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SEO Strategy: 5 SEO Tips to learn from Popular blogs

Mani Karthik — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:14:59 +0000

What are the SEO strategies, if at all, followed by popular blogs ? Do they give importance to SEO ? If they do, are there anything to learn from it ? Is it different from the regular basic SEO ? Let’s find out if we have answers for the questions above.

Do popular blogs have to follow SEO in the first place ?

One argument I’ve repeatedly come across is that if your blog is popular, then you don’t need to really work on the SEO part. Very fair observation that but I can’t completely agree, though I’d love to. The reason is that this is a chicken-egg problem. Do you have to first do SEO and then get the site popular, or get the site popular first then do the SEO.

In my opinion, SEO comes first irrespective of whether you’re popular or not. SEO is one of the basic foundations of a website and I can’t think of a reason why it should be ignored. Anyways, the fact is that many popular blogs, while they want to focus more on content, the SEO basics are well taken care of. Let’s dig deeper.

1. Healthy Publishing frequency

One of the major signals to Google, about the authority f your blog is higher publishing frequency. If your blog can churn out 25 quality post a day, that’s no amateur blog. Note that the number is not the sole factor here but the quality factor of each of them. There are several “splogs” out there that copy content from popular blogs from their RSS feeds. But none of them can be counted as “authoritative” as their content is copied and duplicate.

If an upcoming blog, can match up to the biggies with good publishing frequency and original content, then you automatically gets upped to a better authority/trust level with Google.

2. Efficient Interlinking

If you look at any popular blog out there, you’ll see that most of them rely heavily on keyword based interlinking. This means that a clever strategy is behind the whole scene. Interlinking can be done in many ways. From simple “Read more” links to proper keyword based deep linking. The idea is to use the homepage PageRank of the website and leverage it onto inside pages, interlinking them with well targeted keywords.

3. Getting the basics right

The crux of the matter is that with all that overload of content coming in, its impossible to always check for keyword densities and keyword research indexes. Instead, the way out is to create a good basic foundation built strong on SEO and then let everything else fall into place by itself. Many of the popular blogs have the basic SEO metrics covered well in advance even before going full swing with their content. Good amount of time spent building a solid foundation based on SEO is worth all the time you’d spent on it later.

4. No unnecessary focus on keywords

If you watch closely, unlike SEOs who sometimes appear to others as a little too obsessive about keywords, popular blogs does not really focus much on the keywords to the extend of repeating them unnecessarily for the sake of keyword density. The content is unique, rich and social media friendly, not entirely SEO friendly. Even if the authors wanted to, not all the time could they do an SEO formula check on articles. So beyond the basic title/headline optimization I cannot see a scope for detailed keyword analysis or focus.

5. Efficient control of Crawlable space

As a part of getting the basics right, content focused blogs has a huge challenge in front of them, of managing the bots. As important as creating search engine friendly content, is important to manage the bots and controlling them into crawling certain spaces while clearing out others. Webmasters essentially has to have a good grasp about what part of their website is important and what not. If that sounds rude, what part is search engine material and what not. So to enable the bots to crawl those pages/part of the site that’s search engine material, its essential to control them using advanced SEO tool such as Robots.txt files, Nofollow/NoIndex tags etc.

Summary

Essentially, the idea is that popular or not, you need to have the SEO basics in place to build a website, and as and when your blog gets popular, there might be restrictions to the possibility of going into details of keyword research and competition. But the fact is that if you have a good sound SEO foundation, then things will fall into place with the content building in on top of everything. However, the focus should be on building authority and trust with Google with popular, shareable and quality content.

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SEO Strategy: 5 SEO Tips to learn from Popular blogs was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

8 Metrics to measure while doing an SEO Health check

Mani Karthik — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:38:03 +0000

An SEO health check is typically offered by SEO companies as the first step in their SEO long run processes. Basically it means that the site will be scanned, checked and analyzed for basis SEO and other health check issues, that will help the SEO to get an understanding about how to frame an SEO strategy around the website, and how to progress forward. A good SEO health check will cover a through study of the sites advantages and disadvantages.

Here are ten of the most important SEO metrics that I’d suggest during an SEO health check.

1. Canonical URL Mismatches

One of the most common mistake overlooked even in authority websites is the use of one or more instances of the same URL, without setting preference for domain indexing. Ex:- Existence of www and Non www versions of the same domain.

2. Site Index health check

Normally SEOs would just look for the number of URLs indexed on Google and get away with it. In my opinion a much more thorough check on the number of similar page titles used, number of dynamic URLs, number of duplicate meta tags are all worth checking as they will help you plan a detailed SEO strategy goind ahead and avoid surprises later.

3. Robots.txt protocol checks

Another factor often overlooked is the existence of the Robots.txt file. Sometimes it is completely ignored, otherwise the rules ignored so as to leverage maximum on it. With a proper content strategy in place, the first thing you want to do is to tweak the Robots.txt to control content indexation.

4. URL Health checks

URL health checks is not about just finding the number of URLs listed or the keyword relevancy on them. It should also be about content-URL matches and duplicate issues. URLs are the basic foundations of any site structure and these if screwed up can ruin all other SEO efforts.

5. Language Duplication Issues

In many of the sites I’ve worked on, one major issue that detriments the site’s growth is the existence of the content in more than on language. When the same content is to be presented in more than one language, usually webmasters take the easy way out and do some work arounds that will churn out the same content in more than one instance on different URLs. Ex: site.com/en/content.html and site.com/it/content.html

Even though a lot depends on the backend CMS, special care has to be taken to make sure duplication issues don’t arise which might hold the site from making any traction on the search engines.

6. SERPs Meta health checks

Actually SERPs health check is like the ECG of SEO health checks. Many problems can be figured out by scanning the search index. The meta descriptions, URLs, page titles all signify the robustness of the actual content on the website. The idea is to dig deep in to them and figure out what’s better than what is out there, not just what’s wrong.

7. Backlink Pattern Checks

Another gem in SEO health checks are backlink analysis. Usually if there are problems beyond the on site optimization factors, they reflect on the backlink patterns. Many websites that complain about “we don’t know what we did, but we’re not ranking well” can see patterns of spam links on their backlinks. Analyzing them will reveal a goldmine of data.

8. Hacked content checks

Always perform checks for infiltrated content on your site. Most of the time, hacked/infiltrated content doesn’t show up anywhere on the site and you wouldn’t even know if it exists. But using Google Webmasters Tool and SERPs checks, one can easily figure out if hacked content is available on your site. Alternatively, if you search for obvious hack terms with the site operator search on Google, most of the popular hacks shows up.

Summary

End of the day, the idea is to lay the perfect foundation for an SEO strategy in place by figuring out what’s weak and strong links on the site. If you skip this step, then things can get out of hand giving you surprises later on – which you might want to avoid.

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8 Metrics to measure while doing an SEO Health check was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

Tips to use Google’s Keyword Research tool effectively

Mani Karthik — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:52:02 +0000

One of the most popular tools used by SEO’s in Keyword Rsearch is undoubtedly the Google AdWords tool. There are many other tools available, like WordTracker, Yahoo’s KW research tool etc, but Google’s is most reliable as SEO’s consider Google’s data more accurate.

Oh! Wait, if you don’t know what Keyword Research is, its the process of finding out the most popular and searched phrases on the search engines so that one can optimize their website around those phrases increasing the chances of getting search engine hits from them.

Let’s see how to make the best of Google’s Keyword Research Tool.

1. Filter out gems from the data – don’t just believe it blindly

One grave mistake what many people do, is just blindly believe the tool. Let’s take an example. If you search for “red apples” this is the result the tool shows.

Filtering out what’s of interest to you is very important. As a first step I would sort the keywords in descending order of “Global Monthly Searches” (unless yours is a regional website), so that I get the most searched keyword on top with the ones that follow beneath it.

2. Find keywords that are related to your website content

Now, Google doesn’t know if your website is about the company apple, or a fruit shop. It is for you to figure out. For this, we have the categories tab on the left hand side. Google shows you a set of categories in each of which you’ll get suggestions for the selected keyword. If you’re interested in the fruit apple, then select “Food” if its the company Apple, then go for “Technology” or something similar. This is where your thinking comes into play.

3. Don’t go for the numbers, they could be deceptive.

The problem with this data is that the numbers could be very deceptive. Google might have wanted to make this as simple as possible, hence you’ll find every broad match data that you can find from the search engine data. To nullify this, what I’d suggest is you take a look at the numbers (search volume) and match it with an actual google search (if not obvious from the keyword itself).

In the above example, the top keyword suggested is “dried fruit”. While many of us can actually figure out if this is a broad match or not, others can take do a Google search and figure out how difficult the competition is.

“Dried Fruit” has a competition of 3,780,000 websites already, so you might want something more specific and meaningful (unless you have a PR 7/8 page).

“Organic Apples” has lesser competition of 599,000 pages and the keyword is more sensible.

4. This isn’t the most accurate data about search number, use your judgment

The AdWords tool is primarily built for SEM campaigns helping folks figure out what keywords to bid for and what to avoid. Its not actually intended for SEO. What it can do is basically give you clues about what keywords might be useful for your campaigns.

So bottom line is while using the tool, don’t just blindly go for the data. Use your judgment and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. And also, don’t stick to just one tool, use multiple tools to figure out what are the interesting keywords, and see if it matches your content. If yes, go ahead with the rest of SEO processes.

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Tips to use Google’s Keyword Research tool effectively was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

Google Caffeine Update: How does it work & What does it mean ?

Mani Karthik — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:08:38 +0000

So, Google Caffeine update is now complete. It had started few months (years) ago, and had been silently updating since then. And not to mention all the speculations on what it is and how it affects the search engine results. Google have never given us full details on what it is, and how it worked, and even now when the whole thing is live, all we get is a simple diagram and some vague notes. But that’s the way its always been.

Bur from what we understand from the little details we have, is that Google probably is now giving more importance to “content freshness”. As they say that Caffeine now updates content more frequently with lesser latency, and considering the fact that page speed and frequency of updates, are considered important this probably is a huge factor. We don’t know how much yet, but still.

So what are the changes that Google Caffeine will bring in to Search results ?

1 – No or reduced latency in indexing

With the older index there was a lot of delay in indexing new content, however fresh or new it were. But we’ve seen recently that Google indexes newer content more frequently and places it if relevant higher on the search results. Good improvement this one, but definitely needs improvement. Bottom line is that newer content has better chances to get indexed on Google quicker.

2 – There are no indexing cycles or periods

I assume that with the Caffeine update, there won’t be any stipulated “indexing periods”. Where by a site has to wait in queue for some amount of time until the content gets indexed. Well, if the site has wrong SEO, then it still might have to wait but for the one’s that has their platforms clear, need not work hard to get new content indexed. Or that’s that it looks like.

3- The focus is on mentions and references not “backlinks” (Unconfirmed)

Now, don’t take my word for it, but from what I see, Google now places a lot of importance on mentions on social media, references and “presence” more than the backlinks as we used to call them earlier. So if a site needs to get indexed on Google, it doesn’t need to rely completely on backlinks from another website, as it used to be. These days, websites get mentions and references from social media more than a backlink, and though the numbers cannot be equally weighed, some importance shifts towards the social media side, and Google recognizes it – I hope.

How long will it take to see the new results based on Google Caffeine ?

Actually, you would be seeing it as we speak, because as far as I know, Google have been working on the update for several months now, and its only now that they have declared it “complete”. So what we see now on the general index is probably the Caffeine itself.
Note that the above are not confirmed but possible assumptions I’ve made, hopefully most of them are true.

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Google Caffeine Update: How does it work & What does it mean ? was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

A Stylish WordPress theme for product showcase / company portfolio

Mani Karthik — Sat, 01 May 2010 12:07:17 +0000

When Nick Roach designs a theme, you can trust blindly on its quality and he’s been proving it time and again with his new designs.

The latest to hit the stable is the “My Product” theme, which is the best WordPress theme I’ve seen yet, that fits a product showcase or a company portfolio. That is if you have an online product to sell and is looking for the cheapest and effective solution to design, this is the theme for you. Download and zip it in and you have a professional looking, sleek, cross browser compatible and above all, a convincing eye candy design. Here’s the screenshot.

Setting up the theme is extremely easy, you have detailed documentation available and more ever a supportive discussion board (with email support) that will take care of any queries you might have. There are loads of features available like -

- Unique color schemes – Just change the color setting from the admin panel and the entire website’s colour theme changes automatically.

- Optional Blog-style layout – If you don’t need the portfolio like theme, you can change the setting and the site will change to a blog style layout.

- Admin panel theme options – Almost all the complex work is take care of by the admin panel settings itself (which is also themed by the way) where you just need to make the settings right and everything falls back to place by itself.

And loads of other rich features that comes with the regular Nick Roach designs.

Download the theme here.

Demo.

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A Stylish WordPress theme for product showcase / company portfolio was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

5 Tips to create an excellent search engine optimized landing page

Mani Karthik — Sat, 01 May 2010 11:18:55 +0000

Okay, back to some basics today. These days, landing pages are being used very frequently, even though they have evolved from the cheesy designs and glaring oddities. These days landing pages come with sexy designs and the best compelling copies, that can convince you in seconds. We’ve seen many good examples of modern, sleek looking landing pages, which are eye candies but when it comes to search engine optimization, I’ve seen that not all of them are fool-proof. Which is what we would discuss here today.

1. Its not about one keyword anymore, focus on the contextual category !

Earlier, you could get away with search engines by optimizing for one keyword and rearranging all the stemmed keywords around it. Like “seo tips, seo optimization, seo google” and things like that. But clearly, search engines have evolved a lot and the algos need to change. The wise thing to do is to spread out your list of keywords along a plain path. This is different from “stemming”, where a core keyword is repeated with combination keywords in and around the page. Doing so, might not harm you but it wouldn’t stand a chance to get the attention it deserves with the search engines as it will fit safely into the brackets of the “old school stemming agenda”. So the key is to diversify your keywords, and focus on the category and context rather than a single keyword.

2. Repetition and keyword density is not the key, but relevance is

As mentioned in the earlier point, one could easy get away with repeating the targeted keyword to a calculated average density and get picked up by search engines. But the relevancy factor have gone ahead of this simple criteria and now revolves around metrics such as relevancy, context, references and traction. Search engine robots are clever enough to figure out if the copy was written for search engines or otherwise, from scanning it, so don’t make the evident mistakes of focusing too much on one or a few set of keywords. Instead of focusing on “Red apple, Blue Apple, Green Apple”, one might want to focus more on “Apples, Orchards, Fruits” and the like.

3. Do not completely disregard the Old school SEO, certain parts still work.

Like code optimization, clean code and semantic markup. Make sure that you use the core concepts like the Page Titls, Heading tags and all the SEO basics in place without ignoring them.

4. Cool graphics are alright but also optimize the code accordingly.

Search Engines have evolved much to figure out how to parse and scan heavy graphics and multimedia content, but the page load time is one such important factor you might not want to ignore. If you have heavy graphics make arrangements to make them load fast. Quick delivery is a key factors as we’ve seen Google put too much focus on it lately.

5. Highlight the best parts that needs focus in the content.

There are more than one way of doing it but one way I’d personally recommend doing is to highlight important phrases (that gives contextuality to the content) by including them cleverly in to the heading copy and interlinking them with the page with anchor text, particularly if its a long page. Search Engines are picking up “inter-page links” these days and if not a direct clue, definitely passes a signal about the content to search engines.

Apart from these points, the regular search engine optimization strategies can be employed and social media can be used to bring in some traction to the page. Gone are those days when you build a good foundation and leave it at that for the search engines to pick up and say “Wow, this is amazing stuff”. These days, they say a lot of amazing pages, so the key is to make them say “Ah ! This is a better one among the lot, and its popular too, let’s pick this up”.

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5 Tips to create an excellent search engine optimized landing page was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

We were right. Google now considers page speed as a ranking factor.

Mani Karthik — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 05:26:33 +0000

Remember these posts we did some time ago ?

1. 4 SEO Factors Search Engines might talk about more in 2010 and

2. Speed up your pages like right now !

Looks like, we were right ! Google has now officially announced that it considers page speed as a possible ranking factor. Matt Cutts says it might not be significant enough a factor to drastically change the SERPs results, but its only one among the numerous search engine factors that might help in the bigger push of your site showing up high for the relevant results.

My take is that as responsible webmasters, we should consider making the pages load faster and quicker, if they don’t. Once we have a word from Google, you wouldn’t want to take chances, do you ?

Oh ! And those of you who followed this post earlier (Tools to make your site load faster / speed up your site), would have already figured out how to make your site load faster. Benefits of following DailyBloggr, eh ?

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We were right. Google now considers page speed as a ranking factor. was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

Get Google to index all the images on a site: Now with sitemaps

Mani Karthik — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:44:28 +0000

Google just released a new addition to its Sitemaps protocol today. Addition of images in sitemaps. Now you can add images from your site, that you want Google to crawl, to your sitemaps. And we have a new syntax for it.
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"> http://example.com/sample.html http://example.com/image.jpg
Two interesting things here.

1 – This is in a way admitting that Google does not index images properly from a site, so it needs your help.
2 – Images are still important for search engines, and we haven’t seen the best of it.

Either way, its nice to see more updates from Google in this area. I hope Google images become awesome as websearch, sometime soon.

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Get Google to index all the images on a site: Now with sitemaps was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

5 New Updates from Google this week

Mani Karthik — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:34:35 +0000

Round up of what happened in the Googlesphere this week – in no particular order.

1. GMail starts reporting suspicious account activity with your email

GMail introduced a new “message” feature that will show an alert message on your GMail account if it suspects any suspicious activity within your GMail account. Suspicious activity includes anything from logins from completely new IP ranges or multiple logins. Google‘s way of keeping us safe from intruders on GMail.

2. Faster Google Voice on Android phone with “Inbox Synchronisation”

Google introduced a new update to its Google Voice for Android phones that will update you for Google Voice messages in a matter of seconds compared to minutes on Android devices.

3. Google launches the Apache Mahout project

Mahout is an Apache Software Foundation project, which aims to create scalable machine-learning libraries using a variety of techniques including leveraging Apache Hadoop. Unlike other Open Source machine-learning libraries, Mahout was built with one thing in mind: the ability to scale over large sized data. – says Google.

4. Google introduces Search Funnel on AdWords

Google introduced a great product on AdWords that lets you give more access to user info, like ads he clicked, the time he spent on them etc before clicking on a final ad and landing on your site.

5. Google adds Haitian language Kreyol to its search languages.

Google just added the Haitian language Kreyol to its official languages available for search on Google.

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5 New Updates from Google this week was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.

How to get links to a website in the shortest possible time ?

Mani Karthik — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:36:00 +0000

Getting links to a website is probably the toughest yet the most rewarding thing to happen to a website. One that every webmaster hopes, tries and wishes for every time. But how easy is it to get links to a website ? How can you do it the right way ? Why do people always talk about numbers, is that all about it, or is there something beyond ? More questions than answers, anyways let’s try and discuss it in the most simple and understandable ways today.

We have discussed various link building methods, here, you might want to check it. But lets focus more on the time part of it. How fast can we get links and how fast is too fast ?

First off, even though getting links to a website is important, its very important that we don’t overdo it. And that means one shouldn’t speed it up in some un naturally awkward way (even if you could) nor one should focus more on getting as many links as possible getting just too obsessed with the numbers.

Co-relation between the traffic and link popularity signals

Many people think about numbers and are obsessed with it. Let me grab as many links as possible for my website – is their mantra and its not quite right. The thing is that Google, probably out of its experience knows that a website that is not popular do not get links pointing to it that very often and probably takes its own time in gaining the adequate number of links matching the competition. There is an unwritten formula that matches the link popularity with traffic of a website. Now, that does not mean that a website cannot get lot of links without getting popular, no. If the content is unique and awesome, like lets say a new website for a political campaign by a popular leader, might get lot of links immediately, but then again there’s a popularity curve that shoots up. So, having a relative co-relation between the traffic to a website and the link popularity is a good signal to the engines that the links are genuine and not artificial. But if there is a non-correlation then even though it might be genuine, it would not send the right signals to the search engines about the genuine-ness of the links. So its a good practice that one refrain from any methods that promises to give you as many links as possible in a short time frame. In short, number – isn’t the name of the game.

Less is more when it comes to number of links to a website

Now, don’t get me wrong, but less could be more, provided you have quality. Let me explain. Quality of a link pointing to a site is measured from signals such as the Google PageRank of the website, number of links pointing to it, other websites mentioning the website contextually, references in authoritative sources such as the Wikipedia, general traffic signals, site age, health etc. Mostly, its the link popularity of the website that matters. If the linking website has enough link popularity to pass on, that itself is a good push to the linked website. That said, getting more links, as many as possible is not the deal. But, as you might have already guessed, getting as many quality links as possible matters. And if the links are already good in link popularity, then only a couple of them can do the trick. So the final word is that – less is more.

Summary

Let’s not confuse things here, but essentially, I’m trying to explain that getting links to a website, though an important factor, shouldn’t go aggressive. There are various methods to get links to your website from good authority sources, the healthy way. These methods work the healthy way and might not give you results overnight, but that’s the best part. Getting obsessed with links is a dangerous thing to happen to a webmaster. So remember, get as many as high-quality links, get them nice and slow, and fewer in number – that’s the right way to go about it.

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How to get links to a website in the shortest possible time ? was posted at DailyBloggr.com by Mani Karthik.