SEO beginners FAQ

1. How to get listed in Google?

Read How to get listed in Google

2. How many search engines should I get listed?

It doesn’t make sense to submit to 100s of search engines. Your most of the traffic will come from Google. So it is enough if you get listed in Google, Yahoo and Bing ( MSN Live) – the three major search engines. If your site depends on business from local, submit to popular search engines and directories in your locality and niche.

3. How much should I pay for getting listed?

Getting listed in Google and many other leading search engines is free. Don’t pay anyone.

4. How can I make my site rank in first page of Google?

If you just want to rank for your site name, and if your site name is very unique, you will automatically rank in the front page. But if your name is not unique and you are aiming for a highly competitive term, you need to optimize your site for search engines.

5. SEO?

SEO means search engine optimization. Meaning, you need to understand how search engines work and design your site accordingly. It is the art and science of coding your site well, writing smart content and getting a reputation online. Search for “SEO” in Google and read some basic stuff.

6. Where can I learn SEO?

There are 1000s of sites teaching SEO. It is easy to get lost and confused by contradictory concepts, SEO myths. I recommend reading the following websites to know more about SEO.

* SEO Book

* Daily SEO Blog

* Google SEO Guide

7. How much time will it take to learn SEO?

You can learn the basic stuff in a week. But, this is a highly evolving field and million dollar competitive industry. If you want to be a professional SEO offering SEO services, then better spend hours everyday It is best to start SEOing your own sites, experiment and learn.

8. Should I pay others for SEO? How much should I pay?

If you want immediate results and not good at tech stuff, better get a SEO expert. The payment depends on how competitive is the term you are aiming for, what are the results you want and whom you are hiring. There are many self-proclaimed SEO experts who will offer you package services for a very low rate. Please be warned about them. There are many black hat SEO techniques (meaning it is like fooling the search engines in short term) which will get you banned from search engines sooner or later. Also be warned that some may charge you very high for simple services actually. So, study the market scenario before you decide to pay.

9. How to find a good SEO expert?

* See if he does nothing but SEO. SEO is a very demanding field. If he she does too many things and offers SEO as just one of the services, I doubt his expertise.

* See if his own site ranks well in search engines.

* Ask him examples of few competitive terms he ranked well for.

* Ask for the procedures he will apply to get you better ranking.

10. What will be the best SEO strategy?

Honest. Natural. Smart. Organic. Natural. Patient. Focus on single topic. Build friendships and reputation online.
Good luck for better SEO

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How to get listed in Google?

1. Create a useful site with at least 10 pages of comprehensive, unique and useful content.

2. Use a content management system like WordPress. WordPress takes care of 80% of the SEO mechanics ( See slides 11 and 12)

3. Add a xml sitemap. If you use WordPress, Google XML sitemaps works great.

4. Link to the site by a new article from your already indexed sites. Try to get as many new article links from your friends online. The higher their PageRank the better. This is the most guranteed method to get your site indexed. I have got my newly launched sites indexed and ranking in Google just within hours of launch following this method.

5. If you are new online and find it hard to get links from others: Find forums, blogs related to your topic and leave meaningful comments. This will get you some links and help you make valuable friends who will give you links in future.

6. Read and follow Google SEO guide

7. If nothing works you can try Google Add URL and add your site to Google Webmaster central and implement any suggestions they provide.
Good luck getting listed

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Article writing with SEO (Search engine optimization) in mind:

1. Have short, to the point article titles. Place your important keywords at the beginning of the title.

2. Remove non-keywords, common words from the article URL.

(For WordPress ) In a post’s edit view, under the article title, you have an option to edit permalink. Pleas edit it to include only the keywords. You can leave out insignificant and common words like “how”, “to”, “for” etc.,

3. Always define or summarize the main theme of the article in first paragraph. The sooner you have the main keywords in the article, the better.

4. When you refer to your previous articles, link to them by descriptive text. A link saying “improve golf success” is better than a link saying “click here to see”.

5. Categorize and tag your articles well with keywords. Be liberal with keywords. But, it is better to use only one broad category.

6. Link to external useful information sources on the article topic.

7. Bold the keywords and important content. Please take care that you don’t over do this.

8. At the end of article, link to a list of related articles from the same website and your other websites.

9. Publish articles regularly with a predictable interval.

10. Pack your article with as much info you can. The more informative, exhaustive, comprehensive the better. Think if your article is worth linking by an unknown person. Improve it until you feel so.

11. Please genuinely participate, comment in other people’s forums and blogs. The more you mingle with the community the better it is for SEO.

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Bounce rate can be defined as how many visitors leave your site without seeing a second page in your site. This is an important metric for your website performance. It does not matter how many hits, page views, unique visitors you get. If they all leave immediately, then something is wrong.

How to measure Bounce rate?

You can install Google Analytics to monitor bounce rate. If 60 out of 100 visitors leave without seeing second page (usually in a given time like 30 minutes defined by cookies), then your bounce rate is 60%. A bounce rate below 40% is good. 40%-65% is OK. Anything above that should be taken care of. Also, what you want to achieve through your site also defines what is a good bounce rate for you. A high bounce rate is not always bad. For a search engine like Google, 100% bounce rate may be good, actually !

How to reduce bounce rate?

1. Choose your niche. The more focused you are the lesser will be the bounce rate. Don’t write about civil wars and cinema gossips in the same site.

2. Update your site regularly. Regular visitors may bounce too. People often visit their favorite sites to check for new content. If you don’t have new content they will bounce. Give them Email and RSS feed subscription options so they won’t contribute to the bounce rate.

3. Write in depth articles: People often land through search engines in particular pages. If you don’t have comprehensive info about the given topic, they will bounce.

4. Write more number of related articles: If viewers like any of your articles, they will like to read more of the same topic in your website. Try to write more number of related articles on any given topic.

5. Monitor the search terms: Sometimes Google can send you people for a not so matching query. It is not your fault. But, you can record these queries and try to provide updated content on these topics. So you will have better performance in Google and your visitors will also be happy.

6. Give internal links: Give a list of related articles at the end of each article. Link to relevant previous articles from within the article. Categorize and tag articles.

7. List popular posts in the sidebar.

8. Have better page navigation: Often people get lost and don’t have a clue how to reach parent sections. Give them navigation bread crumbs at the top like Home >> Category name >> Articles name . Link to previous and next articles. This would help people to navigate back and forth and explore.

9. Use homepage real estate: Many sites have 100s of useful articles. But the homepage will be static and clueless of the hidden content. Redesign your homepage to include teasers and direct important sections within your site. Make it dynamic to show the latest updates to the site automatically. But, please note that not all land in your site through homepage. So, you need to focus in internal linking, context based menus in all pages of your site.

10. Have a clear and simple menu: Google does this well. Don’t squeeze all your pages in the site in your menu. Have a context based dynamic menu for each page. A menu should be self-explanatory. Don’t design it badly to look like a flash gimmick.

Now a quick quiz. I assume that websites with some specific content will always universally have lower bounce rates. Can you guess what ?

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Would you like to blog in a own domain like me? I am offering Free WordPress web hosting now. Please see if it helps. Thanks.

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WolframAlpha is a new text and data computation engine. I have already started using it instead of Google for some of my needs.

1. To trace a IP addreess

2. To find current time

3. To find color of a HTML color code

4. To convert currency – Automatically detects and converts to your local currency.

Have you started using WolframAlpha? What do you use it for?

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Slow WordPress

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For almost any search query, a Wikipedia article ranks better in Google.  Is Google biased towards Wikipedia? No. Google itself has Knol which is a direct competitor for Wikipedia. Then, how do Wikipedia articles rank better? Here is the secret:

1. Google favours informative pages over commercial sites.

A search for web hosting in Google lists informative articles including Wikipedia in the top.  See how a search for web hosting in Yahoo just lists only commercial websites.  We can think of Google as favouring information. Or it may be indirectly forcing companies to buy their adsense slots by denying top search results. Only Google knows

Except the above point everything else is well deserved merit by Wikipedia.

2. Wikipedia is online since 2001. Google thinks old sites are more reliable.

3. The structure of a Wikipedia article itself is highly SEOed:

* Both the title and URL of Wikipedia pages are to the point, short, self explanatory.

* Highly exhaustive, comprehensive collection of information.

* Articles are focused on a single topic. Assures keyword density.

* Natural writing assures  presence of related keywords.

* Frequent updates to the articles, addition of new articles regularly brings the search engine crawlers very often. So the changes are indexed at once.

* Copy formatting, text highlighting, sub headings, section – sub section structure help the bots clearly understand the content.

* Title definition at the very first paragraph.

* Images with description, alt tags, descriptive names and URLs.

* Presence of relevant external links., Google likes this.

4.  People by default link to Wikipedia to learn more. The Wikipedia pages are heavily interlinked. This increases the PageRank of Wikipedia pages.

Wikipedia is the best place to learn SEO because it doesn’t employ any SEO expert at all and yet ranks so well

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How to choose a domain name?

1. See if you have the .com name . Even if you want to have the site at .org or  .net or other TLDs, if you don’t have the .com available, it is not good for branding. Go for another name.

2. If you are really serious about brand value buy the .com .net .org and the TLD for your country in the beginning itself. When you site gets popular, it’s quite possible that some one else may cybersquat in these important TLDs. However, don’t spend too much on buying all TLDs or every possible variation of your domain name, unless you are Google.

3. If you are commercial, then .com name is the best. People by default think of a URL as .com . If you are non-commerical a .net or .org will do good. A country based TLD is best had as a mirror / redirect.

4. No hyphens. No numbers unless it is a part of your brand name. No suffixes like “online”, “live”, “4u”, “onthenet”.

5. Short. Clear. Catchy. To the point. Easy to remember. Spell correctly if you can.

6. Dare to have a  unique brand name. Domain name is not the only way to SEO. How if Google was named http://thebestsearchengine.com ? Think about the sites you most use. How many of them have unique brand names?

7. Don’t tweak a popular site’s name. I don’t remember respecting any such site.

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GoDaddy Sucks. Why?

1. When you want to buy a single product, GoDaddy will keep pushing lot more products and confuse you. The check out is not a quick process.

2. Google “GoDaddy Problem“. There are so many GoDaddy specific problems.

3. GoDaddy doesn’t have the popular and familiar cpanel interface. The domain management interface, hosting management interface are all outdated, cluttered, not user-friendly at all. Since it has a uniquely useless interface, you will waste lot of time figuring out how to do things and finding the buttons.

4. If you want to move a domain registered with GoDaddy, you have to do 60 days before the domain expires. Else, it will lock the domain with them for another year. Considering how users think of moving only at the last minute, they will be trapped.

5. While most of the top web hosts offer unlimited web hosting space for around 6 US dollars a month, GoDaddy charges 13 USD.

6. No Fantastico / simple scripts to easily install software like WordPress. The alternative solution GoDaddy offers is horrible and slow.

7. GoDaddy doesn’t warn you before reaching the bandwidth limit. Instead I get a notice that I am going to be charged for extra bandwidth that I unknowingly consumed. If they had given a prior warning, I would have taken care. They are charging as high as 2 USD per 1 GB extra bandwidth which is atrocious. Nothing less than looting you. And before I could change a valid payment info, they are threatening me to wipe down all my sites. How dare! That too, I still have 2 years of hosting money paid in advance !

8. No easy and comprehensive way to track stats.

9. GoDaddy will lure with you lot of features which you will discover that they are individually priced.

10. GoDaddy seems to offer a slightly lesser prize for hosting. But, you will have to pay for 4 years, while companies like bluehost ask to pay for 2 years only . Once you are in, it’s a hard decision to move out before this 4 years time.

11. Once I got a email notice that there seems to be a phishing attempt from my site and it will suspend my site in a day If I don’t respond. How am I suppose to respond within such a short period? How if I was in a vacation?

12. Thinking they make it more safe, GoDaddy has made password recovery frustrating. They keep logging out automatically in short sessions. I want it to trust me more and make things easy.

This list will grow more as I continue to suffer.

Right now, the only thing pretty about GoDaddy is the girl they show in their homepage Don’t get fooled !!

GoDaddy sucks.

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