Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

SEO INTERVIEW QUESTIONS :

February 13, 2009

1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2) Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?
4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
5) Have you attended any search related conferences?
6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?
7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.
What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
9) Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
10) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?
11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO India?
12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?
13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?
15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?
16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?
17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?
18) Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?
19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)
20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
42) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
Thanks to Rand at SEOmoz.org for this post on SEO hiring. It helped quite a bit in assembling this list. Any additional questions anyone can think of?
*** UPDATE ***
I got several excellent questions from a couple forum postings. These get into the more complicated end of SEO.
22) What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)
23) What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI – Indexing)?
25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
26) In Google Lore – what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

How to improve your web presence?

January 24, 2009

1. If you’re launching a new site, or new content, write an introduction and submit it to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Netscape. See 23 Top Social Bookmarking sites for more great places to submit your content. seo india
2. Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.
3. Create a MySpace account and use it to publisise your site.
4. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you’re really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
5. Create a Technorati account and “claim” your blog.
6. Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories. An excellent list can be found at Info Vilesilencer.
7. Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline publicity.
8. Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.
9. Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds.
10. Submit your RSS feeds to aggregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, feeddirectory and feedfury. Stolen from DigitalPoint – seo company india

11. Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
12. Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site.
13. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
14. Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. See here for more info.
15. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on.
16. Tell your friends about your site. It’s free advertising init.
17. Speel cheek ur stie. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
18. Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers.
19. Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
20. Don’t worry about PageRank – worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*
21. Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff. – seo services india
22. Tell your neighbours, you never know what contacts they might have.
23. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype, Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
24. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It’s free, relevant and localised.
25. Do NOT use frames.
26. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It may take time, but it’s worth it.
27. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google.
28. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
29. Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
30. Sign up with an affiliate programme to sell your product, or if you’re a publisher, make some cash!
31. On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
32. Send out a newsletter!
33. Go to a free seminar for Website owners. You might learn something.
34. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course).
35. Don’t pay people to submit your site to search engines. It’s a waste of money.
36. YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign.
37. Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.
38. Sponsor a WordPress theme or a phpListDirectory template.
39. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add “As Seen on TV” to your site!
40. Avoid proprietary technologies like Java and Active X.
41. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it’s not manufacturer specific – so mp3 rather than wma.
42. Learn about CSS. It’s the new HTML.
43. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia.
44. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.
45. Have user friendly page names – most tools comes with some way to avoid www.yourdomain.com/
46. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a “Skip Intro” link.
47. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desperate for stories and you may well even get a picture of your ugly mug published.
48. Become a leading authority on your chosen subject.
49. Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site back to you.
50. Abide to W3C standards – it will help your site in the long term.
51. Your local community sports teams offer cheap, but highly effective sponsorship opportunities.
52. Publisise your site on related forums – but don’t spam!
53. Ask bloggers to write about your site or product – in return for a link of course.
54. Offer a competition related to something in the news – so football around the time of the World Cup etc.
55. Add a “Tell a Friend” function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.
56. Have a Sitemap on your site to allow users to navigate around quickly and to aid the search engines.
57. Have a nice keyword rich title at the top of each of your pages. Users and search engines both like descriptive titles.
58. Include a Feedburner button on your site so people can easily subscribe to your feed.
59. If you use PPC then create a landing page for each of your AdWords – it’ll boost your conversations no end.
60. Appear on Dragon’s Den.
61. Create a Press section on your site where can you store all your press releases, logos and banners.
62. Add a link to your site from within your eBay profile.
63. Ask your friends to give you honest feedback on your site.
64. The best way to find someone to do any kind of work on your site is through personal recommendation.
65. Gain exposure by submitting photos and pictures to Flikr.
66. Share your banners on banner exchange sites.

Boost your search engine rankings with v7n Directory
67. Make sure it’s easy for your users to subscribe to your RSS feed.
68. Create a “lense” for your site on Squidoo
69. Ask friends, colleagues and associates to “Favourite” your blog on Technorati.
70. You can add a Bulletin to your MySpace account promoting your site that all your MySpace Friends will see.
71. Response to your customer’s emails promptly, even if it is with a simply auto-responder. No one likes to wait 3 or 4 days for an acknowledgement of their contact with you.
72. Get a professional Copywriter to give your site a once over. If you are on a tight budget, limit to the just the homepage.
73. Make a list, “Top 10″s work well. Update it regularly to give your visitors a reason to return.
74. What did you learn today? Tell other people and they might learn something too.
75. Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.
76. Deep link directories are an excellent way to promote inner pages of your site.
77. Meta tags might carry less weight than previously, but you should still have them on every page.
78. Ask your Gran for feedback on your site. Never ignore the silver surfers.
79. Include a “Add to your Technorati favourites” button on your site.
80. Google Analytics is free and will tell you all you need to know about who’s visiting your site.
81. Search engines will find you. Don’t pay money for your site to be “submitted”.
82. Don’t be afraid to link to other sites, especially if they are relevant and to highly respected sites.
83. Keep It Simple Stupid: use CSS to control layout, style and colours and use HTML text rather than graphics to represent text.
84. Validate your HTML and CSS. It’ll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers.
85. Small pages sizes and optimised graphics will give your site a snappy feel and won’t require users to wait around for it to load.
86. If you plan to submit your site to lots of directory or article sites – create an email especially for this. Delete it when you’re finished to avoid spam.
87. “Link baiting” means writing some killer content that people will want to link to. Like a “101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence” list!
88. If your chosen field is technology related then write a “whitepaper”. That’s a posh name for an article.
89. Google receives roughly 50% of all search requests, Yahoo 25% and MSN just 10%. That’s a good rule of thumb as to how much emphasis to put on each.
90. Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your Web site. You can use this to control search engines, but if nothing else it’ll reduce the number of 404 errors in your Weblogs.
91. Free online games, a forum or chatrooms will give your users a reason to come back to your site.
92. Ebooks with re-seller rights make an excellent “free gift” for your site.
93. Upload your product feed to Froogle. It’s FREE!
94. This is an excellent list of Top 25 Social Bookmarking Sites
95. Search out unanswered questions on Yahoo! Answers and add your site as the “Source”.
96. PageRank is vanity, ranking is sanity.
97. Yahoo are catching up with Google with an excellent set of webmaster tools called Site Explorer.
98. Don’t buy traffic. It’s un-targeted and won’t convert.
99. Pay Per Click advertising gets you fast results – and if it’s handled well can be very profitable.
100. Upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.
101. And that’s it!

Web Directories and Specialized Search Engines

December 13, 2008

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is the lion’s share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you do, topping Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not literally but in terms of effort and time) to top Google and keep there is too high. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate seo india nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can’t use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about possible alternatives.

What are Google Alternatives
The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for the other major search engines, if you have not done it already. Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors, though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, do not expect much.

Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.

Naming all Google alternatives would be a long list and it is outside the scope of this article but just to be a little more precise about what alternatives exist, we cannot skip SEO instruments like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

Web Directories
What is a Web Directory?
Web directories (or as they are better known – search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop directories, where you gather files in a directory based on some criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind (otherwise it will be impossible to browse thousands of pages for let’s say Computers), search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore) and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search directory.

The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Keyword Difficulty

December 8, 2008

The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for is the first and crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your client’s) money and time. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all – which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to increase your chances of success, additional research is never too much, especially when its results will save you the shots in the dark.

Dreaming High – Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?

After you have made a long and detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have chosen popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have chosen keywords for which top positioning is achievable with reasonable effort. If you have many competitors for the keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every SEO knows, if you can’t be on the first page (or on the second and in the worst case on the third one) of the organic search results, you’d better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those particular words is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can’t count on that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the good results?

You can feel discouraged that all lucrative keywords are already occupied but it is too early to give up. Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition. The SEO experts from Blackwood Productions confirm that it is possible with less effort and within budget to achieve much better results with low-volume search keywords than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.

Get Down to Earth

The best way to estimate how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword is by using the appropriate tools. If you search the Web, you will see several keyword difficulty tools. Choose a couple of them, for instance Seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, Cached’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and Seomoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and off we go. The idea behind choosing multiple tools is not that you have so much free time that you need to find a way to waste it. If you choose only one tool, you will finish your research faster but having in mind the different results that each tool gives, you’d better double check before you start the optimization itself. The Seomoz’s tool is a kind of complicated and if you want to use it you need to make several registrations but it is worth the trouble (and the patience – while you wait for the results to be calculated).

You may also want to check for several keywords or keyword phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance, if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly with credits and loans, and some of your keywords are finance, money, credit, loan, and mortgage, running a check with the seochat’s produces results like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the idea): finance – 89%, money – 76% credit – 74% loan – 66% mortgage – 65%.

It seems that the keyword finance is very tough and since your site is targeted at credits and loans and not on stock exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance, there is no need to cry over the fact that it is very difficult to compete for the finance keyword.

The results were similar with the second tool, though it does not give percentages but uses a scale starting from Very Easy to Very Difficult. I did not check all the results with the third tool, because it seems that the seomoz report on keyword difficulty for a particular word needs ages to be compiled but the results were similar, so it becomes clear that it is more feasible to optimize for mortgage and loan, rather than for the broader term finance.

You may want to bookmark some of these tools for future use as well. They will be very useful to monitor possible changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have optimized your site for the keywords you have selected, occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you are already optimizing for because the percentages are changing over time and if you discover that the competition for your keywords has increased, make some more efforts to retain the gained positions.

SEO Best Practice Onpage Optimization

November 23, 2008

This is pretty straight forward tips to increase the visitor from search engine. SEO Best Practice tips is collected from many sources where it has valuable suggestion for SEO performance improvement. So here is the list…

Create the Best Title for your post

1. Use your brand on the title tag One nice example of the power of branded title tag is on Gatzet.com. You can see also the title tag on Asus Eee PC User Manual
2. Limit length to 65 characters (including spaces) or less. Very long title won’t get indexed completely by search engine. It simply wasting our space. The bad example for a long post title is on Tricking the tag ‘b:section’ appears inside of the tag ‘head’ Error in Blogspot.
3. Include the important keyword on post title . You post will be more prominent for the visitor when they search for particular keyword contained on your post.
4. Think like a searcher when writing a title. Take time to chose the best title composition for your post. Keep in mind the search terms of your audience will use to find your post.
5. Repeat the title keyword in the headline. The headline lies within the first 160 character of your post. This part will be the main headline of the page on the search engine index.

Create the Best Meta Description for your post

1. Always describe your content honestly. A misleading meta description will hurt your Search Engine traffic on the long term.
2. Staying in descriptive style. Describe the content of your page clearly using 160 character and put it as headline.

Create the Best URL / Permalink structure

1. Describe Your Content. Use url structure that include your post title. It helps a lot to increase your search engine ranking.
2. Keep it Short. Long and tedious URL is simply looks less-interesting and spamy.
3. Descriptives are Better than Numbers. Use keyword as much as possible rather than number.

Methods Of Becoming A Better Designer

November 22, 2008

This article is going to focus on some simple effective ways of becoming a better web designer online, review ways of becoming a better designer away from the computer.

1. Analyze Your Client, Don’t Let Them Ask All The Questions.

When a client approaches you for your services automatically there are many questions that they are asking, such as “What is your turnaround time for this project?” “What is the overall price range for this type of service?”. What you should do next in your reply to this is ask them a few questions such as whereabouts they live, what age they are, how long have they been hiring web designers, who have they hired in the past. These questions just give you a better idea of who you are working with and get a better understanding of the type of person they are.

2. Speak Confidently About Your Pricing.

When pricing your services or work, you must be confident in your own self-ability and price what you feel is an appropriate price for the given design brief. Looking back to question one, a good question to ask your client is what is their budget. Asking this lets you know that they might be on a specific budget that they cannot spend over. Also, when your client has given you details on what they want and you have asked them what their budget is, don’t be afraid to tell them the overall price for what they have asked for.

3. Draw Up Plans, Visualize Your Design On Paper.

A good way of quick concept drawing is simply jotting it down on paper. In the design brief the client has most probably stated the various styles they want included in the design, so using arrows and highlighters to state various styles used for various parts of the web design gives you a better understanding of how the design will look and feel.

4. Finding The Right Colour Scheme For The Type Of Design Needed.

After all the planning, you then need to move to the computer and get started by actually designing. On so many occasions I have came across websites which use a very weird and interesting colour scheme but it really doesn’t suit the type of website it is.

Using websites like this gives you a better understanding of colour choice and colour theory. I’d recommend you save a colour wheel from Google as well, so you can quickly open it up before designing and eye drop some colours onto your Photoshop canvas.

5. Be More Creative & Adventurous When Designing.

Taking time on a project is always a crucial factor. If you promise a deadline date to a client it’s always professional to keep within that date. But use your time wisely. By being creative and adventurous I mean by using various techniques when designing the final product. Experiment with brushes, textures and even your own photography.

6. Use A Client Contract Agreement.

For some time it took me to realize that using a Client Agreement document is an important part to designing. It keeps you safe from stealers and scammers and lets you know that the person you are working with is legitimate. It’s also worth mentioning in your CCA (Client Contract Agreement) that it will keep your client safe and secure by knowing that they are working with a professional company.

7. Experiment In Your Free Time.

Have you ever been bored in your free time with no client work at all and all you do is browse the Internet and chat on IM? I’ve found that now and again designing in your free time will benefit you when coming to design for your next client. In my free time I try to do design various things rather than just keeping to web design. I would recommend designing print based design such as logo’s, coasters, badge design, advertisement design. It’s also great to work on things that you’re not particularly good at. For me, it’s vector work. I really love vector art but I am absolutely hopeless at creating it. I’m also not really fond of logo design, so I usually mess around in Illustrator and try and get some nice concepts.


8. Go To Conferences, Meet Other Design Related People.

There’s nothing better than meeting new people in my opinion. I believe in trial and error but learning from people who have more experience is even better. If you live nearby were design conferences happen, then I’d highly recommend going to one. It also boost’s your inspiration and motivation when coming to design again and it’s also a great way to learn away from your workspace.

9. Collaborate On Projects With Friends Online & Offline.

Recently, I have been working on a project with a good friend who is very interested in what I do. He doesn’t have any idea how I do it, but he loves how I make money from what I do. The friend I have been working with is doing Fashion Design at college and is very creative and great at what he does. It runs in his family as both his two cousins are now designing for high street brands down in London and he wants to follow in their footsteps.

10. Enjoy web banner Designing > Money.

Last but not least you should enjoy working on your client briefs first and foremost. There is nothing better than a high morale when working and keeping a great vibe between you and your clients.
Being creative and enjoying what you do is a fun experience. If you are just starting out as a freelancer and reading this, I’d say this is the most important pointer of them all. Enjoying what you do will only make your everyday life that little bit more fun, especially in the design field.

How to Optimizing Flash Sites?

November 21, 2008

Optimizing Flash Sites
If there is a really hot potato that divides SEO expert and Web designers, this is Flash. Undoubtedly a great technology to include sounds and picture on a Web site, Flash movies are a real nightmare for SEO experts. The reason is pretty prosaic – search engines cannot index (or at least not easily) the contents inside a Flash file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of course, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were plain text, these workarounds are just a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, although certainly they are better than nothing.
Why Search Engines Dislike Flash Sites?

Search engines dislike Flash Web sites not because of their artistic qualities (or the lack of these) but because Flash movies are too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly, as they do with a plain page of text. Spiders index filenames (and you can find tons of these on the Web), but not the contents inside.

Flash movies come in a proprietary binary format (.swf) and spiders cannot read the insides of a Flash file, at least not without assistance. And even with assistance, do not count that spiders will crawl and index all your Flash content. And this is true for all search engines. There might be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time beings, search engines are really united – they hate it but they index portions of it.
What (Not) to Use Flash For?

Despite the fact that Flash movies are not spider favorites, there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. But as a general rule, keep Flash movies at a minimum. In this case less is definitely better and search engines are not the only reason. First, Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them. Second, Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection or better is still not the standard one.

Basically, designers should keep to the statement that Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it – i.e. you have some text with the main points of the story (and the keywords that you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie to add further detail or just a visual representation of the story. In that connection, the greatest SEO sin is to have the whole site made in Flash! This is is simply unforgivable and do not even dream of high rankings!

Another “No” is to use Flash for navigation. This applies not only to the starting page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie but external links as well. Although it is a more common mistake to use images and/or javascript for navigation, Flash banners and movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.
Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites

Although a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be optimized. There are several approaches to this:

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Input metadata
This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.
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Provide alternative pages
For a good site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages.
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Flash Search Engine SDK
This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. As it name implies, this tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious job to do it manually.
However, you still need to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if necessary. For example, the order in which the text and links is arranged might need a little restructuring in order to put the keyword-rich content in the title and headings or in the beginning of the page.
Also, you need to check if there is no duplicate content among the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color of the extracted text is also another issue. If the font color of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will run into hidden text territory.

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SE-Flash.com
Here is a tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is visible to search engines and what is not. This tool is very useful, even if you already have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed because it provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Besides, it is not certain that Google and the other search engines use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so this tool might give completely different results from those that the SDK will produce.

These approaches are just some of the most important examples of how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well. However, not all of them are brilliant and clear, or they can be classified on the boundary of ethical SEO – e.g. creating invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the Flash movie itself. Although this technique is not wrong – i.e. there is no duplicate or fake content, it is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages and it is better to avoid it.

Top 10 SEO Mistakes

November 21, 2008

1Targetting the wrong keywords:

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can’t think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2Ignoring the Title tag

Leaving the

3A Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don’t like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can’t read Flash content and therefore can’t index it.

4JavaScript Menus

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

5Lack of consistency and maintenance

Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6Concentrating too much on meta tags

A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don’t except to rank well only because of this.

7Using only Images for Headings

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO India images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text.

8Ignoring URLs

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

9Backlink spamming

It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. Here are some more information on The Importance of Backlinks

10Lack of keywords in the content

Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

Quality Link Techniques

November 20, 2008

I want to make 100% sure we have an understanding on what I mean when I say an advanced or quality link. I plan to use your company for forum signature posts, blog commenting, social bookmarking and video submissions. Each of those tasks are pretty clear and easy for both of us to understand what the deliverable is.

However, when I say an advanced or quality link, it does not mean any of those services. In fact, you can have the one person quit doing forum posts as that is not what I need right now. It means spending time hunting for links on relevant websites. You might get a listing on a “links” or “favorite sites” page, you may get them to add a link from text that is already there, you never know. Below are 2 tools we use to find sites that we might be able to get quality links from. We use these to find sites, then we go through and carefully look at each site. Again, it might take you 1 hour to get one link[like : seo india ]. It might take 2 hours for some. For good, quality links that is okay with us. Every once in a while we stumble into a site where we can add 15 links. For example a site that is all about cooking might add all of the culinary schools we sent you. Some times we need to offer some cash for a good text link. We can pay up to $10 per link if necessary.

We look for sites that have:

- many pages,
- lots of backlinks according to Google (usually 100+ on the home page, 500+ and you have a very good site),
- home page has a pagerank of 3 or better,
- that look like they are trying to provide a real service or real content to the world and are not built just for links or Adense ads
- match the theme of our client’s site,

Here are the 2 tools I mentioned. Each of them will give you hundreds of ideas but only a few will lead you to a quality link:

http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php

http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html?keyword

We also conduct good old fashioned Google searches using phrases like these (keyword phrase would be based on the site you are getting links for). Once you get the idea, your team can brainstorm other ways to do similar searches.

“useful keyword phrase links”

“keyword phrase links”

“useful keyword phrase sites”

“helpful keyword phrase sites”

“favorite keyword phrase sites”

“recommended keyword phrase sites”

“best keyword phrase sites”

Targeting library sites you could do this:

“useful keyword phrase sites” library site:.edu

“helpful keyword phrase sites” library site:.edu

“favorite keyword phrase sites” library site:.edu

“public library” “useful links” keyword phrase site:.gov

keyword phrase

resources public library site:.us
librarians OR library picks keyword phrase site:.edu OR site:.org

Or take the word library out to find just .edu sites. There are lots of different searches you can try.

For example, in just a few minutes, while writing this email, using this search I found this site. I would normally email the person listed on the right and tell him we have 15 or so culinary schools we would like to list on this page. If we sent him the content with links included, how much would he charge for his time to add them to this page? If he responded, you could have me send the content and the money to the guy or we could have you do it and we reimburse you.

Hopefully I have made my point. I am trying very hard to find a company the truly knows how to find quality links (not forums posts, blog comments, video or bookmarking – those are different). Even if I have to train you like I am with this email. I just need someone I can depend on for a long time. If you can do it – great! If not, I am going to quit trying and hire my own team.