at worst. The practice is often used to drive traffic to fraudulent or malicious websites.

Keyword stuffing in content is known as spamdexing. Hiding keyword stuffing from the sight of webpage visitors can be accomplished in a couple of ways if keyword stuffing is used. While it no longer works, webpages still attempt to hide keywords in different ways. These ways included:

Coloring text the same as the background color
Positioning text far away from the center of the webpage
Putting text behind a picture so that it cannot be seen

According to Google, keyword stuffing is not only unethical - it's also ineffective. Meta tags are no longer used to rank websites, so keywords placed in that field are ignored. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms help Google identify not just when terms are irrelevant but also when they are out of context or overused. Furthermore, if hidden text is detected in content, Google may remove a site from its index so that it doesn't appear in search results at all.

Google offers some advice: "Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context."

Monday 16 February 2015

What is Keyword Proximity?

Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. Your keywords should be close to each other in content of web page. In general, the closer the keywords are the better.

I know. It is very difficult to understand this term with definition. You can only understand it by the help of example.

Example:

Someone searches Google for “SEO Services India”

The important thing toconsider is that it is not one keyword. It is keyword phrase with threekeywords in it. Therefore,

Here we have three keywords

Keyword 1: SEO
Keyword 2: Services
Keyword 3: India

I am going to make two sentences for this keyword to explain it in better way. So have a look below.

Sentence 1: SEO Services Company and Internet Marketing India

Sentence 2: SEO Services India by ABC Company

If someone searches Google for “SEO Services India” then website with the text written in sentence 2 will rank on the top because all keywords are used closely compared to the text used in sentence 1.

Sentence 1 Keyword proximity

The search term proximity between “SEO” and “Services” is Zero but between “SEO” and “India” is five words. In the same way the distance between “services” and “India” is four words.

Sentence 2 keyword proximity

In sentence 2 search term is used very closely to each other. So, it looks more relevant than the first one. If we talk about proximity in sentence 2 then it is zero because keywords are used very closely and perfectly.

Our advice is to maintain keyword closeness as much as you can while writing title or content for your website because it really helps to rank better in Google search engine result page.

Sunday 15 February 2015

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

For example, if you have a Web page with exactly 100 words on it including all headlines, captions, alt text, and advertising, and you have a keyword phrase that is on the page 3 times, your keyword density is 3%:

Keyword Density = Number of repeats of the keyword / total number of words on the page * 100

When you're evaluating keyword density, you need to decide on your keyword phrase and then write your page. Once you've chosen a keyword phrase for your Web page, you need to start using it. As you probably already know, you should use your keyword phrase in:

the meta title
meta keywords
meta description
h1, h2, and h3 headlines (and h4-h6, if you have them)
the first paragraph of text in the HTML
in link text
in alternate text for images
scattered throughout the rest of the text on the page

But if there isn't a lot of text on the page, repeating your keyword phrase that many times could end up with a page that is too keyword heavy. In other words, your keyword density is too high.

Strive for a Keyword Density of Around 5% or Less

This means that out of the entire Web page content, your keyword phrase should be no more than 5% of the total words. If it is more than that, you risk appearing like a keyword spammer to search engines or annoying your customers with hard-to-read pages.

Don't let keyword density rule your Web writing. I aim for a keyword density of 3-4% for my target phrases. I've found that this works to get the keyword phrase into the mind of my readers.

Wednesday 11 February 2015

Online Reputation Management (ORM) or SEO: Which Does Your Company Need More?

There are two distinct services which are often grouped together but have some very different purposes. In general, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used to increase the search engine ranking of your content. Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a bit broader of a term, and is used to specifically manage the online reputation of a person, place, thing, site, brand, etc. They both sound pretty similar to the name so it is a great way to have a better understanding of what each are. That understanding is the key to making a wise decision especially when determining the needs of your company. Lets start with SEO since it is often integral to ORM, but ORM is not a part of SEO. Sounds confusing for the moment, but hopefully all will soon be clear.

The Basics of SEO

Understanding the basics of Search Engine Optimization cannot be done in one article. It cannot be done in ten articles. In fact if you Google “Search Engine Optimization” you will come across a somewhat large number of results, 27.9 million to be exact.

So what is SEO?

Search EngineOptimization is merely making a website, review, blog etc., as much as possible, meet the specific criteria that a search engine uses to determine ranking. Sounds simple and the basis for it is simple, but as the 27.9 million it’s in Google can attest, it is anything but simple. Here are small numbers of the most important things good SEO will incorporate (keyword refers to both “keyword” and “keyword phrase”):

Search Engine Optimization incorporates these plus hundreds more. In this sense search engine optimization is truly optimizing your site/content for the highest search engine ranking possible. If all that is SEO then what is ORM and why should a company not just pursue SEO?

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management deals with everything about your company’s brand in the online community. This community includes the entire web – search engines, forums, blogs, news sites, social networking sites etc…

Online Reputation Management is first being mindful of your company’s online brand then building on that brand in the search engines (chances are this is where you are sought for the most) through social media and other websites that produce and disseminate content.

Online Reputation Management is done through a funnel of three main processes:

1. Being mindful of your company’s online brand (Monitoring)

First and foremost, you have a brand – as the owner and manager of that brand, you have to be mindful about it. Know what’s happening to your brand. Know what the latest news about it is. Know what people think about it. Where are you mentioned? What are they talking about when your brand is mentioned?

There are tons of tools that you can use in order to monitor your brand in the online world:

Google Alerts

This will be your best friend when you’re monitoring your brand online. You can track web results, news, blogs, video results, and group’s results. There is no better way to get all of your brand mentions than Google Alerts.

Yahoo Alert

Set up for free to track news by keyword, stocks, local news, feeds and more. Receive notifications via email, Yahoo Messenger or mobile.

Social mention

Social mention is the social media version of Google Alerts. It helps you monitor your brand in different social platform throughout the web. You can subscribe to the feed, get email alerts or download the Excel file.

Twitter Search

Twitter has grown to be one of the best places to monitor your brand in. Almost everyone in the Twitter world re-tweets content with or without hashtag. The beauty of Twitter search is that it also lets you set-up search parameters such as dates, links, location, sentiment, Twitter account, and more.

2. Building on that brand (Prevention)

Online Reputation Management extends to these factors connected to you:

Your Name
Company
Brand(s)
Product(s)
High profile employees
Handles/usernames

If one of these things gets affected by a bad reputation, it would usually spread itself to the others like a festering disease. Protecting your name, company, products and high profile employees are carry less impact compared to your brand (which should almost always be your username).

BRAND / USERNAME:

This is the best thing you can do in managing your online reputation. Build and build and build and build on your brand. Branding is key to ORM. Surprisingly, it’s also arguably your most powerful asset when it comes to SEO. Building your brand can start from getting all of your brand’s social media usernames. You can find it out using Knowem.

As soon as you know on which social media sites your brand is still available as a username, grab the opportunity to register it there. These accounts are your online licenses to build ‘online real estates’. It will boost the chances of you filling up the first page of your brand SERP if you own powerful social media accounts with your brand as a username.

Some of the key socialmedia accounts you SHOULD get are:

Facebook profile / page
Twitter
Google+ Account / page
Quora
LinkedIn

If you have these accounts, interlink them with each other and link to them from your blog / website and they should rank really well in the search engines.

Get a Blog

Another great way to prevent bad reputation webpages from ranking as your brand is to create and maintain a blog. Search engines love blogs. That’s enough for you to know that you SHOULD get a blog for yourself in order for you to rank well and to have that powerful leverage for your brand that you can flexibly use whenever there is any newly published bad reputation out there.

There are a lot more reasons why you should have a blog for your company – you can publish company news establish a readership, promote products and services etc…

3. Fixing any damaging content to your brand (Cleaning)

Once the damage is done and you don’t have any ammo to fire back, here’s what you need to immediately do:

Hire an ORM consultant
Contact the owner of the bad reputation site and humbly ask if he/she can put it down
If it is against the law, contact any possibly concerned government body and ask them for help to bring it down
Ask Google to De-index it if there are any elements in the page against Google’s guidelines

If all of those are not an option for you, start with getting all those powerful social media accounts and create a network of links to them using your website. Start a blog and interlink that blog with those social accounts and with your main website. It will take more time for these to rank – and most probably the damage will already be done by then.

ORM work is mostly about establishing that bullet-proof reputation in the web by getting all the possible ‘real estate accounts’ you can for your brand.

Monday 9 February 2015

What are Keywords and why do we need them?

Keywords are the words and phrases a person types into a search engine, looking for relevant websites products and services or just information. Using the right keywords on your site is the vital first step in effective search engine optimization (SEO).

When someone is searching for information on the web, they will usually visit a search engine and type in some words describing what they are looking for. The search enginethen checks its database and returns the results listing pages that meet thewords submitted.

Search engines use keywords when they include your website in their search results. Keywords can make or break your search engine ranking. Adding keywords to the content of your website can improve its ranking, but overusing them can cause your site to be banned for spamming.

When identifying keywords, make sure select words and phrases in the content of your website that someone is most likely to use when searching for your online business or website.

“Keyword Is Also Known As Query Terms You Enter In Search Engine According To This Query Its Show the Results”.

How to determine what keywords to use

So, how do you determine what keywords are relevant for your site? Firstly, you need to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes to determine what words they would submit to the search engine when they are looking for you. Also, review your web site pages and pick out key phrases and words that describe your business, product or service.

List these words and phrases as they will form the basis for optimizing your web pages so that they will rank higher on the search engines. The more specific your keywords the better. Remember that single word keywords will have a lot more competition for top ranking search results than phrases.

Conclusion

The appropriate choice of keywords combined with optimized web pages submitted to the search engines can result in free targeted traffic to your site. This is a source of traffic that should not be overlooked.

So if you are building a business website, you want to ensure that when customers search for relevant keywords, your website appears as early as possible in the list of results. That is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about.

Tuesday 3 February 2015

Difference between Google Panda and Google Penguin Update?

Panda and Penguin are the names given to describe Google’s Algorithm updates. This is a simple guide to understanding the differences between the two, which will ultimately help your website perform better in Google search.

Attributes	Google Panda	Google Penguin
The Idea	Penalize websites of low quality and that with low quality content.It is first introduced in 24^thFebruary, 2011 with the name of Farmer Update in USA.	Bring down websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and use black-hat SEO techniques
Date of First update	February 2011	April 2012
Also Known as	Farmer Update	Over Optimization Penalty.
Purpose	Bring the high quality and content sites on the top of search engine rankings	Bring the high quality and content sites on the top of search engine rankings
Surviving the algorithm change	· There are no two ways about surviving Panda than to make an update in the website and get rid of all those low quality pages, content and keywords. · Over-optimized pages need to be checked. · Websites that have been hit by Panda need to work on brand awareness and social media networks in a new campaign. · The webpage(s) that have been affected need to be isolated from those that weren’t harmed.	· Black hat SEO techniques need to be abolished because Penguin is smart enough to deal with all websites indulging in these practices. · Avoid excessive link building, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, and meaningless and irrelevant content. · Creating content for other blogs and websites and socializing content. · Relevant use of keywords and absolute refrain from all kinds of stuffing.
Google released any tool to recover?	NO	Google introduced A new tool called “disavow links tool” .
Recovery choices for websites	Panda is basically an on-page problem, so the main changes need to be on the website. Check for pages with no or little content, as well as, for plagiarism. Creating elaborative pages with FAQs and more for a website should help.	Check for the links to find if there are from the same domain name or IP address, so that links don’t look like purchased. The links should not just be direct links to the website, because websites that have followed such polices have seen dip in the rankings. Disavow tool can be helpful in getting rid of too many links that are just associated with the keywords. Penguin genuinely focuses on penalizing unnatural links that are causing changes in the search results intentionally.
How do The algorithms affect a site?	It is possible that an entire site is affected through panda. Usually single pages of a website are not targeted in the algorithm. Panda doesn’t look for think contents but the overall content, so in websites where little original content and more duplicate or thin contents are present, those are likely to be fully penalized.	Penguin generally affects one part of the website on a page and keyword level. Unless spammed for too much keyword usage on the entire, Penguin doesn’t damage the entire site.
Does a recovery request help?	No, because the changes are overall.	No, unless a manual warning is issued, and even in such warnings, recovering is next to impossible.
Does manual removal of links needed?	No, because content is more important here.	If time permits and one wants to avoid relying totally on Disavow tool, then definitely manual link removal is helpful.
By when sites can recover?	If the duplicate and thin content has been done away with, then probably by the next refresh.	Should take time in recovering as refreshing is not frequent. Google has announced an update but with no date specified.

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