This is a guest article by Ben Johnson of Logoinn and he shares his tips on building a better business website that earns you dollars while you sleep.

First of all, what do you think a perfect business website is? Well, to me, if your business website takes your financial worries away, then it’s a perfect business website. This way you don’t have to work for anyone, you don’t have to worry about attending office everyday and you don’t have to worry about being punctual either. A perfect business website helps you earn bread and butter and gives you complete peace of mind.

Having said that, now we need to discuss that which vital elements ought to be incorporated in your business website to make it perfect.

It Must Be Appealing As Well As Relevant:

This is a misconception that you just create a website and it will start making you money. It’s a completely false notion. You have got to make your website attractive if you seriously want to win the trust of your market. Secondly, ensure that your website design is relevant to your business model.

It’s the quality of your web design that tells your market that your products will be of high quality as well. If your design is of low quality, you won’t be able to win the trust of your market. So, ensure that you make it attractive as well as relevant.

You Must Provide User-Friendly Navigation:

How much time would you spend on a site where you will see hundreds of confusing links all over the page? Well, you won’t spend more than a few seconds. The same thing will happen to you if you don’t create user-friendly navigation. Your website visitors or potential buyers won’t spend any time on your website and will most likely leave in less than 10 seconds.

Ensure that Your Copy is Benefit-Oriented:

What converts your visitors into customers is your copy. Your copy must highlight  all the benefits clearly and concisely. It should tell your market why you should be trusted. It should entice your market to prefer you. So, you will need to take some time to write a compelling copy or hire a professional copywriter to do the job for you.

Choose a Readable Font Size and Style:

A lot of websites don’t care about their font-size. They make it really small. Small font-size is not easily readable. If you visit a website and find it difficult to read, then you will leave immediately. Your visitors will do the same thing if you don’t select a readable font size and style. Also, try avoiding grey font. Black is the best in terms of readability.

Strategically Organize the Content and Graphics:

Don’t make your website look like an unorganized place by having text and graphics everywhere. Organize everything in a nice and professional manner. Ensure that your website doesn’t look messy at all. Once you create the site, look at it and determine if it gives you a refreshing feeling or not. If it doesn’t, then you need to analyze your site and end the flaws.

So, these are some powerful tips that will empower you to create a perfect business website…for your business!

If you have any tips, please do share.

5 Tips for Creating a Perfect Business Website is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. The 21 Worst Things To Have On Your Blog or Website
2. Creating Top Quality Blog Reader Relationships
3. How To Build A Community Of Readers Who Want To Do Business With You

This is a guest article by Ashish Sharma. You join the group of guest bloggers by following our guest blogging guidelines.

According to Ashish, the world of SEO is highly competitive and therefore, instead of targeting the world wide web (which is far more difficult to achieve), business should target local search engines which can get you targeted customers for your business.

The most apparent trend in SEO today is “going local”. Since Google and Yahoo initiated local search engine listings such as Google places and Yahoo local and afterward added local search results to universal visitors, this automatically made every business realize that they have to strive to be on local listings.

When I was a beginner, I used to follow the basic SEO techniques for SEO beginners, which did not benefit my website as I intended it to. But later I found that the local search engine optimization is the best way to attain small business profits and reach the target market. These local listings enable the user to search for local businesses in their area, and later the abundance of net-books and smart-phones popularize this development even further.

After benefiting from the local SEO techniques, I am compiling a list of top 10 useful SEO and online marketing tips that may help your business to attract local customers.

1. Participate in the niche communities / local community:
   The quickest way to popularize your business in a particular area is to join the niche and local community of that area. Suppose your business is focused for the US customers, the best way would be to join the US communities, this way your products and services will directly reach the users of the targeted niche.
2. Build a local network and share updates:
   Building a local network makes your products reach directly to your customers. Suppose you provide products and services for a particular industry, say, Paper Products, you can directly choose the specified category and reach those that belong to the same industry or are interested in buying paper products.
3. Focus keywords with location specific:
   Using location specific keywords is probably the most critical factor for location specified businesses. Suppose you want to sell your paper products to the users from Washington DC, the best way would be to use Washington in your targeted keywords. This not just makes your business reach specifically to the target area but also boosts your search engine performance and sales. You can find more such tips to boost up local traffic to your blog or website in various online reputed social media guides.
4. Make sure to think like the visitor/customer:
   Customers often neglect the technical aspects while searching for a term or business on the net and that is why it is mandatory to use the keywords that your customers are likely to put in the search box to find your business or products.
5. Numerous locations require several landing pages:
   Local search engine sites do not prefer a business to have more than one local listing, although if you want to list your business in two locations, then just make sure to link back both the local listings to the same page or homepage. Often, business owners get trapped in general keywords and overlook to focus on less popular keywords that may have a high possibility of making sales.
6. Put complete physical address on every page of your site:
   Your geographic location can be re-enforced only when you put your complete physical address on every page of your website; this also helps in turning a visitor into a customer.
7. Add your local phone number:
   Aim behind following the SEO guide and listing your business locally is not just to make your business popular but also to get customers that can turn your business into profits. Make sure to add local phone number to every page of your website so that the visitor can avail your services.
8. Ask for feedback:
   Customer feedback is very important for the success of your business. Make a point to ask for a feedback through your contact forms, e-mails or invoices. Ask the customer to rate you or give a feedback on the local listings such as yahoo, Bing or Google. These feedbacks add to the credibility of the business.
9. Always welcome bad reviews:
   Whether you have a small business or large enterprise, bad reviews are a part of any business industry, take bad reviews as a chance to improve your business. You can always tell your customers about the improvement you have made for this review, that ways you convince the customers that their feedback matters.
10. Manage information across the internet:
    Even after viewing the detailed information about your products and services on your website, local listing services explore the internet wide and far to find reviews, pictures or any additional information about your company. Submitting the additional information to the services like infoUSA and Localize may help.

Top 10 tips for Local SEO & online marketing is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. 9 Quick and Easy WordPress SEO Tips
2. Great SEO tips for Everybody
3. Essential SEO Tips for Beginners

Errors can seriously damage your website’s SEO and page rank.  You can lose some valuable traffic due to it. Mark of Marks Marketing Blog is giving tips to reduce the seo errors. Join in the awesome guest blogging club and take a look at our guest blogging guidelines.

There is an awful lot written about how to optimize your site in all the right ways; making sure you build back links and keywords and all that sort of stuff. But do you make a habit of checking for those little errors that might be undoing all the good work you have been putting in?

Broken links are the enemy of good SEO

Google is all about helping it’s users to find websites that are helpful and enjoyable to use, and users don’t tend to like it when they click on a link and they get the dreaded 404 error – ie, “page not found!” the link is broken.

As such, if Google is cruising around your site and it follows a broken link, your site is going to get marked down for that. Google doesn’t want to direct it’s users to sites that don’t work properly after all.

And images, they matter too

Images, and in fact, any media you can embed into your site, can all “break”. If google finds an image tag but the image itself isn’t where it should be, that’s not good either. I’m sure we’ve all been on sites and found the little icon you get when an image is broken…

How to prevent broken internal links

Sometimes these things will happen, pages move, typos happen and the bigger your site gets the more they will happen. But if you take some precautions, you can minimize the risk of broken links happening and save your precious SEO brownie points.

KISS
keep your sites link structure simple. This is perhaps only a little thing, but having a simple link structure will help to minimize mistakes and mis-types which can lead to broken links.

301 redirect
If you do move a page you will obviously change all the links, but just in case you forget, using a 301 re-direct in your HTACCESS file will ensure that any old links will be sent to the right place. This also preserves any page rank that page may have.

How to prevent broken external links

From time to time you will probably want to link to a site outside of yours, this is good, you should do. Unfortunately, you have no control over the other site you are linking to. If a site you link to goes down for any reason you might end up with broken links.

Be picky about who you link to
Do you ever link to sites that are related to a subject you are writing about without really checking that site out? When you are linking to a site you should be thinking carefully about how well maintained that site is. The question ultimately comes down to: is this a site that is still going to be here in 6 months, or a year? If you link to short term sites, which dis-appear a few months later, you end up with broken links and lost visitors.

Link to main pages
For similar reasons to the previous point, it is always helpful if you can link to main pages, the home page is most ideal, but category pages or other key pages work well too. Item pages and post pages get moved or deleted, home pages don’t.

Store your own images
Don’t use images hosted on another site, you never know when it might be taken down. If you are going to use an image, store it on your own site, that way you know that it will stay there.

Be vigilant

Obviously, some of these suggestions aren’t always practical. You might be referencing a particular post for instance. Or maybe you review a brand new product with an uncertain future, you can’t really avoid linking to brand new websites all the time.

So the final tip is to be vigilant, constantly check through your website. There are plenty of link checking sites available, I like to make sure to check my site about once a month. If you follow all of the tips above, most of the time you will not find anything. But broken links will occasionally creep in, so make sure you spot them before Google does.

Are you letting errors hurt your SEO? is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Taking your SEO to the next level | Link Building
2. Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic
3. The 21 Worst Things To Have On Your Blog or Website

The Rules of the game have changed and the Age Old SEO is a thing of the past, at least for some people. The new entrant is Social SEO. Social SEO is the social counterpart of old SEO.

Social Search Engine Optimization is a relatively new concept where the content is optimized for social media. The reason behind targeting social media is because of the launch of real time search engines like collecta. They will consider social media shares as an important factor to get indexed and ranked. And not only that, targeting for Social SEO can actually build more links.

The concept is similar to getting more retweets, the stress is more on a catchy title which can attract a lot of people, so they start a chain of sharing, so that the article receives  a lot of traffic. Read more in this article about Social SEO.

Traditional SEO is the old form of SEO, the one that we are using for many years. Take a brief look about Traditional SEO in the following articles:

SEO for Beginner Series:

1. Essential SEO Tips for Beginners
2. Taking your SEO to the next level | Link Building
3. Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic

A lot of bloggers believe Traditional SEO is of little use today and bloggers should change their SEO strategy and focus more on social SEO. Let’s compare the two and see which one is better.

Traditional SEO

1. Time On Site

The Time on site is  a measure of the engagement of your readers. Obviously larger articles take more time to read and they hence have a large time on site. Usually users coming from search engines are looking for something and after reaching your site, they get what they were looking for and hence they are satisfied and hence they read more articles and increase the overall total time on site

2. Traffic

The traffic from search engines depends on various factors such as the amount of searches a particular keyword (The one you are targeting for your blog) gets, the position of your articles in search engines. If you get your website ranked in the first page in a popular search (like blog tips, make money online), then you are bound to get massive amount of traffic.

3. Subscriber Conversion Rate

The subscriber conversation ratio is good and it is comparatively high, but not as high as guest blogging. A blog can expect its subscriber number to grow if it is targeting the right keyword

4. Monetization

Pay Per Click Ads work best when the traffic source is search engines. And after affiliate income, pay per click ads are the money drivers for blogs and websites. So Traditional SEO is a great technique to monetize your websites.

Social SEO

1. Time On Site

The Traffic source for this type of search engine optimization is mainly social media websites and real time search engines. The problem with social media websites is that they are usually bombarded with huge chunks of information and hence each article gets very little attention, and hence the average time on site is usually very low and the bounce rate is relatively very high.

2. Traffic

The traffic from Social SEO can be very high and it totally depends on how much social search engine optimization you have done on your blog and which social media site you are targeting. The quantity of traffic is good, but it lacks quality (i.e. the visitors who are actually reading your articles seriously).

3. Subscriber Conversion Rate

The Subscriber conversion rate is particularly low and it increases once you have gained a reputation in social media sites. For eg. Twitip gets subscribers from search engines as well as from twitter.

4. Monetization

As the traffic lacks quality, therefore monetization is not very good. The only option is to have CPM ads which pay your per thousand impressions, but they are not a good as affiliate commissions and pay per click ads. Also you can sell your ads on a monthly basis rather on basis of clicks. This can be a good technique to monetize the excessive social media traffic.

The Verdict

Traditional SEO trumps Social SEO. The Quality of traffic is far more important than quantity and therefore Traditional SEO will stay until real time search engines completely replace the old search engines that rely on link authority.

The Best Solution

Why only one type of SEO, when you can do both. Use a catchy title for social SEO so that it grabs more attention. Use the title and meta tags for traditional SEO. By this technique you are targeting both the traffic sources and hence widening your blog’s spectrum and increasing it’s traffic sources.

Which type of SEO do you use? What is your opinion about them?

Traditional SEO vs Social SEO is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Social SEO – A New Age Search Engine Optimization Technique
2. How to Create a Social Media Ready Blog
3. Great SEO tips for Everybody

WordPress is one of the easiest ways to start a blog, and one of the most popular blogging tools in use today. By building a reader base, you can get your opinions out there, market your own business, and even link up with advertisers to make money. Regardless of your reason for using WordPress, you want more readers. The best way to expand your reader base is to employ search engine optimization, or SEO for short, to make sure sites like Google will put your site near the top of the results where it belongs. Use these tips to boost your ranking.

1. Content, content, content! - While you want to include terms that people are likely to search for, no one is going to read a plagiarized blog, one that merely spams search terms, or nonsensical writing. People want to see originality and creativity, so pull out all the stops. Depending on your audience you may want to use humor, anecdotes, or other literary devices to get your point across and draw in readership.

2. Linking Up – Use search keywords as links to other sites which will backlink you, but only after making sure your link destinations make sense. For a gardening blog, you wouldn’t want to link to your mechanic’s business site.

3. Location is Key – Having key phrases is great, but don’t forget to state where you are. Many business sites overlook the fact that they usually only provide services to people in their immediate area. If you’re a lawyer in Chicago for example, you may want to use phrases like “Chicago attorney,” and switch that up with names of Chicago suburbs as well.

4. Education Priorities – If your website has anything at all to do with education, make sure to get reciprocal links from .edu sites. Since .edu sites are more heavily weighted on search engines, this will make your page ranking increase. Some .edu sites do actively look for link sponsors, so check around for them, or if you know anyone who works on a website for a local school district or university, talk this plan over with them.

5. Phrases not Words – Most bloggers know to switch up key terms, but aren’t always aware that most people’s searches consist of phrases in order to narrow down results. For our lawyer example, using “personal injury law,” “injury attorney,” and “personal injury legal representation” will generate many more search hits.

6. Call to Action – While you don’t want to oversell yourself by spamming your business name repeatedly (since most people won’t be searching specifically by your business name), you do want to let readers know you’re open for business. Make sure you have a strong call to action in your conclusion that links to your main business website.

7. Adapt and Survive – SEO rules change on a daily basis, so expect to start thinking of your WordPress page as a constant work in progress. Don’t be afraid to change up phrases and techniques in order to stay on top of the game, and read up on which search terms are hot in your industry at the moment.

8. User Based Content – You’ll notice that many popular sites and blogs allow the viewers to put their two cents in. Enabling features like reviews, comments, and sharing options will drive more traffic to your site, and thereby help improve your page ranking. People love to check out sites where they get to give input as well.

9. Fresh Content – Your WordPress site will fall into oblivion if not updated constantly. You can be the most talented writer in the world, but people will not visit unless they can expect new entries on a regular basis. At the very least, try to update your site 1-2 times a week to keep it fresh in the public eye.

This article is a part of the guest blogging contest. If you liked this article, then help in supporting this author by retweeting and commenting on it, which will enable the author to win this contest. By the way, you can be a part of the contest, it is still not late

9 Quick and Easy WordPress SEO Tips is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Great SEO tips for Everybody
2. Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic
3. Top 10 tips for Local SEO & online marketing

This is the third part of the SEO Tips for Beginners Series

Search Engine optimization is not like a Ghost, you should not be afraid it. If you have read the earlier parts of SEO Tips for Beginners Series, you may have noticed that it is not so difficult to optimize your blog for SEO as it may seem. The only difficult part is that you do need a lot of reading and practice to become a SEO pro. And I am trying to make it easier in these set of tutorials

Image SEO

Once you have optimized your posts for major search engines like google and bing, you need to gather more sources of organic traffic, like the image search. Though, the amount of traffic that one can get through google search is very large and more effective than the google image search, but it is still worth the time.

Each image has certain attributes like the file name in terms of the name and the extension (eg. a.png), and also the title and the alt tags. Searches usually consider the file name and alt tag of the image as a basis of indexing images.

File Name

The file names usually used by bloggers contain underscores for eg A_black_book.png. The problem with this name is that A_black_book is treated as a single word and so it will not show in  results that have keywords like “black book”. To remove this problem, use a hyphens (-) instead of underscores (eg. A-black-book.png).

Alt Tags

Alt stands for alternate text. It shows up if the image is not loaded or in the process of loading. Alternative tags should be used to describe the image. Make sure that you don’t overload with keywords because that would not good for seo purposes. On a side note, alt tags also becomes a part of the content. So, in a way it also helps in seo for text content based search engines.

Wrapped Around Text

It is not as important as alt tags but it still plays an important role in indexing of images. The text around the image is usually considered for seo. So, you can use the space around the image to describe it.

Nofollow Links

A lot of bloggers who are not aware of this fact may be shocked, but it is actually a fact. Google penalizes websites if they are linking to a website which is either inappropriate or is of bad quality. The websites you are linking to should have certain quality, because those sites will get indexed on google and they can’t be your referral links.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t use referral links on your website. After all, most of the blogs survive due to the earnings they get from serving advertisements and earning affiliate commissions. The only thing you need to do is to add a nofollow tag to it. Nofollow can be easily add using rel=”nofollow” in your link tag (a href=”your-link” rel=”nofollow”). Nofollow tag tells the search engine to not follow the website being linked, so it does not get indexed.

Do you have any queries regarding seo? Have a tip to share. Comment and let me know.

Image Credit

Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Essential SEO Tips for Beginners
2. 6 Tips to get Traffic to your Blog
3. Traffic Building Tips For Designers and Developers

This is a guest post by Steve Lazuka. Check out our guest posting guidelines

Finding a good content writer can help your website gain valuable readers and increase your search engine rating, but finding a great content writer can help you create dynamic website content and result in a significant increase in visitors.

But how do you do it and what do you look for?

It can seem like a daunting task, but fortunately there a few key points that if followed, will help you find just the writer your site needs.

First things first, though. It’s important to remember that almost anyone can write, but a significantly lower number can write well. The problem you may face is that you may not know how to recognize the difference. The good news is that there are points you can look out for to separate the writing wheat from the chaff.

One of the points great web writers understand is that short is beautiful. So look for short sentences. Like this one. They help get across a point succinctly and are easy on the eye, especially when read from the computer screen.

Next, look for the words the writer uses. He or she may have a Masters degree in English, but it should not be used to bash the reader over the head. Avoid any writer who uses long or little-used words when a shorter and simpler one will do. It’s the worse kind of vanity and also the sign of a poor writer. After all, a writer’s job is to communicate.

Long-winded descriptions will have visitors to your site running for the hills, where a competing site will happily welcome them. Look for writers who keep it short and to the point. The average attention span of the web browser is extremely short. Remember that.

Another reason why writers who use long and unfamiliar words should be avoided is that search engines don’t like them. If you are looking for an article on spare parts for your car, you’ll probably type something like: spare car parts. Simple. But if a writer has written an article on the subject (even if it’s a really useful one) using words such as automobile replacement components, it’s not going to result in many hits.

The old adage that you get what you pay for applies to content writers just as to most things in life. Luckily, because it is such a competitive market the chances are that you could secure the services of a great writer for a modest fee. The best way to do this is shop around and look at samples of a writer’s work. A little time spent here will more than reward the effort.

When you finally decide on your writer, make sure you both agree on a deadline. Any writer worth his or her salt will never miss a deadline, but it’s important to agree on a realistic one before any work commences. If you are looking for a regular contributor, it’s worth offering a one-off assignment to begin with. If the writer comes in on deadline and he or she fulfils the criteria below, you should be able to work happily knowing you have the services of a great and punctual writer to help build your site.

So remember:

•       Look for short, concise sentences.
•       Avoid writers who use long and rare words when short and commons will do.
•       Long, elaborate descriptions are great for fiction, but a real turn off on the web.
•       Search Engines like short descriptions. Look for a writer who understands SEO.
•       Agree on a deadline and reward writers who hit with repeat work.

Steve Lazuka is the owner of Interact Media, a content marketing firm based in Ohio. His knowledge of content writing and experience has proven successful for both clients and his own site. He also writes on his company blog and provides useful information for content marketers.

Top Tips for Finding a Great Content Writer is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Finding Great Content to Tweet
2. 3 Great Ways to Get Rid of Writer’s Block
3. Great SEO tips for Everybody

What happens when the rules of the game change? You have to abide to the new rules and stop protesting. That is the whole point behind change. It is inevitable and the best way is to embrace it.

In the past years the scene of blog-o-sphere has changed a lot as though an era has come to an end and a new era has started taking first steps in the online world. The new era being referred to here is brought by social media. Social media has made it possible to find articles related to the topic you are looking for and that too in minutes. It has also brought a lot a people to the world wide web. So it is not actually an evil, it  is more of a boon for bloggers who were looking for a medium to promote their blogs.

As Social Media has gained acceptance of  the mass, it has started revolutionizing the online world. So much so that search engine giants like google have started developing real time search engines which are using social media shares like tweets as a criteria for showing results. The more the number of shares, more is the chance of getting noticed.

Now, as search engines are evolving to real time search engines, the SEO strategy needs to be  modified in order to stay in the game. The new SEO strategy is to use Social SEO techniques. As the name suggests Social SEO is the SEO targeting social media. The main aspects of Social SEO:

Catchy Title

Each and every social media site displays the title and gives it a lot of importance ( for example, twitter displays the title with the shortened link) . A title is like an advertisement to the article. Therefore, the role of the title is to attract a lot of eyeballs and to do that one needs to spice it up with adjectives like superhero, kickass etc. Spicing up the title does not mean that title goes off topic, ideally it should be very catchy and still be very relevant to the topic.

Targeting content

Previously content was targeted towards search engines i.e using keyword rich title tags and adding meta tags, but now it needs to be targeted to the audience. The articles should solve a purpose or provide something unique, so that readers like the article and hence share it on social media websites. The Title’s job is just to bring the visitor to the site, the content is the one that should impress the readers. It should be top notch, unique and informative and should have minimum grammatical and spelling mistakes.

Images & Other Media

Adding media to articles adds value to the article and makes it even more user friendly. According to a study, readers prefer watching a video than reading a block of text because the video is very interactive. So, by adding relevant media to the article, the interactivity and the overall user experience can improve by many folds. And a good user experience will lead to more sharing.

Social Media Rockstar

Being a social media celebrity can always help in Social SEO as it will help in massive sharing of articles and that too, without any extra effort.  It will also make indexing in real time search engines pretty easy. Becoming a social media rockstar is not very easy and one needs to be very active to become an influential one (i.e the one that is able to obtain a large number of shares) .

Add a Share Button

Majority of readers are reluctant to share a post if a vote button is not present on the article, This may be due to their laziness or because of paucity of time. By adding a social media vote button, the time taken to share a story decreases and so it encourages more and more people to share.

Build Relationship

Building relationships is very important if one wants to decrease the load of social SEO. Good relationship make good friends and good friends can help in dividing the workload of Social SEO.

As Social SEO is a relatively new concept, therefore there may be other techniques which may work, but these are the ones that always work and are the stepping stones to the path of social SEO.

Do you perform Social SEO? Do you think it is relevant in these times?

If not, then. Hire an agency for professional search engine optimization services.

Social SEO – A New Age Search Engine Optimization Technique is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Optimizing Title For Search Engine Optimization in Blogger
2. Image Search Engine Optimization
3. Traditional SEO vs Social SEO

This is guest post by Onibalusi Bamidele. Want to write for us ?

SEO short formed as search engine optimization is a process whereby a website is being optimized to appear and rank in the search engines. So many people think SEO is not required to rank in the search engines, but i want you to know that if everything is not in place such as the robots.txt and some other on page factors then your page will not be indexed by the search engines. So many factors are entailed when talking about Search Engine Optimization but we have to deal with the important ones first.

i. ON PAGE FACTORS: The onpage factors of a website has a long way to go in affecting a websites search engine rankings. Some you need to work on are:

• META TITLE: The meta title is your website’s title, it is what is being shown to your visitors by the search engines. The following are tips for choosing a good website title:
  a. Let the title be attractive.
  b. Let it make sense.
  c. Let it be in line with the theme of your website.
  d. Make sure your keyword is included in the tilte.
  e. Make sure the title is as short as possible.
• META DESCRIPTION: Aside the meta title, the meta description and keywords does not influence your search engine rankings, but why is there a need for optimization? You ask! The need for having a good meta description is because this will be shown to your visitors by the search engines, it will also improve your click through rate. It is possible for you to achieve high search engine without getting the right amount of visitors if you have a poor meta description. It is important to make your meta description attractive, but don’t worry about the keywords in the description because it will not affect your search engine rankings.
• META KEYWORDS: This has to be the list of your desired keywords, you might not bother much about this as it is less regarded by the major search engines.
• KEYWORD DENSITY: This is also a very important and overlooked method of achieving high search engine rankings, this is also very important when targeting highly competitive keywords. It is important to make sure that your keyword density is not more than %3 of your whole content.

ii. OFF PAGE OPTIMIZATION: Every other thing that can be done outside your website to improve your website rankings/traffic is called off page optimization. Some of the important off page optimization strategies are link building, Social bookmarking,Creating media awareness e.t.c.

• Link building: This is one of the most important factor for ranking websites and it is very important to consider mostly dofollow websites in your link building efforts. It is also very important to deeplink to inner pages of your website from bot your website and other link sources.
• Social Bookmarking: This is another method of improving your search engine rankings, and any webmaster that is not tapping this yet is missing a lot. Some good social bookmarking sites to start with are: Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Sphinn and Twitter(social networking).
• Creating Media Awareness: This can be done by creating videos and uploading them to video sites such as Youtube. Just make sure your link is included in your description and and video when doing this. It is also important to consider press release sites.

Great SEO tips for Everybody is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Essential SEO Tips for Beginners
2. Image Search Engine Optimization
3. Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic

This is guest post by Jordan Kasteler. Want to write for us ?

The year 2010 has only just begun, but already we’re starting to see some SEO software companies move ahead ahead of the pack. For any great, large-scale internet marketing campaign, the right software is essential, so it’s important to take notice of those that are working to be the best. If you’re looking into buying new Internet marketing software, here are a few you should check out first.

SEO Elite

SEO Elite, by Bryxen Software, has been wowing customers for years now. Its comfortable user interface, competent handling of basic SEO functions, and convenient article submission feature have all made it a consistently reliable software choice.

The Pros

SEO Elite has been around for a few years now. This means that there has been plenty of time for its user interface to be ironed out. SEO Elite makes it difficult to get lost by using easily understood language and presenting basic data clearly and conclusively. On top of this, SEO Elite has made a name for itself by condensing the article submission process into a few simple button clicks on your part. The convenience  of this feature to small-time marketers should not be overlooked.

The Cons

SEO Elite is considered by many to be fairly antiquated at this point. The updates arrive infrequently, and move the software at a slower pace than many other models. Some of the most important data and functions that you may need for the biggest projects simply aren’t available on SEO Elite. Combine this with the fact that SEO Elite is sold with only a single user license, and your left with a program that seems to only fit small-time, individual marketing efforts.

The Bottom Line

SEO Elite, at roughly $150, is a pretty cheap piece of SEO software. This, along with Elite’s easily accessible interface, focus on basic data, and easy article submission feature make it a perfect SEO suite for beginners or single-business promoters. However, its outdated modes of operation and restrictive tendencies make it very difficult to use in any kind of SEO firm.
/

iBusinessPromoter

Of all the big names in SEO software suites, no one has received as much positive attention recently as iBusinessPromoter. Its advanced algorithms and predictions ensure you have all the reliable data you might need, while the monthly updates ensure that you’re working in a modern atmosphere.

The Pros

iBusinessPromoter produces, in terms of raw data and calculations, more than any other SEO suite available. For large, delicate, or high-profile projects, where information equals efficacy, IBP can be invaluable. It offers the most modern and advanced calculations, and so provides you with the most modern and advanced predictions for your company. In order to ensure up-to date content, IBP releases a new update every month, which often significantly improves the software’s performance.

The Cons

The major drawback of IBP is its price. For a personal version the price tag is around $200, while a professional business copy will run for double that. Then, after the first year of free updates, the updates begin costing nearly $100 per year. On top of this, IBP can be quite hard to operate without a real understanding of the SEO process. It has a customizable, adaptable interface which, while great for experts, can be frustratingly difficult to figure out for the average Internet marketer.

The Bottom Line

IBP is the top of the line. If you’re willing to fork out the money, you’ll have access to the most dynamic information possible about your marketing effort. However, the technology is not for novices, so if you’re only marketing your own private business, or just entering the SEO scene the learning curve will be steep. IBP will certainly not make your marketing simpler, but it’s sure to make it more effective.
/

Web CEO

Web CEO is an impressive, comprehensive SEO software suite. It’s most endearing feature, and the one that sets it apart from the rest, is its excellent management of the most repetitive and tedious tasks associated with Internet marketing. By strictly adhering to the submission guidelines of various search engines, and automating most of the steps in the submission processes, Web CEO makes sure your content is easily and smoothly submitted every time.

The Pros

Web CEO is unique in its absolute compliance with search engine guidelines. Frequent updates make sure that the software is aware of the current guidelines, and always changes accordingly. By itself this may not seem like much, but when combined with Web CEO’s extensive automation of the submission process, it is a huge weight lifted off your shoulders. All of your content can be submitted easily with Web CEO, and you never need to bother with the headache of checking submission guidelines. Web CEO makes certain that the content follows every rule, and is looked kindly upon by the engine operators.

The Cons

With such a focus on making tedious tasks bearable, the data-mining fields of Web CEO somewhat lack. They’re still sufficient for almost all types of marketing, but the most top-of-the-line operations are beyond CEO’s reach. Also, most of the SEO “tips” given by Web CEO are either common knowledge, or completely irrelevant. Web CEO asks you to make compromises with the individual software functions, in exchange for its impressive automation process.

The Bottom Line

If submitting content is most of what you do, then Web CEO is for you. At about $200 for a personal copy, $300 for a business copy, it is relatively expensive but the convenience it offers can be worth it. That being said, if your marketing needs call for an all-inclusive software suite, you probably want to check somewhere else.
/

SEO Studio

SEO Studio is one of the first SEO software suites ever produced. Its incredibly accessible interface, easy to understand language, and complete mastery of basic concepts has made it a very valuable tool to beginning/small-scale Internet marketers for years.

The Pros

SEO Studio has focused its attentions on being the perfect small-business SEO suite. This means that it boasts a very easy to use and understand layout, a bevy of helpful, basic tips, and a full review of basic marketing data. It also is sure to define any SEO terms that may be over the head of beginning marketers.

The Cons

As you might expect, SEO Studio does not provide the kind of extensive data or in-depth calculations that some of the more modern software suites can. While its functions can easily manage basic marketing campaigns, the important numbers that can mean the difference between top ten status and top one thousand status are nowhere to be found.

The Bottom Line

SEO Studio makes no attempt to hide what it is; a suite designed for beginners. If you’re running a basic-level marketing campaign and don’t need to worry about advanced information, the software will make your life much easier. If you need that advanced information, though, this software simply wont deliver for you. At approximately $200, the software is average in price, so it’s up to you to decide what you need.
/

Keyword Elite

As far as keyword-focused software is concerned, Keyword Elite is the gold standard. It is the only key-word focused software on the list because, frankly, it’s the only one you’re going to need.

The Pros

Keyword Elite’s strength comes from its ability to quickly generate upwards of ten thousand Google Adsense keyword lists and actively seek out hidden niche markets. With a firm knowledge of these keywords, both general and niche, you will be able to market most effectively to the people who most value your product.

The Cons

The price of the product, $200, is a bit of a turn-off. For a product that only deals in keywords, a price so similar to that of full SEO suites seems a bit unreasonable. Also, there are keyword software programs that offer more in terms of increased traffic to your site, but none that offer the same kind of increased revenue.

The Bottom Line

If your goal in marketing is to increase your revenue and find the niches in which your product is appreciated, Keyword Elite can definitely be helpful. Short of that, it really doesn’t serve much of a purpose.
/

2010′s Leading Internet Marketing Software is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Affiliate Marketing Software Info (Infographic)
2. Top 10 tips for Local SEO & online marketing
3. Great SEO tips for Everybody

This is the second part of the SEO Tips for Beginners Series

The previous article on Essential SEO Tips for Beginners was just to give you a head start towards SEO, this post will take it to the next level.

To reach the top of the rankings, one has to receive an authority. The meaning of authority is to get quality links (links from high authority websites) from a lot of websites.  The amount of backlinks you need for a particular keywords, depends on the competition. In order to receive a lot of backlinks, you need to build links. The process of link building is a bit time consuming and a lot of work needs to be done to get backlinks to your website.

This article will focus on the various techniques which will help in Link Building :

In-linking

In-linking is a easiest possible way to start link building. Each page of a website is taken as a single entity and linking pages to each other will help in increasing the number of backlinks and also the page authority or page rank.

In-Linking doesn’t mean, linking to every random page , but it should link to relevant pages. A tool which can help is publishing related posts using Yet Another Relates Posts Plugin (YARRP). Other than that you should make a habit to link articles to particular keywords for example If I have an article on social media icons and If I am targeting the Keword “Icons” then I will link to the article whenever I use the keyword “Icons” in any post.

To automate In-linking in wordpress you can use SEO Smart Links. This plugin automatically links to articles when it find specific keywords in an article.

Guest Posting

Another novel technique to build quality links is by guest posting at authority Websites. Guest posting not only helps in building an online presence but it also helps in getting keyword rich links to your website.

Dofollow forums

Being an active member of forums like Digital Point Forum can be useful in two ways. First, it will help in building relations with others and secondly, it will help in building backlinks through the forum signatures (which are dofollow and appear everytime you post or reply on a thread).

Social Sharing

Sharing articles on social media websites is not a direct method to build links but if you are consistent and post quality content, then there are high chances that people who will like your content will link to it in their articles.

Comment Frequently

Commenting may seem like a useless activity, as it is only a medium to interact and discuss. But how does commenting help in building links? If you learn the art of commenting then you can get a lot ofbacklinks. When you comment, you try to build a relationship with a blogger, and if you consistenly give your feedback to the blogger, then the blogger starts liking you and eventuallly links to your articles.

What Link building activity do you use?

Stay Tuned and subscribe to our feed

Taking your SEO to the next level | Link Building is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Essential SEO Tips for Beginners
2. Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic
3. Great SEO tips for Everybody

From the moment Twitter caught fire it was inevitable that sooner or later the ”right now” phenomenon would penetrate the world of Internet Search Engines. For those who scoffed at this, thinking the momentum was coming mostly from avid social media enthusiasts, the launch of Collecta.com in the summer of 2009 should have been a wakeup call. Look at the backgrounds of Collecta’s management team and you’ll see these guys are heavy hitters in the search world. And now the 800 pound gorilla of search – the Great God Google – has arrived on the scene. In December of 2009 they started offering real time search results. How is it different?

As you probably know a traditional search engine crawls the web and archives what it finds for later retrieval. This process centers on web pages and by definition it takes awhile for new and immediate content to catch up and appear on a site to be crawled and indexed. Social media users get instant updates and it is this immediacy which is being translated into these real time search engines. Some real time search engines crawl social media feeds and news feeds as well as traditional web pages. Collecta is one of them and it has been very well received and appears to be getting better by the day. Let’s take a quick look at how Collecta works, and then we’ll compare it to Google’s real time search capability.

Collecta Real Time Search

Collecta’s user interface is one of the slickest out there. On the left side of the page you enter your query but be prepared to wait a bit for results to appear as Collecta searches everything – web pages, social media sites, news media sites, and even micro blogging sites. You can speed things up by using the ”Search Options” window to limit the search using a variety of filters. For example, you can ask for video only results, or blog comments only results. The results appear in the middle of the page and if you click on it, a result appears on the right side. The search is continually updated and the interface tells you when you started the search. You can start a new search in the search box on the left and underneath you’ll see a ”Hot Now” list showing what most people on the Net are looking at right now.

If you play around with Collecta for awhile you’ll notice that social media and blog sites dominate the results due to their being constantly updated. If you’re a web site owner who’s been using traditional SEO techniques to improve your SERP positioning, the implications should be obvious. The more frequently you update your content the better you will do on these new real time search engines.

Google Real Time Search

Many Google users may not yet be aware they now have a real time option with Google, although some may have noticed that the top position for some search queries is no longer an organic result – it is a ”Latest Result.” To get into the guts of Google’s real time search you have to click the ”Show Options” button appearing on the SERP. Once there you can limit your search in a variety of ways. Google has filters which allow you to specify the source of your results and set a time frame – from latest to past 24 hours to a specific range of dates. Google claims that relevance of results is still vital in real time search but if you experiment with it a bit you may find that in many instances immediacy trumps relevance. One area where this shows up is how Google treats tweets. Collecta views all tweets and other social media sources as equal but Google ranks them somewhat like they rank web pages based on the importance of inbound links to Tweeter’s profile. Tweets and other social media updates from higher quality users are included while those from lesser posters might not be. Another difference between Collecta and Google is the mixed nature of pre-filtered results with Google mixing results while Collecta doesn’t. So far reviewers are impressed with Google’s entry into real time search but where do we go from here?

The Future of Real Time Search

Collecta appears to be aware of the SEO implications as they are now offering a widget where web site owners can add real time feed to their sites, thus providing immediacy in content updating. While immediacy is an appealing aspect of real time search, there are two key issues that may be critical to the future of real time search. One is relevance. Ask yourself what is more important to you as an Internet visitor. Do you want to know what everyone else is interested in at the moment? Or are you more concerned with what you are interested in at the moment? Even with the available filtering options, real time search results might lead to information overload in short order. Bing has been successful with that point in their ad campaign. What do you think? Are real time search results an example of information overload?

Collecta, Google, and the Future of Real Time Search is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Google Wave – Is there any future?
2. Social SEO – A New Age Search Engine Optimization Technique
3. Add Blogger Blog to Google Webmaster Tools

This is the first part of the SEO Tips for Beginners Series

After starting a blog and putting all the content, the next step is to focus on getting organic traffic. “Organic Traffic” is the traffic that arrives from search engines like google, bing etc. These search engines show results based on relevancy, content and the number of  backlinks. Once your website improves its search engine rankings (for a specific keyword), it will see an improvement in the inflow of organic traffic.

Why is there a need for SEO?

Search Engine Optimization techniques assist in getting more organic traffic. The reason why “Organic Traffic” is deemed important is because of the following reasons?

1. The “Organic Traffic” is very consistent source of traffic and it has lower bounce rate ( the rate at which a reader exits after reading a single page), so the readers coming via this medium have better engagement.
2. The Organic Traffic consists of new visitors, who may subscribe to your blog  and hence help in increasing the reader base.
3. Major chunk of  the adsense earnings is due to clicks by users arriving from search engines and if you are treating blogging as a business, then it is very important to improve the earnings to achieve break-even in a shorter period of time.

I would to like give some basic  SEO tips, which would be very beneficial for bloggers who are just beginning their journey:

Optimizing Title

Google and many other search engines give a lot of weight to the site title. The site titles are titles that show up at the top left of the browser as shown in the image below.

These titles are also displayed in the search engine results. According to Google, the page title is given extra weight age in search results and optimizing them should be your first priority.

The blog title is like the brand name for your brand. Add the blog name before or after the title of the article. This is important for branding your blog. People start recognizing you as a brand and so it helps in building a good brand image.

Use keywords in blog titles, which you want to target. To assist in choosing appropriate keywords, google adwords has a wonderful tool that gives you details of  monthly search volumes of a particular keyword. You need to target keywords which have very high search volume, in order to extract maximum traffic out of it.

WordPress:

You can try the All in one SEO plugin, which has all the required SEO features. You can change the title by going to the All in one seo settings and then adding %blog_title% in the post title format.

Blogger:

For blogger blogs, check out  the following post:

Optimizing Title For Search Engine Optimization in Blogger

Use Slugs in Links

Using links like www.bloggodown.com/?p=18 for articles is not a very good practice in terms of SEO. The keywords in links are given a lot of importance and using keyword rich slugs in links is a recommended SEO practice. These links contain kewords in them. For eg. http://www.bloggodown.com/optimizing-title-for-search-engine.html is a keyword rich link.

Meta Tags

Employing meta tags for a website’s SEO has been an age old practice. These tags are not displayed on the website, but they are seen by search engine bots. The two most important meta tags are meta description and meta keywords. Google does not consider Meta keywords but it still plays an important part in other search engine rankings. Meta Description should be a keyword rich description of the post ( more like a summary). Meta tags and Decription should be ideally added manually, but if you want to don’t want so much hassle, then you can use the All in one SEO plugin which will automatically add the meta tags and description for all the posts.

Stay Tuned and subscribe to our feed, The next part will cover topics like link building and Image SEO

Essential SEO Tips for Beginners is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Great SEO tips for Everybody
2. Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic
3. Image Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization helps build a great traffic source from major search engine providers like google, bing and yahoo. Previously i wrote about how to do image search engine optimization and how to add blogger to google webmaster tools. This is the post is on optimizing blog title for search engine optimization.

Every search engine firstly looks for the title and page link for the match fr a query, then it looks for the query in the post content. So to get a higher rank in search engines, you have to optimize your title and link. Blogger links are already optimized like (for example 350+ Fresh Twitter Icons has the link http://www.bloggodown.com/2009/08/350-fresh-twitter-icons.html which is perfectly optimized), but there is a need for optimization which is by default as Blog Name: Blog Posts Title ( eg. Blog Godown: 350+ Fresh Twitter Icons).
To optimize the title the post title should come before blog title.

Here’s a preview:

Here is a simple hack to do this:

1. Go to the Layout> Edit Html.
2. Download Full Template (For Backup).
3. Search for the following code:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

4. Replace the code by the following code:

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;’>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>

5. You can also remove the title of the blog after post title by removing <data:blog.title/> from the code above.

6. You can also add tags to your blog title by adding it after <data:blog.title/> in the previous code.

7. After editing all the code. Save the Template and it’s done.

Check your title at each post and you will see the result.

This will be the end result when you see in google search

Optimizing Title For Search Engine Optimization in Blogger is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Image Search Engine Optimization
2. Social SEO – A New Age Search Engine Optimization Technique
3. Replace Home and Posts Links by images in Blogger

Nobody can deny that Google is the best search engine. As google is used by most users so it is a great way to get new visitors to your blog.
Adding your site to google webmaster tools increases your blog’s visibility in search engines which means more traffic.

Here’s how you can add your blog to google webmaster:

1. Verification:

You can verify blogger blogs by adding a meta tag to your blog. But you can verify your blog without any coding. Just sign in to your blogger account and then in the bottom of your dashboard you will see a link to google webmaster tools as can be seen in the following image:

Add Blogger Blog to Google Webmaster Tools is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Optimizing Title For Search Engine Optimization in Blogger
2. Google Friend Connect Recommedations Gadget For Blogger
3. How to add Retweet button to blogger

Search Engine Optimization helps you increase traffic. Usually webmasters just optimize for Google text only search but optimization for image is also important to get some bonus traffic.

Google has also started integrating other search engine (like Image Search and Google News Search) results into their normal search results. You might sometimes see images related to the search above the normal search results.

Following tips will help you optimize your images for search engines like google:

Image Search Engine Optimization is a post from: Blog Godown

Related posts:

1. Optimizing Title For Search Engine Optimization in Blogger
2. Social SEO – A New Age Search Engine Optimization Technique
3. Great SEO tips for Everybody