Matt Cutts of Google Talks About Parked Domain Content

Google has released a new Webmaster Help video. It's another one of those in which Matt Cutts answers his own question. This time, it's:

I have a parked domain and want to launch a new website on it. Are there any pitfalls I should avoid? Should I keep my domain parked or put some sort of stub page there?

"Google does have a parked domain detector," says Cutts. "You've probably seen this” where you land on the page, and there's the lady with the backpack smiling at you, and it's like, 'Click here to learn about whatever,' and those pages aren't as useful. Users don't like to see them, and they complain when they do see them, so we do have a parked domain detector that we run, and then when we detect that a page is parked, or a domain is parked, then we try not to show those pages in our search results."

"The fact is that if you leave your domain parked right up until you launch, it might take a little while for us to re-crawl that page and reprocess it, and for the parked domain detector to really believe that it's no longer parked," he continues. "So, my advice would be, once you buy a domain, if you do intend to put something there (you know, a month, a few weeks whatever, beforehand), just write a paragraph or two or three, and say, 'This will be the future home of xyz. We're going to be the world's number one source of red widgets or blue widgets or green widgets,' or whatever it is that you're planning to do."

"Even if it's mysterious, just make sure that you write a paragraph of text or two," he adds. "It's not just an empty page or like a completely empty web template, because we do try to detect that sort of behavior."

He notes that if there is already some kind of content, Google won't have to learn that the page is not parked, when you're actually ready to launch.

Local Business Website Visitors Generating Tips

Every business faces strong challenges for local marketing and making web presence in its locality. Especially for small businesses generating local traffic is a complicated mission. Local customers provide the support that small businesses need to keep going, which makes optimizing your website for local search engine rankings even more important.

1). Find Reliable Hosting Near your Region:
Before you start any website project, you need a reliable place to host it. Look for a hosting service that provides enough bandwidth to support site pages, the types of media you’re planning to use and the amount of traffic you’re expecting to get. Without this, your site is likely to go down without warning. Downtime means disappointed customers and losses in sales.

2). Optimize for Local Business Keywords:
You already know how important keywords are for SEO, but you have to put effort into ranking for local keywords. For that you may Hire SEO Experts, who will take care of your website SEO campaign. Customers in your area are likely to use some kind of location-based term when searching for local products and services. If you’re a cookie company in Vermont, for example, don’t just optimize for “fresh cookies.” Try phrases such as “fresh cookies in Vermont” or “homemade cookies in Montpelier.” Incorporate these phrases into your website text, page titles and meta description tags in a way that flows naturally.

3). Include Local Address:
Putting your business address and contact information somewhere prominent on your front page makes it easy for customers to get in touch with you. Putting it on all of your pages alerts search engines to where you are and can help deliver more useful results in location-based searches. While you’re at it, why not embed a map as well? That way, customers can see exactly where your business is in relation to their own locations and find you more easily.

4). Get Listed on Local Directories:
There are many online directories that allow you to list your business along with contact information, photos and sometimes even videos. Getting your business on Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Superpages and other local search directories verifies that you’re in business and lets you update your listings whenever necessary. Being listed can also give your search rankings a boost over and above the competition.

5). Linking Local Websites:
A good network of relevant backlinks helps to show search engines that your site is of high quality and worth crawling. Local backlinks from sources such as other businesses, local resource listings and pages for special community events give your company local credibility. Seek out a variety of links that will help establish your identity. When others link to you, make sure that they do so in a way that incorporates your highest-performing local keywords.

6). Use Social Media:
People love to share where they’ve been and what they liked about it, and this is where social media comes in handy for small businesses. On Facebook, for example, business Pages put location, hours and contact information right near the top. When users “like” your page, the action shows up in their news feeds for their networks to see. You can also target important updates to specific locations, so it’s easy to let followers in your community know about limited-time sales, special offers and other location-specific events.

7). Gather User Reviews:
On many search directories, customers can leave reviews of their favorite businesses. You won’t have any direct control over whether these reviews are positive or negative, but the feedback you get will help you make business decisions to better serve your customers in the future. Some sites allow you to reply to user reviews, giving you a chance to ask questions, resolve problems and establish yourself as a reliable presence in the community.

Making sure that your business website is designed to draw local traffic is worth the necessary time and effort. Local traffic not only brings in customers from around the community; it also boosts your reputation in nearby areas by generating Internet buzz and increasing consumer feedback. Local traffic has the potential to boost sales and raise brand awareness in the areas that are most important to your marketing efforts.

Content Marketing Tips for Website SEO Promotion

Before starting content marketing, you should have fundamental knowledge about your audience, the ways to generate great content and to use those in your websites or blogs for online visitors. For more details you may visit my older posts, but before we dig deeper into succeeding with a content marketing plan, we need to decide what success looks like. The most reliable way to do that is to define and track metrics over time. You’ll not only get a great picture of whether you’re succeeding, but knowing what works and what doesn't will help you do more of the former and less of the later.

First, let’s discuss what metrics we are talking about. At the simplest levels, we are talking about things like:

• Page views, unique visitors, pages per visit, length of visit for websites
• Followers/friends/fans and sharing for social media
• Subscribers and click-through for email

But to succeed in this online market, particularly if you need to defend a content marketing budget to C-level executives, there is more to measure. The metrics listed above are proxies, really. They may not have cost much to create, but the question is “do they return more than they cost?”

That’s why it’s important that business metrics be a part of your success equation, as well. And that means sales or subscribers or generating qualified leads.

There are four types of content marketing metrics: consumption, sharing, leads, and sales. Most marketers overvalue the first two (blog page views and re-tweets, for example) and undervalue the last two (email subscriptions from people who first read the blog and, ultimately, sales from among that group). If you focus your metrics on behavior, rather than on data aggregation, you’ll be measuring points of greater business value.

Don’t discount the importance of tracking how your consumption and sharing are changing over time, but have in mind that those measures are most relevant in relation to how they affect your business goals: this month’s email newsletter click through rate was double our norm. Did sales double that week?

You are probably one step ahead of me already, asking the question, “But how do I know if my sales increase can be attributed to my content marketing?” That can be a tough question for many of us.

It’s easy if your latest email newsletter or social media post has a link to a landing page with a “Buy Now” button on it. But for most marketers, you have to be careful in attributing conversions to your various marketing efforts even if you’re doing things like segmenting leads via gated content links on your website.

The classic example: someone clicks through to a landing page but not ready to buy. A month later, when they want to buy, they mayn’t have the URL of the landing page handy, but they remember your company name. A quick Google search lands them on your home page, and from there they initiate their purchase.

Cases like this make it important to view your metrics in relation to one another and not always individually; content marketing vs. direct mail vs. outbound telephone sales. Yes, you want to evaluate which is most effective, but you also want to leave room for the bleed between efforts that will always occur.

The most important advantage is to know how to interpret the data as important as the data itself.

Tips for Choosing Right Keywords for your Business Website and SEO Campaign

Choosing right keywords for business websites of any type of business is very essential. Business or money can be made by finding the right keywords to be used in your website, marketing and design. In the event you are not specific enough you can be certain the effort you put directly into your website won't be as effective as you would like. Making space for essentially the most successful keywords and phrases will be a primary thing to consider within your online niche market. 

Numerous ideas can be found which match a niche market. The trouble is for every good idea that is executed well there are dozens that are thrown together with very little focus on fine detail.

Keywords choices for any type of business are very crucial. You could perform some preliminary research on the types of ingredients utilized in the product making process. Consider if there's anything unique concerning the canning procedure that could be a phrase sought by some consumers. Become a person that pays a significant degree of focus on information. Use those aspects to develop worthwhile keywords and phrases for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing Online.

Using particular keywords and phrases in your website content is important and profitable for search ability of your website. Every article you are posting, all of the description you compose, every press release you put together should take notice of the distinct keywords and phrases you might have identified will be most useful when you are looking at search results. If you focus on keywords choices you will find that search engines like Google may observe and rank your site much better for this particular term.

The reason it is important to pay attention to these types of terms is the fact that when you only use profitable keywords some of the time then you're really losing useful internet space for material that may be valuable, but has no promoting use.

You could possibly impress the reader using the content, but without the helpful keywords or phrases you have very little power to draw those readers to your website. Consider everything you do as potential way to get visitors to your site. The keyword selection gets them on board; the exact content is what keeps them there and causes them to consider the importance of your message and product to their lives and personal interests.

There are online tools you should utilize to fine-tune the keywords you use in your online content so there should be no excuse not to identify and begin using these words to help turn a profit. You didn’t go into business to be timid so there is nothing wrong with making certain your message gets the attention of search engines that can introduce you to actual customers.

SEO Tips for Promoting your Business Websites Online

1). Choosing Targeted Keywords:

The most important aspect of using business targeted keywords for your website is to begin a process of searching keywords with proper analysis and research. Be sure to take advantage of any types of free tools or services, which may be at your disposal. A good example of this would be the Google Adwords tool. You might also want to consider using a portion of your advertising budget to pay for some more comprehensive programs.
It is also very essential to note that keyword density, as this considered to be outdated these days. It is crucial that you do your best to include keywords naturally within the text of your website while ensuring that you are not doing this to excess.

2). Create an Outstanding URL:

There are quite a few things that you must do in order to create an outstanding URL. From the start, you need to choose a domain name that is relatively short which also includes your most valuable keyword phrase. Hyphens are allowed and acceptable, but you should refrain from adding any more than two.
When it comes to individual page naming, be sure to include a highly relevant keyword. Do your very best not to use any session IDs or other dynamic and database variable URLs.

3). Utilize Long-tail Keywords:

Long-tail keywords offer the highest impact on search engine rankings. These typically consist of a minimum of three words. If you’re able to come up with some that are intrinsically related to your specific industry, it will knock the competition right out! In addition, any traffic that is driven to your site as a result will be much more relevant which means a better end result.

4). Utilize Latent Semantic Indexing: 

Latent semantic indexing, commonly referred to as LSI, is the process in which you include related phrasing and keywords with your main phrases in an effort to elevate your site’s ranking within the various search engines. For example, if your site sells shoes, you would include other related words such as heels, pumps, sandals and boots. This would, in turn, help to elevate your rankings within the search engines. This would also ensure that your site does not come across as any type of spam since you wouldn’t be using the same old keywords again and again.

5). Make Your Internal Links Count:

Most websites often forget to use their internal links properly and that puts them at a disadvantage from the very beginning. It’s an extremely simple way to ensure that each and every one of your pages score a better targeted ranking within the entire various search engines. Ensure that you include every page most targeted keyword or phrase within internal links, which are pointing to those pages. Additionally, make sure to always reference any of your other pages with links within your website’s content as appropriate.

6). Invest in PPC:

A PPC campaign is the absolute fastest way to see immediate results from your advertising dollars. Begin your campaign using all of the keyword research that you’ve done previously. Start with a small PPC costs can skyrocket if you are not familiar with how it works. Play around with different style ads. Use varying strategies and keywords until you see some definitive results. Only then should you begin running bigger campaigns.

7). Optimize any Images Used:

It’s crucial that you use an ALT tag for all of your images that describes in detail what the actual image consists of. Use targeted keywords and phrases for maximum impact. This will ensure that those who are not able to see images will still have an understanding of what is in that location. This also ensures that you can be found within image-based searches. In addition, do your best to name your images using a keyword within the actual file name.

8). Optimize the Title Tag:
 
Do not fool yourself. You should not just put anything in your title tag and expect it to be sufficient. If you think that, you can’t possibly be any further from the actual truth. The page title offers an outstanding opportunity to increase your ranking while also attracting people to your site.
Your title tag should be no more than 70 characters long. Keep it short, simple and to the point. Additionally, make sure that every single page must have its own specific title. Do your best to include your targeted keywords into the title and try to be extremely descriptive.

9). META Tag Insight:

Be aware that the META keywords tag is not reflecting on by Google for ranking anymore, although some of the other engines might still be using it. Most important are the META description tags and title. Make sure to limit your title to 70 characters or less and ensure that your META description is 160 characters or less. If you go over that, the various search engines will simply cut it off. Always remember to utilize your targeted keywords in your META tags.

10). Do NOT do – Building Links:
 
For the most part, many people do all of the wrong things when it comes to building links for their site. Please, do NOT buy links or use a “link farm.” Those are two of the worst things you could possibly do. Do your best to avoid any low quality directories that could be construed as “spam.” Blog commenting, link exchanging and posting on various forums are not as valuable as they once used to be. Additionally, it looks extremely unnatural if you were to suddenly have thousands of links within the span of a few short days. Remember, its quality versus quantity.

11). What to Do – Building Links: 

The best thing to do is to submit your links to respected directories such as Best of the Web and DMOZ. Try to focus on creating links to others within your own industry or niche. This will definitely improve your reputation within the community. Do your best to use unique content that can serve as bait for your website. These days, social networks can be highly beneficial.

12). Don’t Ignore Canonicalization:

It’s imperative that you ensure that your pages are not being counted more than one time. This will confuse all of the search engines and possibly impact your tracking statistics. Make sure to use 310 redirects to transport pages to one homepage and fix all issues with the rest of your pages as well.

13). HTML is Best:
 
Other program languages such as JavaScript aren’t searchable in search engines and so they are of no benefit to you. Make sure that you use only HTML so that you are automatically increasing your page rank. Don’t ever over complicate your site by using lots of frames, forms or code types that are unsearchable.

14). Choose Right SEO Professionals:

If you want to promote your website online, choose experienced SEO professionals/company having good experience of optimizing websites. Think about your budget, try to invest less and continue this. Because SEO is a long term process and should not be stopped. You just monitor the works and give the professionals your feedbacks. For starting SEO for your website at a minimum budget contact SEO Company India.

Updating Low Quality Pages Improves SEO Effort of your Website

There are many websites that have recently lost Google traffic, the main cause is lots of low-quality content pages. This sort of low-quality content was probably created by some scammy SEOs in an attempt to boost search engine rankings. This was low-quality content that was naturally created with no thought of the search engines.

Impact of Low Quality Content:
Before the Google’s Panda filters, most likely, nothing. But when Google did the Panda update, some pages on some websites that were previously ignored, started to cause rankings and traffic problems for the overall website.

Contains of Low-Quality content pages:
In most cases, the low-quality content pages simply doesn’t contain much information at all. They may only have a few words or sentences outside of the global template of the page. Or they may contain information, but it’s very similar to what’s on other pages of the website. Most of the time these low-quality pages been dynamically generated by whatever content management system (CMS) the site is using. This is especially true of blog sites using WordPress or other blog software, as well as forum sites.
Let’s look at some specific types of low-quality content:

  1). Profile Pages:
Empty – Many forums, blogs or other community sites encourage people to become members. In order to do so, they have to provide information that is used to create a profile page of that person. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these, but some of them may be created with nothing more than a user name and a bunch of empty fields. So you can end up with hundreds, if not thousands, of nearly empty pages.

Spammy – Profiles have also been a target for spammers because some of them allow you to add links. Even those that don’t specifically allow links can sometimes be hacked to include a link by a smarter-than-average web spammer.

Recommended Fix: There are a few ways to deal with this. You could make profile pages invisible to anyone (including search engines) who isn’t registered and logged in. Or you could add the no index Meta tag to all profile pages. If you prefer to have your profile pages indexed, you might try to require more information than just a name so that there is a less chance of the profile seeming empty. And if you allow links, be sure they are automatically tagged with the no-follow attribute. You may also keep all profiles invisible until they go through a manual human review.

2).Empty Directory or Search Results Pages:
Websites that have a directory of sorts will often have a number of different categories. This is a great idea when there are enough items, people, or places that deserve to have their own category. But sometimes a website will get too granular in its categories and only have one (or sometimes zero) results contained within them. It’s easy to see how this creates a poor user experience, and thus a low-quality content page.

3).Tag Pages:
While adding tags to classify blog posts can make for a helpful way to browse a blog, creating an unlimited number of tags and tagging every post with a bunch of them creates tons of low-quality content tag pages. If a tag is so specific that only one post is tagged with it, the tag page itself will list only that one post. And if that post is tagged with other unique tags, a whole bunch of very similar stand-alone tag pages will be created that all just link to this one post, which means they’ve defeated the purpose of tagging as a means of categorizing posts.

Recommended Fix: Don’t use tags to stuff keywords on your pages. Instead, use them for their intended purpose by creating a limited number of them that correspond to their own unique category. This will provide an alternate way of browsing your blog, as well as more opportunities for Google to find and spider your pages.

If it’s too late to start over with your tags and you’ve already got a crazy array of meaningless tags, then add the rel=nofollow to the tag links themselves, and add the “noindex, follow” Meta tag to the resulting tag pages themselves. This way you won’t have all those duplicate pages indexed, but the search engines can still follow the links contained within them.

4). Posts That Simply Link to Something Else:
You see something interesting on another site that you want to tell your readers about, so you dash off a quick blog post that says, “Here’s an interesting article about whatever” and provide a link. Even worse is if you link to these “empty posts” from elsewhere on your site in the guise of providing actual information if they click the link. This only annoys your readers because they have to click yet again to get to what they really want to see.

Recommended Fix: A better place for quick recommendations would be to post it on your social media channels and/or link directly to the real content from elsewhere in your site where it makes sense to do so.

As you can see, whether or not you intended to have low-quality content pages on your website, you may have some anyway. Whether we agree with the way Google is handling this sort of content or not, the fact is, many sites have been negatively affected by it. Therefore you’d be smart to recheck your own site every so often for low-quality content and go through each of the recommended fixes to remove it ASAP.

Make Website more User Friendly Instead of Emphasizing on Backlinks

Making a website more user-friendly with eye-catching look and feel, proper navigation and adequate information with unique quality content is much more important than emphasizing on collecting backlinks. Although link building is a very essential process of search engine ranking algorithm considered by Google; the importance of making a website more visitors oriented can never be underestimated. There are some factors like informative and engaging content, unique quality services and attractive design which able to drive unique traffic for your website.

As the owner of a website you will obviously try hard to create a very good reputation not only for yourself but also for your organization. So it is obvious for people to believe that poor or degraded quality incoming links will lead the particular website is not good.
Also it does not seem to belong to any good neighborhoods and over time this will going to affect your websites ranking and bring it down considerably.

Some other factors which relate to this are the attractive design and appeal of the website, the arrangement and spacing of words, informative content in a particular webpage. Also the navigation and functionality of links present in different web pages or how easily a user is able to identify his answer to a particular query is also as significant.

Links coming from lower quality and free for all websites should not be a matter of concern for you as this is not the only aspect, which Google sees as a condition for judging quality of your website. If your website is attractive, user friendly and of a good structure, then you will definitely score better than others in this respect. A regularly maintained and well constructed and informative website is always appreciated by any user more than anything else.

It is always possible for any owner to not only have a website of high quality but also have back links of good quality. This is always possible in this ideal world. There always remains a concern that a user’s perception about a particular website might get affected or be negative if the user comes to know about the website from a bunch of links, which are actually full of spam.

Now it is advisable to get detached from these links coming from spammy websites. This can only be done if the poor quality links are actually manageable. You should give a try at contacting the owner of the concerned website and personally asking them to remove links pointing your website. It is however to be kept in mind that Google does not perform any such things on your behalf, also they don’t perform content management of any sort, they only perform indexing of any content found over the net.

You should not worry on this for too long because of uncooperative owner. Rather than it will be better to focus and concentrate on things which are under your direct control because as a webmaster you can hardly control links to a website. So it is better to go for website reviews from forums of webmaster, manage your content well conduct usability studies which will help you improve ranking and indexing to a great extent. Also you can take a leaf out from your competitors into what strategy they are employing and why you would visit their website more.

Finally try and remember that links of lower quality will hardly impact you in the long run but factors under your control like a website’s view, organization, and usability will always affect it positively.

Top 10 SEO and Link Building Mistakes

Mistake 1 – Neglecting On-page Optimization:

I think more people are beginning to understand the importance of on-page optimization when it comes to ranking their web pages. With so much focus on keywords and link building though, often I see webmasters focusing too heavily on the “off page” stuff, without realizing what they do “on” their website is just as important. Proper internal linking, keyword density, LSI, image text, no follow tags, just to name a few, are also very important to search engines. There are free plugins available to help you with a lot of this stuff, so do your due diligence and implement whatever strategies need be.

Mistake 2 – Freaking Out When Rankings Plummet:

SEO Tips - SEO Services India

Go onto any internet marketing forum and you will see this every single time. People are literally freaking out when they see their rankings drop. Most often this is due to a thing we call the Google dance. All new websites go through what is called a “honeymoon” period where their websites rank very well at the beginning, but after a couple of weeks they settle in the search results… usually at a much lower ranking, again, this is natural. 

If your websites have age and have dropped in rankings, you may need to work harder to get your position back. You may need to update your content more often, you may need to build more backlinks or you may need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Google’s algorithm is changing frequently these days so it’s important to find out what they want, and go give it to them. The days of gaming the system through black-hat techniques is coming to an end.

Mistake 3 – Writing for the Search Engines:

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see being made day in and day out. Webmasters are writing terrible content that is keyword stuffed for the bots. While it is important to have a certain keyword structure within your content so that the search engines know what your content is about, it is very important that you write for the human visitor FIRST. Some say for every 100 words, you should have your keyword inserted once. So, if you have a 1000 word post, you will put your target keyword into the article 10 times. I think this is a good rule of thumb to follow.

Make sure that when you read your article out loud, that it sounds natural and not robotic like. Always remember if inserting your keyword too often into your post takes away from the natural flow of the article itself… then do not do it. Google is clamping down really hard on over optimized websites. Always write with your target human visitor in mind.

Mistake 4 – Building Thousands of Low Quality Links:

I cannot believe this is still going on with all of the changes Google has made. There are still idiots out there blasting thousands of links to their money sites in the hope of climbing the SERPs. I was offered 10,000 free links the other day to my website and I told the person to take a run and jump. Those kinds of links are going to have an adverse affect on your ranking. It has to be bloody obvious that Google hates these kinds of links and, if your business is solely dependent on this kind of strategy, then you are playing the fools game. One solid PR5 backlink from a relevant site will be far more powerful than a million links from low quality, non-relevant crappy sites.

Mistake 5 – Not Being Aware of No-follow and Do-follow Links:

When I first started out in this industry I had no idea about these two terms. I built a lot of links to one of my first websites and it was taking forever to gain traction in the SERPs. After a bit of investigating I found that almost all of my backlinks were placed on web pages that were no-follow. Needless to say, those links were just not as effective for rankings as the do-follow links I needed. I’m not saying that no-follow links don’t have their place. In fact, it’s important to have diversity in your linking structure, but most of your links must be do-follow to gain maximum benefit.

Mistake 6 – Expecting Quick Results:

I know when I first started online, I expected to make a lot of money fairly quickly. Boy was I brought back down to earth over the next 6 – 12 months. I almost threw in the towel on more than one occasion because it became very frustrating, trying to make this thing work for me. I built website after website, built a hell of a lot of backlinks, wrote hundreds of articles and participated in all the social media sites, but, it just wasn’t happening as quick as I was led to believe it would.

I realized later on that NOBODY makes money online quickly. They all have to put in the hard work. Your progress can be accelerated if you are willing to spend some cash and outsource a lot of the grunt work, but in my experience, expecting to make money very quickly online usually works against you in the long run. The failure rate is so high because people find this out the hard way.

Mistake 7 – Not Being Consistent:

If you are serious about making money online then you must be consistent every single day with your efforts. This can be the biggest stumbling block for many. It almost was for me. You can work very hard to get top search engine rankings for a particular keyword, but even after the fact, you still have to be consistent with your efforts, else your competitors will overtake you fairly quickly. Everything you do in regards to your online business has got to be consistent. You must put the work in everyday if you are to see the results you’re after.

Mistake 8 – Not Diversifying Your Link Building:

To make your link building look natural, it’s important to gain backlinks from many different sources. Backlinks from just article directories and no other places for example, do not look natural and can hurt your rankings. You need to get links from social media sites, article directories, blogs, blog comments, forums etc. Diversifying your link building looks natural and can put you ahead of your competitors in the search results. A naturally good website will get links from many places, not just one or two.

Mistake 9 – Not Getting High Page Rank Links:

Every day you are back linking, you should be looking to place your links onto high PR websites. Google values links placed on higher PR websites exponentially higher than low PR websites. These links are obviously harder to get, but that is exactly the point. The harder it is to get a link, the more valuable that link is likely to be. This is why all these push button software programs that can get you thousands of links are crap. You will not come across a software program that gets you high quality backlinks with the push of a button. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or a moron.

Mistake 10 – Not Updating Your Content Often Enough:

Obviously the more high quality backlinks pointing to your content, the higher your search engine rankings will be. You will then get lots of free traffic. While this is the basic approach that everybody uses to climb the SERPs, there is another way. Google loves websites that update often. I have built a website that has very few backlinks pointing to it that gets me 10,000 visitors a month from the search engines. The reason for this is because I regularly update my content.

I see webmasters spending so much time building backlinks to their websites every day. This is important of course, but if they actually spent an hour each day writing a new post for their website, they would get far more traffic further down the line. I know this works because I have used this approach many times in the past. With all the Panda’s and Penguins about these days, I have found my websites gain higher search rankings, simply because I always have fresh content on my sites. If you do not want to write every day, then write at least 3 times a week – it helps.

Tips to Create Great Content within Minutes

As you know, content development is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition. It is also very expensive for small business owners to afford that kind of effort. So they tried the new concept of micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content within little time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.

Using the following ideas, you can develop sufficient micro-content for your social media marketing strategy devoting only few minutes a day for these activities.

Do a Proper Preparation:

Like any marketing initiative you must have a concrete idea about your strategy, selling points and targeting audience locations. Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You'll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative. Once you have a complete idea of "your story," here are some content marketing options that work using few minutes a day:

1) Slideshare:

Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides. Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website.

2) LinkedIn Forums:

LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content.

There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the "search" function at the top of the page, highlight "groups" and look for a few of those have like-minded people who might be interested in you. If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.

Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website. I have made some fantastic connections this way and acquired some great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they "click" on your profile. Depending on your industry, spending at least 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.

3) Networking on Twitter:

This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content by building a targeted audience through Twitter. It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening. Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you're just starting to tweet.

1) Create a habit of sharing Information: Today, every article, post and video has a "tweet" button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.

2) Leverage your Networks: If you have surrounded yourself with interesting people, they're providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don't have to generate everything yourself. "Re-purposing" other people's content takes almost no time all.

3) Try following the "3 x 3 x 3 rule”: If you are new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects: a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.

Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content drive people to action on your website. Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio-data.

Don't be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so that your moments of daily networking are well-utilized.

4) Connecting Through Comments:

Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:

• As small business owner I advised commented on a magazine's Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
• Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
• My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That's not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long "shelf life."
• Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.
• I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re micro or small. People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy? Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments? 

5) Micro-videos:

Videos are just so hot right now but you don't have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.

Within few minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream and LinkedIn status.

6) Micro-Content and Blogging:

There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:

• Cut and paste answers you've already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
• Start a blog post with, you found this interesting article through a link on Twitter and share the great content from one of your tweets.
• Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
• Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.

A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts within minutes.

Hope the above tips are very helpful for writing informative content for your business website. Feel free to send your suggestions and comments for the enhancement of this blog. You can also contact me for SEO analysis and online promotion of your business website.  

Article Marketing and Syndication Techniques Used for SEO Campaign

As you know, Google rolled out its Panda update in the first quarter of 2011 and sites like Ezine Articles  suffered badly. Now the cynics among us might say things like ‘well they should have seen it coming,’ but what many people fail to realize is that websites like Ezine Articles were the main watering holes for thousands of web marketers. Not only has EZA suffered many online marketers and web businesses have suffered too.

The strategy of writing articles and submitting them to article directories to gain back-links and direct traffic was the cornerstone of many web marketing businesses, and now the well seems to have run dry.

First, the way in which these article directories have been utilized by marketers over the past few years wasn’t really the way in which they were intended to be utilized in the first place. The concept of an ‘article directory’ was and still is this: to serve as a repository for good quality content, a place where webmasters can find articles for their websites/blogs/ezines in exchange for providing an acknowledgment in the form of a link to the author’s website.

Then the opportunity seekers moved in and turned it into something different. Just like back-link building, blog commenting, and SEO in general; the concept was taken and exploited to the point where it simply had to be ‘regulated’ (by Google).

Now, if you’re thinking about apportioning the guilt for this, well, the Article Directory owners were not entirely without fault. They could and should have tightened up their quality standards and made it more difficult for people to exploit the system by throwing low quality canned/spun articles into the directory for the reward of a couple of back-links. Instead they added more and more advertising slots around the content and made hay while the sun shone bright.

So, where does this leave us? Do we walk away from article marketing in the same way we’re walking away from low quality back-link building and other strategies of the past? Well, we shouldn’t be too hasty.

Let’s wind the clock back to the days just prior to the point where it all went south, and look in more detail at the real purpose and function of a quality Article Directory.

There are many hundreds of thousands of niche blogs and websites which have a loyal and focused group of followers. Often, the number of followers can reach into the thousands, with some of the larger blogs boasting traffic stats of many multiples of that figures.

The key to creating such a successful enterprise is to keep your followers fed on a steady and reliable diet of whatever it is that drew them to you in the first place. Usually this falls into one of two fairly distinct categories, they’re either following the personality of the blog owner, or they’re following the specific topic of interest.

In the first case, it’s hard to have a surrogate personality, so the onus is on the blog owner to continue to make him/her available to the followers. In the second case, there is no reason why the information cannot come from a variety of sources, as long as the information, which is on-topic and supportive of the general theme of the blog/website.

But as a blog owner, how on earth can you continue to feed your followers information at the rate they require to keep them ‘entertained’ and wanting more. You need to have some form of ‘outsourcing’ of content.

And this is where the larger Article Directories came to known. People would submit quality articles in the hope of their articles being noticed by these niche (and oftentimes not so niche) websites and blogs. The blog owner would search the directories for content which he/she felt would satisfy the demands of his/her followers, and re-publish the article/content on their blog. In the spirit of any ‘exchange of services,’ the blog owner would retain the links within the article body, and/or bio box, so that the author would receive the recognition for their original work.

The blog owners would benefit from the fresh content being delivered to their readers, and some of those readers would follow the links within the article to the author’s own website. Hence the ‘exchange of services’ are the mutually beneficial exchanges.

What you have is simply a system of providing a service to fulfill a demand. It is called ‘syndication’ and it is widely used in the world of news and media. Associated Press is one of the best known syndication operations around. They have teams of writers who create news stories from around the world and the subsequent articles are syndicated out to partnering websites.

So, when one looks at the concept of Ezine Articles and some of the other article directories, they began life as a valuable resource created to feed a large and hungry crowd of web users with a constant supply of information. So has that really been neutered by Google or does it still exist?

Yes, things have changed, but you can still benefit from syndication as a writer and a blog owner. In fact, now that Google has stepped in and forced a reorganization of how these sites operate, you can benefit more than ever before.

Here’s a simple and condensed strategy which you can adopt if you are a blog publisher or website owner looking for more targeted traffic:

1 - Write an interesting and informative article on your niche. Don’t use blatant self-serving sales language, make it something entertaining and try to leave a question unanswered towards the end of your article.

2 - Create a bio box and word it to suggest that the unanswered question may be resolved if the reader would care to follow the link in the bio box.

3 - Link people to a page on your blog or website which provides a smooth continuation of the article and eventually answers the question posed in the original article.

4 - Integrate some ‘sticky’ components on the ‘landing’ page. Use a discreet opt-in box, have a step to a sales page or combine both together. If your ‘landing’ page is too commercial, too aggressive, you won’t satisfy the needs of point five.

5 - Search for blog / website owners whose content complements your own in some way. If you and they are commercial enterprises occupying the same niche, they’ll be less likely to want to work with you, but there will be some who will. Now write to these blog owners and offer them on-topic content for their blogs/sites. Offer to send them an informative article which is sure to please their readers and followers and include an example of your writing. Suggest that you would be willing to become a regular contributor if your work proves popular with their readers. Of course, your work will contain at least a bio box with links, and you would require that they respect you as the original author and retain your name and bio box intact.

Now simply repeat the above strategy over and over, contacting more and more blog owners with your offer of syndication. Maintain a careful record of your communication and start to build a relationship with the people who accept your work.

There will also be some syndication partners who operate Ezines. These can result in a very large surge of targeted traffic to your website over a short period, so be sure that your website is equipped to handle it and that your landing pages are optimized to reap the full benefits.

Lastly, towards the later stages of your syndication effort, submit your articles to the Article Directories. They can still be a source for syndicated content and there is no reason why your article might not be picked up directly by someone proactively looking for information to share with their readers.

As your syndication efforts pick up momentum, you’ll start to see that article syndication becomes a very real alternative to search-engine derived traffic, you’ll no longer be beholden to Google for your leads and prospects.

Of course, there is a need to do things the right way with article syndication to avoid some common pitfalls and to get the most out of your time. In the next article in this series for SPN I’ll be looking in detail at landing page optimization and list building, and exploring some of the problems with duplicating your content around the web.

Prepare Your Website for Future Google Updates

With the recent Penguin update that came down a few weeks ago from Google, a lot of site owners are wondering what they can do to recover from a search engine penalty. We know that Penguin was designed to target web spam tactics (Panda was more about content quality), and while glaring black hat tactics like keyword stuffing are easy to spot and fix, it's not always as simple to find the gray hat SEO tactics that might be contributing (or will with subsequent updates) to a search engine penalty. Many DIY SEO site owners run afoul of the Google Webmaster Guidelines simply because they don't realize they are doing anything wrong.

If your site has managed to escape unscathed by a Google update so far, don't assume that you're free and clear forever. Each search engine update gets a little better at catching and flagging sites that are in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. Before you find yourself in emergency mode because your organic traffic was cut in half due to a penalty, here are 5 things every site owner can do to protect their website and ensure that future updates will only help their site perform better in the search engines:

1). Forget About Keyword Density

There is no "right" number of times you should use a keyword in any given piece of content. Forget every piece of advice you've ever heard about keyword density (2%, 6%, use each keyword at least three times!) and just focus on writing great content. One of the few hard and fast rules of SEO is that content should always be written for the human reader first, the search engines second. Believe it or not, a well-written piece of content will partially optimize itself because the topic naturally encourages you to use various keywords. You won't ever want to force a keyword into the content to meet some keyword count quota - it's almost always going to negatively impact the usability of your content. Of course you want to optimize your content for SEO, but worry about targeting keywords AFTER you've written the content. You can go back and tweak the post to be a little more SEO friendly in the revision round.

2). Diversify Your Anchor Text

A lot of SEO experts are hypothesizing that exact match anchor text might have been a big flag for the Penguin update. It's important to diversify your anchor text so the search engines don't have any reason to suspect that you might be trying to manipulate the SERPs. Branded keywords are probably going to make up a large percentage of your anchor text portfolio, but you don't want to rely too heavily on a short list of targeted keywords (and please don't use CLICK HERE as anchor text; it has no SEO value) for your anchor text. Much like with optimizing your content, there is no "right" number of times to use a particular keyword or keyword phrase as your anchor text.

3). Remove Questionable Links from Your Link Portfolio

In the weeks before Penguin, Google started sending out notifications to many site owners warning them about "unnatural links" in their link portfolio. These could be link exchanges, paid links, unrelated links, links from blogs and low quality directories and so forth. If there are any links in your link portfolio that might catch the eye of Google for the wrong reasons, it's best to do away with them now so you don't have to worry about it later. Keep in mind that a few "bad" links aren't going to destroy your SEO, especially if the vast majority of your link portfolio is full of great links. You can't control who links to you, which has made many site owners worry about the ramifications of negative SEO (a competitor would purposely link from dangerous sites to you to hurt your site). It's when you have an okay link portfolio or shady SEO past that you need to worry about scrubbing your link portfolio as quickly and effectively as you can.

Some SEO experts have also hypothesized that sites might feel a trickledown effect via their link portfolio. Even if your site wasn't hit by Penguin, if a lot of the sites linking to yours were those poor quality sites Google penalized, links from those sites become pretty much useless to your SEO. Your site may have escaped unharmed, but your link portfolio took a big hit.

4). Analyze the Value and Quality of Your Content

Ever since the first Panda update last year, just about every Google update since then has been focused on quality, especially content quality. It's hard to hold a mirror up to our own efforts sometimes, but take a good hard look at your content. Where is there room for improvement? Are there any thin pages that you could combine in order to make a strong page with a great user experience? Are there pages you should just delete entirely? Put yourself in the shoes of your customer - would you want to purchase from your brand? Is your content compelling and user driven or is it just a bunch of company mumbo jumbo and ego?

If you haven't already, now is the time to launch a company blog (or up the number of posts you have going live each week.) Onsite SEO and link building are crucial to long term SEO success, but content is really what is going to propel your brand forward. The more quality content you have built around your website the better you look in the eyes of the search engines. It gives your customers a reason to interact with your brand (and link to your site!), builds your online authority and helps grow your overall online presence.

5). Imagine There are no Search Engines

Speaking of overall online presences (and this is going to sound strange coming from an SEO professional), treat your online marketing like there were no search engines. It's important to diversify your traffic sources so your entire online livelihood isn't based on the mercy of the search engines. If Google didn't exist, what other online activities would you invest into connect with your audience? Build up these other channels so that if your site is impacted by an update, you can survive until you figure out and fix the problem. Google doesn't owe you anything, and even though they want site owners to do a good job with their SEO (it helps clean up the SERPs, which gives Google a better product) they aren't obligated to make sure your site survives. It's up to you to learn the rules of the online world and give your website the best chance at online success.

There are many, many things a site owner could so with their SEO that could trigger a penalty from Google. But these are 5 things a site owner can (and should) do to not only protect their sites from future updates, but actually benefit from them. 

Useful Tips for Small Business Owners

Leadership is important in your business whether you have 1 employee or over 50 employees. Hopefully, these tips will help you on how to be a good leader for your business if you are not already. All of these tips can't be done just once, you need to practice them daily or weekly or monthly. Repetition of each task will get you in a routine and make your business run smoother. Being a small business owner can be rewarding in many ways but can be frustrating as well.

1). Work on your Business, Not in It

This actually sounds pretty ridiculous because you should know how to do the majority of aspects in your business. This means that you need to focus on your future plan and how your business is going to move forward and grow. You are the mastermind of starting your business. You can't stop thinking and growing just because you are now open.

Sometimes it is a lot easier to focus on the day-to-day operations of your business because I am sure you know it best, but you are not helping your business this way. Why do you hire staff if you are just going to let them sit on their backsides and play games on their phones all day! You need to work on your five and ten-year plans and what steps you need to do to get there.

By working your business and not in it, your business will eventually be able to run itself. As an owner, you need to be able to take a vacation or if you need to leave for an emergency and not have to worry about whether the business will run itself or fall apart without you.

You should be able to leave at any given time and your business should sail smooth. It is very gratifying as an owner to not worry about your business when you are not around. It means you have done your job and have led your employees to be efficient and independent thinkers.

2). Have a Plan and Work It

Now that you know what your future goals are going to be for your business, don't forget about the actual business. I know I said don't focus on the day to day operations but it is important to find out how each department in your business is doing. Check on the inventory and assess your business on a regular basis.

Work this into your short-term goals. Don't let the business slip out from under your fingers because you were looking at your long-term goals. At the same though, don't micromanage every little detail. Practice your plan and make it work.

3). Find a Mentor

Find someone you trust, is patient and who has success in a similar business as yours. You need to be able to bounce off ideas or call them with questions. I'm glad my mentor was patient. There would be times when I would call my mentor five or more times a day and even at all hours of the night.

I wouldn't go this far if I was you, but I had a great relationship with mine. After getting scolded for waking her up, she was more than helpful. The trick to finding a good mentor is finding one that wants you to succeed. This makes all the difference in the world.

4). Keep an Eye on the Future

We briefly talked about long-term goals. I always told myself to look for the light at the end of the tunnel during hard days or think about that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This is important as well because there will be frustrating and long days. Remember why you started the business in the first place and to look forward to brighter days. If you have this attitude you will have more light days than darker ones.

A positive attitude is crucial in succeeding in your business. There would be days when I would have 20 clients needing my attention all at once. Remembering why I was in the business and what my goals were helped me get through the day and focus on my future. Thomas Fuller said "All things are difficult before they are easy." That is definitely true.

You may start promoting your business online by creating a website and following search engine optimization tips and techniques, or you can contact me for affordable SEO services at your door step.

5). Honesty and Integrity

I cannot stress enough how important honesty and integrity is in the business world. I know we have all heard word of mouth is the best advertisement. Well, not if it is negative. If you say you are going to deliver your product at a certain day and time, then do it.

Unfortunately, life happens and sometimes you can't make your deadline. That usually isn't a problem if you are honest with your customer. Tell them why you cannot make the deadline. They will appreciate your honesty even though it was not when you initially told them, but they will more than likely return to your business because you treated them with integrity.

They go hand in hand and can go a long way in your business. This doesn't sound like it would be hard to practice being honest but if you've helped someone learn the piano, then you know that paying attention to detail and communicating with your customers takes the same effort, it's just like learning to read music for the piano. Consistent practice is very important.

6). Pay Yourself

For heavens sake, pay yourself! I cannot stress this enough. We all go into business to make money, right? Well, how are you going to make money if you aren't paying yourself? It will become harder and harder to stay positive when you aren't paying yourself. There would be months when I wouldn't pay myself because I always needed something else for the business. You are always going to need something new. Make it wait and pay yourself.

I mentioned earlier about practicing these tips and how it is similar to learning to play an instrument. When you are learning to play an instrument you practice the movements and notes in a slow and methodical manner to make sure you are practicing it correctly.

Practicing all of these leadership tips is very similar. Imagine learning to play the piano and you have to practice every day. Eventually you will be able to play with speed from all of the repetition, just like you will be able to run your business much smoother because you have practiced every day. It is very essential to start promoting your business online by creating a website and following search engine optimization tips and techniques, or contact me for SEO solutions to small businesses at your door step.

Cool Features in Google Analytics for your Website

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics solution available with almost two million websites (56% market-share) running the software and over 400,000 of the top one million most-visited sites on the Internet. It offers tremendous flexibility as it tracks site visitors, referring sites, search engine traffic and site activity – and it is free. A simple cut-and-paste of the JavaScript snippet before the tag brings an onslaught of data about visitors’ interaction with your website! But how do you get started deciphering this treasure trove of information?

1). The Intelligence Report Explained

The purpose of the Intelligence Report is to alert you to important changes in traffic patterns. It is able to do this by performing statistical analysis on previous data and predict traffic values, compare metrics, and create automatic alerts based on: All Traffic, Visitor Type, City, Region, Country/Territory, Campaign, Keyword, Source, Medium, Referral Path, Landing Page, and Exit Page. These are displayed on the Intelligence Report in green. You are also able to create custom alerts based on: Visits, Visitors, Page views, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, Percent New Visits, Goal Conversion Rate, Goal Value, Per Visit Goal Value, Revenue, and Average Order Quantity. Custom alerts appear on the Intelligence Report color-coded blue. Because this requires a large enough sample size, the Intelligence Report makes most sense for sites with over 100 visitors per day and data going back at least one month. This report can be customized so that the information that is important to you is immediately available to you when you log in. It is also able to send you email notifications of specified alerts.

2). Using Motion Charts

Motion charts animate data allowing you to watch multiple metrics evolve over time using a slider. A motion chart is a viewing option for reports in Google Analytics that is accessed by selecting the tab with the 3 circles at the top right when you are looking at a full report screen.
Animating a report plots five dimensions: x-axis, y-axis, data point size, data point color, and time. You can adjust the speed of the animation, have it plot trails over time, highlight important data points by altering opacity, and change between bubble chart and bar chart. Here is a great video from the Google Analytics Youtube channel giving demonstrating a motion chart:

3). The Benchmarking Report

Essential to every effective business strategy is your ability to accurately track and intelligently evaluate your results. Google Analytics allows you to filter and view a tremendous amount of raw data, but what does this tell you about the success of your site? How do you know how your results compare to your competition? Google gives you the option to share your data anonymously and in return be given access to anonymous data from web sites similar to yours. The Benchmarking Report allows you to compare metrics from your site (no revenue or conversion data) with sites of a similar size within your industry that have also chosen to share their data anonymously.
Comparing information such as visits per day, bounce rates, time on site, and traffic sources can lead to meaningful insights into the effectiveness of your website and Internet marketing efforts.

4). Site Overlay Reporting

The Site Overlay Report allows you to view a page from your website with key metrics for each link displayed in a pop ups as you mouse over them. This gives you a visceral way to understand your visitors’ interaction with a given page. The default displays the number of clicks for each link, but you can easily customize the metrics you would like to view in the “Displaying” drop down menu found at the top of the report. This report is an HTML preview of your site, so you are able to follow the links to other pages on your site and view them through the Site Overlay as well.

5). Campaign Tracking

Google Analytics allows you to uniquely tag landing pages so that you can isolate data into different campaigns. This has many uses. One that I have found helpful is to create a campaign for my email signature. By adding some code to my homepage URL using the URL Builder tool and then using this link in my email signature, I am able to track just the metrics of visitors who get to my site through this link. It is also very useful to tag embedded links in digital media such as PDF files and multimedia presentations. Be careful not to tag links that will be visible to search engine robots – they will be indexed as different links to identical pages making it appear as duplicate content.
Google Analytics is a great tool for evaluating your online marketing efforts and generating reports that allow you to make data-driven decisions about your website. When you understand the metrics that are important to the success of your site, you get reporting that goes beyond raw data and answers questions. Learning how to use the features available in Google Analytics is a crucial first step to seeing what this data is showing you–the actionable insights that it contains. In order to take advantage of these metrics, you want to have clear conversion goals and know what information is helpful. If you do this, Google Analytics has the answers you need to build a successful website.