Different SEO strategies based on keyword Competition

Keywords with little competition require different tactics than keywords with high competition. If you want to get the best possible results for your website, you must use the right tactics with the right keyword.

1. Different keywords require different SEO tactics
Keywords with little competition require different tactics than keywords with high competition. If you want to get the best possible results for your website, you must use the right tactics with the right keyword.

1. On-page optimization has a higher impact for long keywords

The relative value of on-page web page optimization is very high if you target very long keywords with little competition:

Here's an example: say you want to be listed for the search term "buy blue nike 'the overplay' basketball shoe in Atlanta" then it is enough to optimize one of your web pages for that search term because the competition for that search term is not high. You don't need many inbound links to get high rankings for that keyphrase.

If you target more competitive keywords, you need more backlinks to get high rankings in the search results.

2. Even if you target competitive keywords, it is important to optimize your web page content

The chart above might create the impression that web page optimization is not important to get high rankings for very competitive keywords. That is not the case. Optimizing the contents of a web page is the essential basis for high search engine rankings.

By optimizing a web page for a keyphrase, you tell search engines that the web page is relevant to that keyphrase. If more than one web page has been optimized for that keyphrase (which is usually the case) then the web page with the best inbound links will get the highest position in the search results.

For example, the website www.cnn.com has 46,600 inbound links according to Google. Although CNN.com has so many inbound links, they do not rank for the keyword "buy blue nike 'the overplay' basketball shoe in Atlanta" because the website has not been optimized for that keyphrase.

3. Optimize your web page content, then work on the backlinks

If you want to get high rankings for a keyword, the first step is to optimize one of your web pages for that keyword. Then work on the links that point to the optimized web page to outrank other websites that have been optimized for the same keyword.

4. The more pages you optimize the better

When you optimize your website, optimize different pages of your website for different keyphrases. Start with longer keyword phrases that don't have much competition and then proceed with more competitive keywords.

For example, start with the keywords "buy sneakers in atlanta", "buy cowboy boots in atlanta", "buy pumps in atlanta", "shoe shop atlanta", etc. When you have managed to get high rankings for many of these keyphrases, Google will know that your website is relevant to the topic "shoes".

As soon as Google knows that your website is relevant to the topic, it will be much easier to get high rankings for more competitive keywords such as "buy shoes" or even "shoes".

The more pages of your website you optimize for different but related keywords, the better.

5. It's not necessary to have more links than your competitors

It's not always necessary that you have more links than your competitors. You need better links.

Try to get links to your website that use the targeted keyphrase as the link text (also called anchor text) and that point to the web page on your website that has been optimized for that keyphrase.

Don't focus on quantity, focus on quality. Getting hundreds of links from a link farm won't help your website as much as a few dozen links from relevant web pages with authority.

If your website has both optimized web pages and good inbound links then it will be easy to outrank web pages that only have one factor.

Get your website optimized best by our On-page SEO Services and build your legacy.


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Twitter - a very powerful social media vehicle!

Twitter can be a very powerful social media vehicle, but are you using the 140 character social network to it's fullest?

Purge Your Follow/Followers: Take time to go through your twitter follower list and trim it down to the people or companies that are relevant to you.

Create Lists: Twitter's Lists can add value to their online persona. Twitter Lists are a social way of grouping people you follow (and even those you don't) and sharing those lists for the benefit of others as much as for your own organizational benefit. If you produce a useful list that other people follow, there is a strong chance they will follow your account as well.

Share with the Max: Take advantage of the lists you created and share what you want to share, and say what you want to say, as long as it's genuine, and about something that matters to you. Sharing with the audience that you know care about the same things as you do will make your Twitter life that much more rewarding.

Kill the Autopilot: It's not about the number of tweets you do; it's all about the quality and the relevancy of what you say.

Twitter is an important part of social media strategy and make sure you use it to the full potential. When you're on twitter engage yourself with the audience of similar interests and see the difference it will make in your presence on twitter.

To Use Twitter to it's full potential contact us for our Social Media Marketing Services

Google Friendly Page Layout Algorithm & Penalty

Google announced a new algorithm change that looks at your page layout and if the ads above the fold are excessive, your site can be penalized and downgraded in the search results. This comes with no surprise to me and others, because 10 weeks ago, Matt Cutts announced that this is something Google is working towards. Google wrote: We've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don't have much content "above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn't have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward. Google released a special tool at browsersize.googlelabs.com to help you visualize if your site may or was impacted by this. Here is how this site looks:

We seem to be okay, but what about Google's own search results. Well, Google won't let you plug in their own URLs into the tool, so it is hard to tell but I doubt they would pass the test.

Danny Sullivan, as well as many others, go through the hypocrisy with this new penalty and how Google is doing the exact opposite. Not only that, they recommend to their AdSense customers to place ads top heavy so users click on them. Here is their ad map:

That being said, the algorithm is out, if you were hit, you would probably know by now. To fix it, remove some of those ads, and wait and wait until Google pushes out an update. It can takes weeks. If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site. Who is affected? Google said 1 in every 100 searches are. If you read the forums, almost every thread talks about how Google is doing one thing and saying the other. Get your website designed in a best Google friendly layout by our Affordable Website Design Services India. Source

SEO Mistakes to avoid!

Most of the times your SEO agencies make some silly mistakes and your SEO campaign smash. Find below the reasons why your SEO Campaign didn’t worked or isn't working and how to fix it and make work for you:

1. Sometimes SEO’s make a mistake of aiming too high competitive keyword rather than aiming for a moderately competitive keyword with has decent amount of search traffic.

2. Understand your niche and requirement properly and utilize your resources across three key areas: keyword research, on-page content development and link building.

3. When targeting particular keyword, don’t just try to rank for one, two or three terms but keep the variations in mind and target groups. These variations will rank fast and will drive in more traffic.

4. Don’t keep jumping from plan A to B to C and then back to plan A, instead make a solid plan based on current market research and stick to it in order to succeed with your SEO campaign. Stay focused!

5. Most Important - Make sure that you have on-page content development strategy all set as content is still the KING!

6. Focus on quality link building and don’t just drop links on any page using any anchor text. Make sure you're targeting the right selection of “exact” terms – as these are the terms that you can realistically rank for.

Get Professional SEO Services from eLegacy and build your 'Legacy' with us!

Google can crawl links in iFram!

Michael Martinez posted a thread at High Rankings Forums basically confirming earlier reports that Google will see and pass value of a link within an iframe.

Michael said he ran his own independent test.

Michael said:

So I designed a simple two-stage test in December to see what would happen. The test is such that if the link passes anchor text in the first stage there is no need to try the second stage.

I embedded an iframed page on one of my older sites. It is well-indexed, has never been penalized, and has sufficient inbound links that I was confident it would be recrawled and re-indexed within a short period of time. It is also a low traffic site (it used to have more traffic a few years ago) so I felt it was probably a safe place to run a link test without attracting too much attention.

The iframed page only contains one in-body HTML element, a link pointing to HighRankings.com with the anchor text of "jill whalen says search engines crawl iframes". This was, until I ran my test, an expression that did not appear in Google's search results (when you wrap quotes around it).

I let the test be through the holidays and checked it today. The expression now appears in Google's search results.

He is extremely confident about his test that Google can crawl iFramed pages and follow the links within them.

Get your website designed by our SEO friendly Website Building Services.

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What targets to set in Social Media

What targets to set in Social Media

A lot of companies don’t set the right kind of targets for their social media activity, which makes it really difficult for them to measure success or spot opportunities for improvement. Setting targets for metrics like traffic, conversation participation and the number of fans or followers you have is a great starting point.

With these targets in place it's going to be a lot easier to track what actually works. Not everything you do in social media will be a run-away success, but over time you will be able to build a successful strategy based around the activities that had a positive effect on your metrics.

This can also be applied to the social networks you participate in. If you have well defined metrics, it's going to be a lot easier to spot which social networks are working for you and which ones are just draining your resources and offering very little ROI.

1. Fans and followers
Increasing your fan and follower numbers is important, but it’s a bit of an unreliable indicator of success. Set reasonable targets to increase these numbers but remember engagement (i.e. conversation participation and sharing) is more important.

2. Conversation participation and sharing
Judging whether or not your followers are engaging in a ‘good’ amount of conversation and sharing is relative, and it can always be improved. For example, there’s no magic number of retweets you need to hit to be "successful" at sharing on Twitter.

Set targets to increase your posts’ average number of comments, likes, or retweets. Track which sorts of content elicit the best sharing responses and use this to inform your social content strategy to ultimately increase engagement moving forward.

3. Traffic v Conversions
Unless you’re in the business of selling ad impressions traffic probably isn’t a terribly useful metric. Rather than seeking to purely increase traffic, look at which social media sites refer the traffic with the highest conversion rate.

Think both in terms of macro and micro conversions - macro conversions are things like purchases whereas micro conversions are things like signing up for newsletters, downloading whitepapers and so on.

The sites that send the traffic with the best conversion rates should become the priority of your social media strategy.

There are also many ways to determine the financial impact of your social media efforts, - depending on your objectives.

Get your target set best and grow your legacy socially by our full time Social Media Consultant Service.

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What You should be Monitoring in Social Media

When you look at any kind of metrics or KPIs, you have to know which questions you want answered. Each metric can answer a different question, and looking at a combination of metrics helps to give a fuller view of how your social media campaign is performing:

1. Traffic & Conversions from social media sites

The source and amount of traffic generated by social media is one of the easiest metrics to measure. Analytics packages allow you to filter by traffic sources, so you can see how many users come from which social media sites. You can also see whether or not that traffic goes on to convert - e.g. purchasing something, signing up for a newsletter etc.

2. Fan or follower numbers

Most social media sites will only track the total number of fans or followers you have, so you will need a third-party tool to track when people have joined or left.

3. Conversation participation

Conversation participation metrics attempt to quantify how people are interacting with your social media campaigns. These metrics will largely include things like comments or likes on a Facebook post or responding to a tweet.

4. Social reach performance

This looks at whether or not people are sharing your content by retweeting or writing a blog post about your social media campaign.

Get your Social Media monitored best by our Social Media Marketing Services.

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Google is not showing title tags in the search results properly

There are often complaints in the forum that Google is not showing your title tags in the search results properly.

Yesterday, Google wrote a blog post named Better page titles in search results. Here, Pierre Far, explains why Google may pick a different title tag.

In a Google+ post he gives the short version:
Our algorithms generate thee alternative titles so that your page is no longer constrained with having just the one title for all the different queries your page ranks for. This has the nice side effect of making the result look more relevant to our searchers and...

On average, the alternative titles increase the clickthrough rate on the results, i.e. more traffic for you.

The < title > tag is still a primary source for titles we show so all our advice about make them concise and useful and enticing still very much apply. Keep an eye on the HTML Suggestions page in the Diagnostics section in Webmaster Tools for title suggestions.

For a more detailed walk through of this, see the Google Help document on this topic.

Get your title tags optimized best with our On-page SEO Services.

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How Google Employee Respond To Link Exchange Requests

A Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, who works with the search quality team at Google.

Someone sent her an email requesting a link exchange. In fact, it is fairly common for Googlers, including top well-known Googlers like Matt Cutts, to receive link exchange requests via email.

Susan posted on Google+ the email she received and the response she sent back. Her response was, you and your site violated Google's guidelines and will be reported as such.

Link exchange email request:

Hi, my name is Mary. I came across your website, THEDAME.NET, and would like to propose a link exchange between your sites and [redacted].com. Did you know, exchanging links will generate more traffic to both of our sites. Best of all it's FREE; there is no cost or hidden fee. We simply ask for a link back from a page on your site. Simple enough, don't you think?

Here is Susan's response:

Seriously, Mary? You sent a link exchange request to a member of the Google search team, for a domain that isn't even hosted?? You didn't even look at the site, did you. MAJOR LINKSPAM FAIL. I'm reporting your site to Google for violating our Webmaster Guidelines.

Serious response!

John Mueller from Google said that he gets between 3-4 a week of these a week.

Google announced one of the biggest changes to their search results

Google announced one of the biggest changes to their search results, maybe ever.

The results, when logged in, will be extremely personalized with a high level of integration with Google+. Google described it as being "able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they've shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to... all from one search box."

The three core and new features include:

• Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts - both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
• Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
• People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

This sparked a bit of a debate around various communities on the internet. Obviously the privacy community, the social community and of course, the webmaster/SEO community. I wanted to share some of the feedback from SEOs and webmasters in the forums.

Overall, they are worried, like they have been with Google's previous personalization attempts. The one good thing, as Danny Sullivan explained in his detailed write up on this release was that searchers now have a clear toggle on and off switch for personalized results - will they use it and will Google keep that toggle, remains to be seen.

Here are some of the Webmaster comments:

It is, on first appearance, a bit unsettling. I reserve judgment for now, because a lot of times my first reaction to any change is resistance and suspicion - and then over time I can appreciate it.

keep screwing with the sauce........

Yet another way of squeezing out the small publisher. Google now has an excuse to manipulate search results however they want for each individual user. If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times...Don't count on Google to continue to bring you new users forever.

Since the "your world" results can be toggled on and off, I'd think it won't make too big of an impact. But then again, I just finished typing "ostrich - meet sand" so maybe my mindset is affecting everything at the moment.

Then you have Twitter calling this a bad thing and Google defending themselves by saying "We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer, and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions"

Matt Cutts touches on how it is not just Google+ content shaping the results, but also Flickr and they want to add more, if the social networks allow.

Search Marketing Tip of the Week

Search Marketing Tip of the Week

1. Nofollow links don't add to your SEO but in last December, Google and bing confirmed that tweeted links are in fact a signal for a search engine’s organic and news rankings. 2. Building a stronger reach with high quality followers will help boost your tweets’ rankings. 3. Try to have a small set of keywords and use them throughout the day in your tweets to help boost your rankings. 4. Ensure tweet lengths are retweetable and that brings in the importance of short username. 5. Post remarkable updates that appeal to influencers. 6. Make twitter usernames spam-free and try to use your company name if possible. 7. Include keywords in your twitter bio as search engine results often display your twitter bio in the description.

When Will Google Panda's Update Start Rolling?

In July we asked if the Google Panda update was a rolling update? Meaning, did the algorithm update dynamically by itself without having Google hit a button to push out an update.

The answer was no - at least back then.

But it is expected that the Panda algorithm would one day be part of Google's rolling and continuously updating algorithm - working in almost real time, when possible.

At this point in time, I do not think Panda is a rolling update. But some are thinking it is. What do you think?

Are we rolling now? If not, partially? How soon?

Can Google can crawl iFramed pages and follow the links within them?

Michael Martinez posted a thread at High Rankings Forums basically confirming earlier reports that Google will see and pass value of a link within an iframe.

Michael said he ran his own independent test.

Michael said:

So I designed a simple two-stage test in December to see what would happen. The test is such that if the link passes anchor text in the first stage there is no need to try the second stage.

I embedded an iframed page on one of my older sites. It is well-indexed, has never been penalized, and has sufficient inbound links that I was confident it would be recrawled and re-indexed within a short period of time. It is also a low traffic site (it used to have more traffic a few years ago) so I felt it was probably a safe place to run a link test without attracting too much attention.

The iframed page only contains one in-body HTML element, a link pointing to HighRankings.com with the anchor text of "jill whalen says search engines crawl iframes". This was, until I ran my test, an expression that did not appear in Google's search results (when you wrap quotes around it).

I let the test be through the holidays and checked it today. The expression now appears in Google's search results.

He is extremely confident about his test that Google can crawl iFramed pages and follow the links within them.

Google's most recent search quality updates

Google's most recent search quality updates.

Rankings:

• Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.
• Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.

Search Results:

• More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.
• More accurate country-restricted searches. [launch codename “greencr”] On domains other than .com, users have the option to see only results from their particular country. This is a new algorithm that uses several signals to better determine where web documents are from, improving the accuracy of this feature.
• More rich snippets. We improved our process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets. As a result, you should start seeing more sites with rich snippets in search results.
• More accurate byline dates. [launch codename “foby”] We made a few improvements to how we determine what date to associate with a document. As a result, you’ll see more accurate dates annotating search results.
• Google Instant enhancements for Japanese. For languages that use non-Latin characters, many users use a special IME (Input Method Editor) to enter queries. This change works with browsers that are IME-aware to better handle Japanese queries in Google Instant.
• Related query improvements. [launch codename “lyndsy”] Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are related to the original query but have fewer words. We made several changes to our algorithms to make them more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.
• Tweak to +1 button on results page. As part of our continued effort to deliver a beautifully simple user experience across Google products, we’ve made a subtle tweak to how the +1 button appears on the results page. Now the +1 button will only appear when you hover over a result or when the result has already been +1’d.
• Better spell correction in Vietnamese. [project codename “Pho Viet”] We launched a new Vietnamese spelling model. This will help give more accurate spelling predictions for Vietnamese queries.
• Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.
• Improved Hebrew synonyms. [launch codename “SweatNovember”, project codename “Synonyms”] This update refines how we handle Hebrew synonyms across multiple languages. Context matters a lot for translation, so this change prevents us from using translated synonyms that are not actually relevant to the query context.
• Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.uk, https://www.google.de andhttps://www.google.fr.
• Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.

Webmaster:

• Soft 404 Detection. Web servers generally return the 404 status code when someone requests a page that doesn’t exist. However, some sites are configured to return other status codes, even though the page content might explain that the page was not found. We call these soft 404s (or “crypto” 404s) and they can be problematic for search engines because we aren’t sure if we should ignore the pages. This change is an improvement to how we detect soft 404s, especially in Russian, German and Spanish. For all you webmasters out there, the best practice is still to always use the correct response code.

Backend:

• Better infrastructure for autocomplete. This is an infrastructure change to improve how our autocomplete algorithm handles spelling corrections for query prefixes (the beginning part of a search).
• Improved dataset for related queries. We are now using an improved dataset on term relationships to find related queries. We sometimes include results for queries that are related to your original search, and this improvement leads to results from more relevant related queries.
• Safer searching. [launch codename “Hoengg”, project codename "SafeSearch"] We updated our SafeSearch tool to provide better filtering for certain queries when strict SafeSearch is enabled.

Answers:

• Live results for NFL and college football. [project codename “Live Results”] We’ve added new live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results. These results now provide the latest scores, schedules and standings for your favorite football teams.
• Better lyrics results. [launch codename “baschi”, project codename “Contra”] This change improves our result quality for lyrics searches.
• Upcoming events at venues. We've improved the recently released places panel for event venues. For major venues, we now show up to three upcoming events on the right of the page. Try it for [staples center los angeles] or [paradise rock club boston].

SOURCE by Barry Schwartz

Poll - Google was caught buying links!

Google was caught buying links to promote Chrome - well, it wasn't directly Google, it was a third-party Google marketing company doing it without their knowledge.

Google has responded by:

(1) Dropping the ranking for Chrome for the keyword [browser] to well beyond page 7 or so.

(2) Dropping the PageRank of the Chrome landing page.

Is this enough? Take our poll below.

Matt Cutts responded on Google+ saying:

Sorry that it took me until now to comment on the situation that Danny wrote about at http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 . I’m in Central America this week and my ability to reach the internet hasn't been great.

I’ll give the short summary, then I’ll describe the webspam team’s response. Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos--not link to Google--and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 .

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.