There has always been a love/hate relationship with the practice of leveraging blog comments as an SEO marketing strategy. And now, with it being more highlighted as a source of penalty, one can’t help wonder if it’s still a valuable way of building links.

What is Quality Blog Commenting?

Well-known as one good link building strategy used by many Search Engine Optimisation Service providers, quality blog commenting, as the name implies, is commenting on relevant blogs. One of its purpose is to get backlinks from relevant blogs  and drive traffic to your site.

Other purposes for quality blog commenting is a way to connect with the blog owners, for awareness and branding to the blog’s consistent audience, for SEO / Search Rankings (especially those approved comments with no “nofollow” attribute in the profile link section and may send search engine ranking value) and for second-order marketing impact (i.e. getting backlinks from another blog discussing your comment). See this article for more Importance of Comments to Blog Success.

Though blog commenting could also harm your site if not done properly, especially with the Penguin Update that can easily detect comment spams, one should make sure that your blog comments will not be taken as comment spams by search engines.

Tips for Blog Commenting: Doing it in the Right Way

Here are 10 recommendations for commenting on blogs:

1.   Introduce or Identify Yourself Using your Real Name

Avoid stuffing keyword rich anchor text in the “Name” field. Bloggers blog to meet people. They are friendly, so don’t be afraid or hesitate to introduce yourself using your real identity. In this way, you are building trust and goodwill which is invaluable. If possible, use also your actual photo of yourself. Using your real name can often mean the difference between being recognized as a good new member as opposed to being treated as a blog comment spammer.

2.   Avoid Link Dropping

Dropping a link in a comment that is totally unrelated to the comment thread or the topic of the original post is considered as spam and may be rejected or deleted, 8/10 times, immediately. If you want to leave a link, make sure the link is highly relevant to the post, interesting and useful to the audience and as non-promotional as possible. If your links are highly promotional, post it transparently as such.

3.    Comment on Blogs with Similar Target Audience

As mentioned, the primary reason to blog comment is to get more direct traffic to your site. By commenting on blogs that target the same audience as you, you are ensuring that you’re targeting the right people with the right interest about what you are selling or promoting. Of course, if you are a hardware store, you’d want to comment on hardware blogs, not on pet owner blogs.

4.  Read and Understand the Blog Post before Leaving Comments

Make sure to leave comments of quality value. Read first the last 5 posts made by the author, a minimum of 3 posts worth of comments and the previously posted comments on the thread.

In this way you’ll get a better understanding of the author, their interests, their perspective and their writing style as well as the community’s level and style of discourse; thus, helping you make comments that are more in keeping, useful and of interest with the author and audience, making the author and other readers take you seriously.

5.   Contribute Something Useful to The Conversation

In blog commenting, leaving comments like “nice post” or “I agree” and then including a link will not get you far. This is so obvious that you’re only doing it for the link. Give also Encouragement. Bloggers love to be encouraged not flattered. So, if you disagree, don’t hesitate to voice your opinion (but be civil about it). In this way, you are not only passively commenting but are inviting other commenters as well as the blogger to interact with you and be interested with you; thus, helping you connect with the community.

6.   Be Constructive in your Feedback

By providing new resource, you are helping the blogger stay on top of their game. And, this may become a share and give cycle that will make them in turn share a useful resource to you.

7.   Reply to the other Commenters

In this way, you are making a connection, which in the long run will be useful and valuable. However, make sure that your responses stay relevant. This will make your comments or responses becomes more interesting than the blog post itself, establishing your authority as a commenter and garnering more interest in you and indirectly in your website.

8.   Make Sure that Your Profile Link is Pointing to the Most Appropriate Place

Linking a spammy/manipulative-looking site can be considered comment spamming. So, if your site is completely off-topic for the blog/community to which you’re commenting, then make sure that you are linking to your bio page on the site rather than the homepage.

9.   Avoid Mass Commenting All At Once

This is considered as mass spamming as it is obvious that you just want to get backlinks.

10.   Avoid Commenting Across Multiple Blogs

Remember that many bloggers across any particular industry know each other. And posting duplicate comments across multiple blogs will easily be seen with and dealt with accordingly.

If you follow these commenting guidelines, you can be sure that your comments will not be considered as spams. Thus, you get your direct traffic and SEO benefits.

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With the escalating popularity of social media, along with the rapid growth of its usage by brands/business, as well as it playing large part in a shopper’s journey, there is a need for online business owners, search engine optimization experts, and marketers alike to analyze the returns and benefits of going “social”.

And that’s the reason why Google released a new set of Social reports within Google Analytics (GA).

What is GA’s Social Reports?

Google Analytics’ Social Reports is Google’s new social-focused reports with GA that allow digital marketers and SEO Service providers to better measure the full value of the social channel for their business.

As posted in their blog post announcing the launch, GA’s new Social Reports will enable you to:

• Measure the full value of social media for your business

• Track how many conversions are generated from your social media channels

• Display user engagement and conversion metrics for social media site which helps you determine how people are interacting with your content

How does GA’s Social Reports help SEO Experts and Social Media marketers?

Thru GA’s Overview Report, SEOs and marketers can immediately see and assess their social channels social performance and its impact on conversions.

• Thru the Conversions Report, one can assess the importance of a specific network to your social campaign and which goals are being impacted by social media

• The Social Sources Report helps in keeping a tab on the interaction and circulation of the content as well as an effective way of analyzing the effectiveness of your campaigns

• The information from Social Plugin report can help you create more of the type of content that’s popular with your visitors, and test different layouts of social sharing buttons to improve use by your community.

Overall, tracking your site’s social performance can help you determine if getting social is the best for you and which social hubs are the best to optimize your profile. It will also help you optimize your user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as help plan and create the best social media marketing programs.

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So, let’s get a recap of what’s been happening ever since Google released its latest search algorithm.

The Launching of Google’s Penguin Update

Last April 24, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts had finally announced that they have  rolled out its latest search algorithm update that was once called the over optimization filter and then called webspam algorithm update and was finally and officially called the Penguin Update.

Google’s Penguin Update was designed to better catch people spamming its search results or purposely doing shortcuts to rank pages higher that are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.

The Impact of Penguin Update

Had gone live for all languages at the same time, Google’s Penguin Update was reported to have impacted about 3% of search queries.

For the last few days, many webmasters have seen their sites being coldly blasted from Google’s search results. Many had observed that their search-related traffic from Google had dropped significantly within a day or two before Google’s launch of its Penguin Update on April 24. Many had also seen that there was also a major decrease in their rankings.

Mostly pages/sites that were affected had done what Google says as doing webspam techniques, pages/sites that attempt to propel its rankings through things like:

• Keyword stuffing

• Link schemes

• Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects or “doorway” pages

• maliciously create pages by phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other malwares

• Purposeful duplicate content

• An Attempt at Recovery

Now, there are many forum discussion and articles all over the web mentioning of post-penguin recovery strategies. Overall, these all say that those who were hit by Panda Updates must remove all spam elements (like unnatural links) from their web pages as well as only use white-hat SEO methods. You may also read our previous article about SEO Guidelines to Consider for Over Optimization Penalty.

Specifically, according to an early analysis on the sites hit by Penguin, one common theme appears to be a severe lack of natural links, with sites participating in unnatural link schemes.

If you have done:

• buying links with exact match anchor text

• comment spamming, commenting using signatures that uses exactly identical anchor text or using exact match anchor text for keywords you intend to highly rank

• linking via guest posting on questionable sites (sites filled with low-quality articles)

• linking from article marketing sites and dangerous sites

Then you are in violation of Google’s publisher guidelines.

The Release of Google’s Penguin Feedback Form

Google says that reconsideration requests won’t help with Penguin Update as it ‘s an algorithmic change (a penalty that’s applied automatically).

However, if you think that your website was mistakenly flagged, Google had rolled out a new form that you can use to report errors.

According to Cutts’ tweet, Google had launched a Penguin Feedback Form where you can report to Google if you think your site should not have been hit by this update. This form is headed “Feedback on our recent algorithm update (“Penguin”)”.

In the form, there is a link for people who thought if Google missed some spam to submit a spam report.

Then, for those whose site was affected by this algorithm update on April 24th, 2012, and don’t think it should have been affected, there are fields where you can input more details like your URL of a page affected by the update, query which shows non-ideal results and comments.

Last April 27, Google Google also rolled out Panda 3.6 Update, a small and almost unnoticeable Panda refresh because only few sites were affected.

So, that’s the latest happenings so far from Google’s Penguin Update. Keep posted if you want to stay updated on the latest algorithm updates of Google!

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These past few days have been chaotic in the world of SEO. With Google’s latest algorithm update finally rolled out, webmasters are now scrambling either looking for answers why their rankings vanished or trying to get ahead of the once originally named Over Optimization Penalty, then the Webspam Algorithm Update, and now officially named Penguin update.

So, why is your site is affected by Penguin Update?

Google’s latest algorithm update was designed to target on web spam in Google’s search results. Webspam techniques include, largely in part, link schemes (linking from low-quality networks) that attempt to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.

Early analysis on the sites hit by Penguin, according to SEO Experts, indicates that one common theme appears to be a severe lack of natural links, with sites participating in unnatural link schemes.

Here are 5 common issues why your site is affected by penguin update:

1.   Paid Links with Identical Anchor Text.

Examples of these are paid text sponsored links. Google considers buying or selling links that pass PageRank in violation of its existing quality guidelines. And Google considers these paid links using exact match anchor text a clear violation of their guidelines as Google sees these links as being intended exclusively for the sake of manipulating PageRank rather than being useful to visitors.

2.   Links from Spam Comments

These come in 2 forms: comments using signatures that make use of exact match anchor text and comments using exact match anchor text for keywords they intend to highly rank.

3.   Linking via Guest Posting on Low-Quality Blog Sites

Guest posting is a legitimate and powerful way to earn links to your site, but make sure you are posting from the right websites and blogs. Guest posting on questionable sites (sites filled with low-quality articles) that mainly focus on the use of exact match anchor text rather than the content is considered in violation of Penguin.

4.   Linking from Poor Content Article Marketing Sites

These sites have syndicated articles that mainly focus on using exact match anchor text leading back to sites rather than having high-quality relevant content, which is in violation of Google’s algorithm update.

5.   Linking from Dangerous Sites

Google warns sites not to create pages or links to pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware or malware behavior (that covers all sorts of malicious software designed to harm a computer or network). These would cause your site to lose their Google rankings as Google uses automatic scanners to constantly look for this sort of web pages, identifying your site as infected in their search results to protect other users from dangerous websites.

With the Penguin update, it is very important to fix these issues as these would truly decrease your rankings on Google’s search results. You should work on improving your link building campaign by following the ethical SEO Guidelines in order to recover from the negative impact of Penguin update and make your site more authority and therefore increase your search engine rankings.

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Last month, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s anti-spam team, had revealed that Google had been working for the past few months on a new penalty algorithm for over-optimized websites called Over-Optimization Penalty.

What is Over-Optimization Penalty?

It is a new search ranking penalty algorithm that is designed to targets sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed” for search engines.

According to Cutts, this new over-optimization penalty is aimed to “level the playing field,” giving sites that have great content a better chance at ranking above those sites that have content that is not as great but have been overly optimizing or overly doing their SEO. It will decrease rankings for sites that Google has deemed in violation of their existing quality guidelines.

This update, first named as “Webspam Algorithm Update” was rolled out last April 24, 2012 (Tuesday) and was announced on Google Search Blog. According to Google, about 3% of search queries were affected.

Search Engine Land announced yesterday that this Google’s Webspam Algorithm has an official name, “Penguin”.

So what are the recommendations or changes to do for this latest algorithm update:

1. Write Descriptive Title Tags for Humans. Avoid Inserting Too Much Keywords

You need to create titles that sound real and read like a human being wrote them not, titles that read like you’ll simply want to rank for keyword after keyword. Do not repeat your keywords excessively, it would look spammy and manipulative. Just state your brand name then keyword (Professional Web Design Services – Brand Name) rather than Web Design Services, Web Design Company, Web Design Portfolio – Brand Name). In this, you’re repeating the keywords web design three times, it’s too much.

2.   Write a More Natural Anchor Text Linking to Different Pages of your Site

Using same anchor text many times on a page and excessively linking them to the same page is not useful for SEO. It is a known SEO fact that search engines only give or award value to the first anchor text link and to only one on the page. Linking repeatedly to the same page using the same anchor will just make your site look spammy and questionable to someone who’s scanning your page. It won’t help increase your conversion rates.

Rather, create a more logical, useful anchor text link that links to a page on your site that you want others to actually visit and is useful in context. You can also use a modified version of the anchor text. You can shorten it or make it a little longer but make sure to make it natural sounding. In this way you’re going to get these same results and not be at risk of being penalized for over-optimization.

3.   Provide Useful Links at the Footer

Avoid having a cluster of exact anchor text links at the footer of your site that is not useful to your visitors. Instead, make use of your footer wisely. Link your footer to things that your visitors actually expect to find in the footer.

4.   Write Quality Content that is Valuable to your Visitors

Avoid having text content blocks that are primarily for the search engines. This won’t work and would even get you penalized. Those spammy text content blocks in your pages which don’t have any use to your visitors other than to get your keywords into the text are not a good call to action. It would even actually drive people away from you, hurting your conversion rate. So, when writing content, always ask yourself “Do your readers find it useful?” or “Would it make them convert or avail of what your offering?”

5.   Build Links from Relevant and High Domain Authority Websites

Avoid getting backlinks from penalty-likely sources like those guaranteeing that they’re a private link network and they can place your site on it. Do a SEO Audit of your site and do a thorough Link Assessment. Make sure to examine the value of site/page before linking to it. Avoid linking to automated link exchange networks / participate in paid link schemes. Google is penalizing these sites/networks.

6.   Combine all the Pages with very Similar Content and Targeting very Similar Keywords

In this way, you’re providing a great user experience. Writing several pages with very similar or modified versions of keywords and keyword intents would look too much and spammy and would get you in trouble with search engines.

Now, with the Over-Optimization Penalty is finally rolled out, it is now more important to assess your site and do a thorough Website Analysis. By doing an assessment of your site, you will be able to ascertain your mistakes and weakness and be able to change those areas that need improvements.

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Simply speaking, bounce rate represents the most basic expression of dissatisfaction that users can give to your site as a high bounce rate generally indicates that your site entrance pages are not relevant or quite as not compelling to your visitors.

Bounce rate is all about “first impressions really matter” - the more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert (which is the ultimate goal of getting cost-effective SEO Services). So how can you lower your bounce rate?

“12 TIPS on How to Lower Down Your Site BOUNCE RATE”

Here are some tips on how to lower down your site bounce rate and encourage your visitors to click your other pages.

1.   Provide Informative Content and Bring your Visitors to the Most Relevant Landing Page they Need

Make sure that the keyword that you are ranking for on SERPs best describes the content on your website. Take your visitor where they want to go. Make sure that your landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised displayed on the search results or in the ad copy.

Generally, a high bounce rate would indicate your site is not relevant to the search they performed or they judged your site to be of poor quality.

2.   Have a Clean and Accessible Navigation

Make sure that your site’s navigation is prominent, clear, direct and easily accessible. Consider adding the links of your most significant pages in the footer. Make sure also that your click targets for menus that are large enough for use at small resolutions.

For sites with large amount of content, consider including search functionality and a site map. This would help visitors easily find the information they’re looking for.

3.   Add Calls to Action Button or Key Phrases

All website owners and SEO experts aim to engage their visitors and direct them to do a specific activity or activities, such as contacting them, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase. So make sure to put the most popular links and call to action ( key phrases you use suggesting what your visitors should do next) buttons on your site in the ‘best real estate’ of your pages.

The location rule of thumb of web pages is that close to the top and towards the left of the screen is better. Make sure to make them descriptive and easy to find.

4.   Add Informative and Attractive Images on your Page

Make sure that you use images that are effective at achieving your goals. Try considering making use of photos of humans instead of fancy graphics. Use photos that are relevant to your site.

5.   Choose Color Wisely

Use good contrast. In this way, you will not only make the site more accessible to visitors who may have difficulty seeing, but also using good contrast will also provide you with an overall effect of making important content easier to stick out from the rest of the design, making it easier to find and drawing people’s attention or focus to where you want it to go.

Moreover, with an increasing number of people accessing the web via mobile devices, this means that your site will be viewed on a variety of screen resolutions in any number of lighting conditions. So you need to make your site to be as readable as possible in these situations.

6.   Create a Nice Logo

A good logo design image must be describable, memorable, scalable and effective. Your logo is often the first impression that your visitors have of your company. So you must make sure that your logo lends credibility to the company’s main message. Make use of a graphical symbol over, or next to, or to the left of the company name. And make sure that the symbol and name that you use work together.

In general, when you use graphic and text in your logo design, your concept should clearly convey a message to effectively advertise your offered products or services aimed at your target audiences & target market.

7.   Have a Good Layout

For sites that gets a large amount of mobile traffic, have a responsive layout. Having a responsive design  that uses techniques, such as CSS media queries, in rearranging and scaling content based on screen resolution is a good alternative to having specific mobile and large-screen versions of your site.

Moreover, use high-resolution images and stylesheets for retina display. This will greatly improve image sharpness and fidelity, making your site much easier to see on a small screen on devices supporting retina display technology.

You can also create multiple versions for web and large-screen, depending on the purpose, complexity and functionality of your site. However, for most websites, having a responsive design is a great way in making sure that your blog, web app or ecommerce site is easily accessible on a wide number of devices.

8.   Create Enticing Headlines

Headlines are the first things that people read when reaching a website page. Create attractive and interesting headlines and graphics that highlight important features and key information. Particularly for landing pages, your headlines could be the difference between people sticking around or heading on to another site.

9.   Create a User-friendly Sign Up Form

Make sure to add the words “It’s free” next to a sign-up button as most visitors tend to shy away from filling up their basic information in websites

10.  Create a Compelling Product Description

Make sure to make your product descriptions persuasive and informative as they are the second most important aspect of selling a product online. They fill in the blanks that the photos missed.

11.   Improve your Site Speed

Because more often than most, people are impatient to wait, if your site’s speed is slow, your visitor might get bored and leave. If the average user has to wait longer than 10 seconds for most elements of your page to load, they’ll either assume something is wrong with the site, or simply get impatient and leave.

Make sure to improve your website’s speed as improving it will not only improve your site’s performance including bounce rate but it will also improve how Google sees your website along with other factors as well. Site loading time is now one of the signals Google uses to determine your Search Engine ranking.

12.   Check the Placements of Your Ads

Too many advertisements can be a big turn-off to your visitors so it’s important to put your ads on areas that don’t distract them.

Bottomline: Having a good user interface is important in lowering your site’s bounce rate as it will make your site relevant, more easily accessible, and more interesting and attractive to visitors, getting visitors to stay and continue browsing your other pages.

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In planning and designing your site architecture, it’s important to consider both users and search engines.

For users, you should give them the most relevant content and reduce the number of times they have to click to quickly find what they look for. For search engines, it’s also necessary to make your website get the most of pages in search engine index, gaining the most number of pages generating organic traffic and thus conversion.

Basic Aspects of Site Architecture

Here are the basic aspects of site architecture that affect search engine rankings:

• File/Directory System

Though Google can dive as deep as 4 levels, it is very important to place the most important pages to no more than 2 levels deep. This is because search engines place a much greater degree of importance on pages that are closer to the root directory.

So, if your site is particularly large (100 – 200 pages), you should keep these pages (100 – 200 pages) that are most important to your target audience in the root directory. If you have a smaller site, you must leave all pages under the root, placing your most important pages at level 1 and 2. The home page, commonly named index.html, and the Robots Exclusion Protocol, commonly named robots.txt are the two most important documents that should be in the root directory.

By flattening – the process of promoting content “up” the architecture – your site architecture to no more than 3 clicks to deepest level; you can have a much better outcome of higher indexation and a better long tail, improving your overall rank.

• Subdirectories, File Names, and URL Structure and Extensions

For larger sites (250-plus pages), it is advisable to divide different site sections into subdirectories to keep related pages close to each other on a Web server. However, for smaller sites, it is preferable that your URL should be without the subdirectory (www.domain.com/subdirectory.html rather than www.domain.com/sub/directory.html) as it is easier to type and easier to remember. Most users complain of “too many forward slashes”. So you must remember your end users when you create a URL structure.

Moreover, you should basically make use of htm, html and txt in your URL. It is also important to take note to keep your file keywords separated by hyphens and not to stuff them. Take note also to always make use of the ALT tag to name your images as this will reap benefits in the image search results.

• Navigation Menus

Make sure to make your navigation structure clear and easy to follow. You must make it both user-friendly and easily enable the search engine spiders to crawl with ease, associating related topics together in a logical manner. Ensure also that your navigation elements are crawlable and add relevant keywords in your URL to make it reader-friendly as well as search engine friendly.

The best form of site navigation for web optimization is making use of hypertext links. A few well-placed hypertext links can enhance both search engine visibility and page conversions.

For large sites, construct an entire typical website hierarchy, with cross-links, breadcrumbs, and site-wide links. Cross-linking is important for search engine visibility as well as for upselling and usability.

Breadcrumbs, which tells visitors where they are and the direct path back to where they have come from (i.e.  Home  > SEO Packages > SEO Starter Package > Inquire Now),  is an ideal means of navigation for larger sites not only from a usability point of view but also from an SEO perspective as via the effective usage of relevant keywords, it will enhance your site’s link structure.

• Landing Pages

Make sure to keep the landing pages for the most popular search terms closest to the home page, with the least amount of clicks possible to get to the landing page. Landing pages related to less popular, more obscure, or long-tail search terms can reside deeper in your site. Moreover, make sure to have intra-site linking between related search terms. If there are three landing pages, makes sure to intra-link them to the other related pages of your site. By following these steps, you’ll create a site that has sufficient landing pages for each of your desired search terms, and your content will be organized into a logical, user-friendly architecture that responds well to organic search.

• Robots Meta Tag or Robots.txt File

Use the robots.txt file to exclude content and sections of your site from robots. Make sure to include the robots.txt file in your server’s root directory. Do a search on your server for stray robots.txt files and delete any robots.txt file below the root directory. If you have a robots.txt file found in any subdirectory, delete it as it will block crawling of that subdirectory and any directory below.

The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and Robots Meta Tag are the two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site. When search engine spider indexes your website, they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content.

For static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites; make use of robots.txt file. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots < Meta >Tag.

• Error Pages

Creating a custom 404 page that includes links to other pages on your site will not only help prevent search bots to stop crawling your site but it will also give visitors confidence in a site, add credibility, and help to keep them on your site. However, keep these choices to a minimum as it might overwhelm them. Users only need a minimum of feedback to get them back on track.

Make sure to put a search box on the 404 page. Make sure that your 404 returns the correct server header code. Put clear call-to-action links to the sitemap and main categories of your site.

Be sure your 404 error page passes a 404 error code. This stops search engines from indexing it, preventing your error pages showing up in search results.

Put a Meta robots tag on your custom 404 error pages. This will tell the search engines that they should follow the links on the page, but not index it:

• Sitemaps

By creating and submitting a Sitemap, you help make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process, enabling Google to improve their crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future.

• Dynamic Content

An individual Web page construction is important. Make sure that your Head section contains your Meta tags (Title, Description and Keywords) and these should be placed at the top of the page, so it’s one of the first pieces of code the spider encounters. This is because you want to, as quickly as possible; convey to the spider what the page is about. Make use of CSS positioning for tags to reorder the code if it looks as if other mounds of codes are piled on top of the Head section (such as navigation or design code). Using of CSS also makes it possible to put the main body of a page’s content first.

Remember that each Web site has two target audiences: the end user as primary audience and the search engine spiders as the secondary audience. Your SEO goal is to receive regular traffic over time from the search engines as well as conversion from users. So make your site is easily crawlable to search engines and attractive to users – easily navigated, and attracts conversion.

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Over the years, the original PageRank algorithm metrics – anchor text of a link, the link power of the linking page, content and page proximity, link attributes such as nofollow and title, redirects and shortened URLs, the website’s age, the affiliation of the linking sites – have evolved significantly. Though Google and other search engines still use these factors, PageRank algorithms have gotten more complicated by the introduction of 3 new factors.

Nowadays, the core search engine optimization strategy for EFFECTIVE LINK BUILDING is to obtain links naturally over time (trust) from high quality, trusted, authoritative – how influential a website is within its community – websites (authority) that are relevant to your niche/online community (relevance).

Now, these 3 SEO factors are more significantly valuable than ever as Google again rolled out just recently (this February 2012) 40 changes in its ranking algorithm in its quest to provide their users high-quality relevant sites/pages in its search results. The most important change was the change on how Google evaluates links (backlink analysis) – though Google did not go into more detail.

Many SEO Experts speculate that Google now only may consider as a PageRank algorithm the anchor text of a link, provided that link is placed in the right context (page and content proximity). While another possibility is Google may now consider affiliate links (redirected or with page variables) to be less influential on the rankings of a page.

However, though PageRank algorithms always keep on evolving, the most important thing to remember is link building is a continuous process. It is something you must continually do to your website as SEO is a process, not a single event.

Tips on How to Evaluate the Quality of Backlinks

So, here are some tips on how to evaluate the quality of backlinks nowadays:

Page Rank. Though, the PageRank of the site you are linking with is still a factor, however, its importance nowadays has lessened. With new pages appearing in Google’s results every day, constantly changing the PageRank in its SERPs, it would be hard to determine what the value of the PageRank of a site is.

Additionally, the PageRank of the home page of a site is NOT the PageRank of the domain as what most people think. It is only the PageRank of the home page. Moreover, the PageRank that Google publicly displays is NOT the actual PageRank that Google uses in its algorithm and its value can be manipulated.

One of the best ways to get an estimate on the PageRank of a site is to make use of SEOmoz’ Open Site Explorer which performs a calculation of Domain mozRank.

Trustworthiness of the Domain. Ask yourself this, How Trust-worthy is the domain? Generally, it is highly accepted that trusted links carry much more value. Search engines tend to place more trust into websites that have been around longer. The longer a site has been around or the older the site is, the longer it has been building links from other trusted sites; thus, the higher its profile on Google is likely to be – enhancing the value of a link from the site.

So, if you want to have trusted sites for your link building campaign, make use of a tool like SEO Toolbar to scope out the age of the domain. By using this, you will be able to rate and prioritize your link acquisition campaign.

Relevance of the Linking Page. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is the site relevant?
• Is the linking page attractive to the average web surfer?
• Does the page contain interesting content?
• Is the content somewhat related to my website?
• Will it make sense if the web page links to your site?

If your answers to these questions are all “yes”, then try to get a backlink from that page. Take note, it doesn’t matter if that page has a low PageRank.

Quality Content. Make sure that the site or page you are linking with has well-written relevant content. It is a well-established SEO fact that content is one of the most significant factors to rank higher in search engines and nothing will produce better long-term, link-generating results than quality content. So, if it has well written content, then in all likelihood it will be considered by search engines as a high-quality relevant site with authority.

Perceived Authority of the Site. Authority and PageRank have a relationship; however, their relationship is not equal. Authority is concerned with how the sites in a given market space are linked to, while PageRank determines the cumulative raw link value without considering the market space. Thus, higher authority sites tend to have higher PageRank – though not in all cases.

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Creating an appealing blog title also helps you to let your blog post go viral as most readers share or recommend on their social network accounts the blog content they find interesting and informative to read.

However, blog post titles should also be optimized with your targeted keywords so people can find your blog posts when they are searching in Google. So how do you write blog post titles that are both compelling for readers and optimized for search engines?

Here are some tips on how to create an SEO and User friendly blog post title:

Create an Interesting Post Title. Write a title post that can immediately attract and intrigue readers at a glance. It could be a question, a scoop, or offer a cryptic title that peeks through your reader’s curiosity.

Add Keywords to your Blog Post Title. In professional SEO, it’s important to add relevant and important keywords to your blog post title to optimize for search engines. However, you should not over stuff it with lots of keywords as this may give negative impact to your readers.

Convey a Need or Benefit. Before deciding on a title, identify first the need of potential readers, then create a title that conveys that your post will solve this problem or need. Make your title scream at those that see them what they’ll get if they visit the post.

Controversy or Debate. Make your title seem controversial or set it to a scene of debate or strong opinion. But remember, you must back these types of titles up with posts that reflect the title. Let your tile pique people’s interest.

Create Title with a Question. People are wired to respond to questions. Questions at post titles are very popular at not only drawing in readers but are also particularly effective at getting readers to leave comments, particularly in comments that direct a question at the reader – those using the word YOU in the question – rather than just being a random question.

Personalize and Customize Titles. Use personalized languages like using the word ‘you’ in your posts.

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Basically, SEO is all about RELEVANCE – providing on target, relevant to users (answers their queries) and search engines (helps them understand what your site is all about); discoverability – getting your website known to the online world and your users; and crawlability – making your site accessible to search engines.

The bottom-line is SEO is the process of optimising your website to improve your site’s ranking in organic search results on search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you rank, the more likelihood of listing and being accessible to high traffic of visitors for good marketing and advertising, popularity, sales conversion.

So here are some tips on how to improve your professional SEO campaign:

• Check your Keywords
  

This means that you must first identify the words used by the people you want to visit your site. Then make use of these keywords in the first few words of your page title – as this is very significant from a search engine’s perspective.

• Perform an SEO Site Audit

Do a regular content audit of your site. Perform regular check up for outdated content then do trimming or remove dead or useless pages/sections.

• Make Use of Up-To-Date Coding Techniques

In order for Google, Yahoo and other search engines to find and understand your website, make use of the latest coding techniques like Cascading Type Sheets (CSS) which can minimize the amount of formatting in the HTML page code

• Make Sure to have an Easy Navigation

Make use of basic and clear links in the form of text to all parts of your site. This will help the search engines – as well as users – easily follow, crawl and navigate your site.

• Build more Links from Trusted and Relevant Sites

Nowadays, link authority is one of the key ranking metrics. According to search engine optimization experts, merely having links, even a large number of links, does not necessarily guarantee high ranking. At present, links must be of high-quality, comes from trusted (credibility) and authoritative (authority) source, and must be highly relevant to your site’s content. Irrelevant links may well be the cause of harm to your website’s ranking.

• Improve your Internal Linking
  

• Be Mobile-Friendly

With the number of smartphone users rapidly escalating and these consumers are making purchases via their mobile devices, making your site optimized for mobile users is now an imperative SEO strategy. Make use of one URL, serving the content and style sheet via user agent detection and do not use parameters or mobile subdomains.

• Check your Sitemap Page

Sitemaps will help search engines to easily crawl and discover every page in your website. Make sure that your sitemap lists the pages in your site along with brief keyword-rich descriptions of the page. In cases where you have too many pages on your site, you must create as many sitemaps as needed and make sure they’re linked together.

• Optimize for Social Media

In this day and age of the social media, make sure to invest your time for a successful social media campaign. Currently, many website niches are now benefitting greatly in terms of SEO and SEM from being involved in social media.

• Track your Progress. Monitor your Stats.
  

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“Premium SEO Solutions delivers ethical, result-oriented and cost-effective Search Engine Optimization Service to our clients. Choose from any of our SEO Packages that’s right for your business. Keep on visiting our SEO Blog for more interesting SEO articles and news or subscribe to our Feeds to receive updates via Email”

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