SEO – Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC

Matt Cutts Reveals How to Rank #1 in Google

digitalSRC — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 06:06:00 +0000

Ranking no. 1 in Google for targeted keywords is definitely the dream and objective of any and every SEO consultant, however, it has never been easy and particularly so in this troubled time when Google has successfully created an unnerving experience for SEOs, using the cutest of animals – Panda and Penguin.

But well, all’s not gone. Matt Cutts here tells you a simple formula on how to rank #1. Watch the video and get your SEO guns going ablaze.

So are you ready to follow his instructions ?

* This post is just for fun and is actually a mash up of multiple genuinely helpful videos from Matt. It was put together by Sam Applegate. Please do not follow the instructions given in the video for SEO as it is sure to backfire.

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Google Plus One Likely to Effect Search Results and Quality Score

digitalSRC — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 07:54:00 +0000

Google is adding its own version of “Like” button with the launch of +1 ( Plus One) in an attempt to make search more social. Now Google will allow users to vote Plus One for search results as well as on Search ads. Users will get to see both the total number of Plus One votes along with names and contacts of their contacts who have shown their preference.

While it looks primarily like Google’s attempt to replicate Facebook’s “Like” what does it mean for search marketers ? A Plus One vote is a clear indication of human preference and there can be no better judge of a webpage’s quality than a real human user. Google is definitely going to use this as a signal in its algorithm. In fact, this time Matt Cutts himself clearly admits to this , “”When someone recommends something, that’s a pretty good indicator of quality,” said Matt Cutts. “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings.”

Similarly, on the Adwords front, we already know that high quality score would mean lower CPC and better exposure and this is going to get a shot in the arm with implementation of this Plus One feature. Ads that get a Plus One would likely have a higher quality score, resulting in better performance for the advertiser. This has been further confirmed with the statement by ads group product manager Christian Oestlien, “We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones” “Our belief is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations.”

Inbound links have been one of the strongest signals for organic ranking for a long time now and now as Google has started to become more social , incorporating personalized search results, real time twitter results etc, Plus One is definitely going to be a big step ahead in that direction and can prove to be a key player in determining relevance for algorithmic search results.

Also, looking at it from Google’s perspective, introducing Plus One has multiple benefits. Besides getting a new powerful signal to tidy up the search results, Plus One can actually give Google a second chance to penetrate the social web. When the user tries to hit Plus One for the first time, they would be invited to create a Google profile and adjust the privacy settings. Also, Google would offer publishers the option to embed Plus One buttons to their content pages, so users can vote on content on other websites beyond search results pages and most webmasters would be more than eager to implement this as they realize that Plus One votes can help them get better with organic search results. A positive aspect of this for webmasters would be that to get this Plus One embed code, they would need to login to the Google Webmasters Tools. So the ones who have not yet registered with Webmaster tools would probably have one more reason to do it now.

Everything said and done, it would be fun to see how BlackHats and spammers use the Plus One votes to their advantage. Though Google has been doing a fair job at fighting them, there has been one too many cases where BlackHats and spammers have gamed the Google results and introducing such a simple, manual signal to influence the search results might throw a new challenge for the Google anti-spam team.

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How Google Instant Affects SEO and PPC

digitalSRC — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:41:00 +0000

I have been watching the launch of Google Instant and keeping a tab on the updates and predictions on the web, based on what I see here are few points on how Google Instant would affect SEO and PPC.

How Google Instant Affects Adwords

The number of impressions are going to increase – Google now considers an impression if the visitor is on the same page view for 3 seconds or more – this would be pretty common as visitors would tend to scan through the changing results as they type and also there are slow typers for whom typing a search query with some long words are going to take time. In addition the regular impression count as we used to get based on when the user hits enter or clicks through to some other page would be accounted for.
As an effect of the above point, we are likely to see a higher CPC – with more number of impressions happening on the go the click through rate is likely to go down. Once the CTR is down that would adversely affect quality score and to offset that we will likely have to increase CPC.

Broad keywords would become more important, importance of long tail would be reduced – As we start typing Google starts showing results, as an example- if we consider the query “iPhone Application Developer” – when the user starts typing iPhone Google starts showing relevant ads about iPhone, the user types “app” the results change a little and focus more on iPhone apps and developers and finally if the user completes the query and hits enter Google shows the most relevant set of iPhone application development ads. Now, it would be a clear benefit for a advertiser trying to get traffic from the final keyword to be visible right when the user has typed in the first word of the search phrase( in this case , iPhone) – because if the user can see the relevant result right after typing the first word he is more likely to click through to it rather than completing the full query.
This would mean the advertisers would need to spend more on broad keywords ( making it difficult for smaller companies). Again in doing that, in most cases the broad keywords might not be the most relevant one’s for you – so you tend to receive a bunch of un-targeted click and also the broad keywords would likely have lower level of relevancy, in turn affecting quality score and CPC.

How Google Instant Affects SEO

On SEO front while there is no major shift in the algorithm or ranking factors with Google instant, it would definitely affect the traffic from organic searches. As Google starts to show results on the go, the top three positions would become more important than ever as many searchers would click through to the site once they see the relevant results . Most of them would not bother to scroll down the first page unless they complete the query and in case of a multiphrase search query it is likely that they might find their answers even before completing the query.
However, one of the factors that we always hated Google for might now come to our advantage in some industries. Google has always listed the most authoritative sites on top – taking the example of the previous query “iPhone application development” the above the fold positions are mostly taken by Apple website who is not a direct competitor to the companies trying to sell iPhone development service – hereby forcing the visitors to scroll down. I would also presume, because users would not be able to find the exact type of results as they type the query, chances of them completing the query is much higher in some industries like this ( unless they click through to paid search results) compared to various other industries, in which case they are likely to scroll through the entire search result page.
In long run however the importance of long tail keywords are likely to be reinstated because with this predictive search query inputs and instantly changing results, users would get more knowledgeable on how to search , and which queries can get them the most relevant results and this is likely to initiate more long tail searches.

I think it is too early to predict exactly how Google Instant would change SEO and PPC but apparently it seems this would mean more Adwords spend for advertisers and a tougher competition on the SEO domain.
Feel free to share your thoughts and inputs on how you think Google Instant’s effect on SEO and PPC.

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Google Enhances Flash Indexing

digitalSRC — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:04:00 +0000

Google announced about its capability to index Flash in July 2008, however the indexing capabilities had some severe limitations. In a recent announcement in Google Webmaster Blog they have now clarified about their enhanced capabilities to crawl and index flash files.

While they have improved on a bunch of issues I think the most important point is that now Googlebot is able to index a flash file and also index the content in it even if it is loaded from an external source like an XML, .txt file or another .swf. Also it can map the flash file to the content and evaluate the flash page in its entirety. Prior to these Google would typically evaluate the flash file sans the content whenever content is being loaded from any external source.

The points below summarizes all the points that illustrates Googlebot’s capability with flash indexing..

Googlebot can now index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. It can click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.

Discover links within Flash files.

Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.

Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.

Index sites scripted with AS1,AS2 and AS3 even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.

With this super charged Googlebot it seems that it is no more an impossible task to have a full flash website and yet hit the first page of Google SERP. However, this is a very recent announcement and it would definitely be better to play it safe with good old HTML if you have some serious SEO in mind.

Google Starts Indexing Flash
Google Starts Indexing Flash – Afterthoughts

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5 Tips on Usability

digitalSRC — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:12:00 +0000

As a SEO and Internet marketing consultant I come across various clients with varied requirements and usability is probably one of the most important yet hardly ever asked question that I face from them.

SEO has evolved to great extent and now just getting good rankings for a website doesn’t finish a SEO consultant’s job. Client’s today are more ROI driven and if you really want your clients to convert the traffic that you deliver you will often need to help them with usability.

Though not really specific to increasing conversion, here are few usability tips that would help make your visitors spend a nice time on your website.

a) Users Don’t Like to Keep Guessing: Users love web pages that are self explanatory and don’t leave them guessing. We already have too many questions to answer in our life why would anyone like to visit a web page that just adds a few more questions to the list – what is this website about ? which link do I click next ? is that graphics clickable ? Yes, usability flaws basically means your users gets more questions for which they need to find the answers and keep guessing what next .
Provide your users with an intuitive navigation structure, help them move from one page to other in a logical way, provide them with visual clues and easily recognizable links that guides them to their goals – they should be happy with it.

b) Don’t Test Your User’s Patience: If you are offering a product or service to your visitors to test that’s great but it doesn’t allow you to test the patience of your users. The less action is required from users to test a service a random visitor is more likely to try it out. First time visitors would not be willing to fill in long forms or put in personal details. Give them a small form they might fill that to play with your product or service but give them a long form and they are likely not to visit your website again.

People often ask for email address while offering a test service, while I do understand that this is a good way to collect leads and a way to communicate with prospective customers, it would be much better and probably many more people would try the services if you don’t ask for the email address at the beginning. If you need to get the email address, may be you can ask users for a feedback at the end of their first use of your product or service and there you ask there emails.

c) Manage Your User’s Focus: Well we all know that user don’t read but they scan web pages however what we tend to neglect is during this scanning process user’s focus keep diverting. We should understand that human eyes typically move in a non linear fashion and this gives us the opportunity to arrest the user’s focus to any part of the web page and this can be used effectively to give users a better experience on your web page.

For example, bold texts, graphics, text in bigger fonts, videos or animations tends to get the users attention before the other page elements. If these elements can be used effectively to convey the necessary message and then provide hints on the way they should navigate through the pages to reach their goal it would definitely enhance the user experience as well as contribute to increasing the conversion rate.

d) Keep it Simple ( KIS ) – The Keep it Simple principle is just perfect when you are designing with your users in mind. Visitors typically don’t visit a website for the design, they come for information and keeping a simple design helps them to find the information they are looking for more easily. Look at Google, one of the most used website in the world, don’t you love the simplicity of their interface ? Present your information on the site clearly and give your visitors a few options for action without overcrowding them with unnecessary content.

e) Test, test and test some more – Testing is one of the key factors that improves your website’s usability. While it is good to get the site tested by a lot of people it might not be a viable option for new websites. But even conducting a test on a small audience is good. Test from the very beginning, organize the feedback , do changes based on them and test again. Testing is an iterative process and it is important to be organized with the process. Also bear in mind, don’t test your own application or website – you know exactly how it is built and how it is supposed to work so you would likely not see any issues with usability. Get it tested with people who are using the website for the first time and get their feedback.

Please feel free to add your own tips on improving usability in the comments section.

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Solve Duplicate Content Issue With Canonical Tag

digitalSRC — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:41:00 +0000

Canonical URLs have always been a serious concern for most webmasters and SEO . Though solutions like 301 redirection of canonical URLs have been suggested time and again it is not really the easiest to implement and particularly for SEO s who are not highly tech savvy.

Google earlier has provided the option by which you can indicate which version of your website URL ( www or non www ) would you like them to show but that was not a complete solution for canonical issues.

Recently all the search engines have come together to find a easy solution to the canonical problem and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have given the news officially on their blogs.

If your site has identical or almost similar content on multiple pages you can indicate one of these URLs as the canonical URL for the search engines to display. This can be now done by simply adding the tag to the preferred version, inside the section of the duplicate content URLs.

For example, if you have the following URLs with same content..
http://www.domain.com/widgets/blue
http://www.domain.com/product.php?cat=widgets&col=blue
http://www.domain.com/product.php?c=23bd&did=144
http://www.domain.com/product.php?cat=widgets&col=blue&sessionid=232424242323

You would obviously like the search engines to consider the URL
http://www.domain.com/widgets/blue

For this, all you have to do is add the following tag within theof the other pages. This would be good enough for the search engines to understand that all the duplicate URLs refer to the canonical URL and accordingly Google would transfer PR and additional URL properties to the preferred URL.A few points that you must keep in mind while using this canonical tag :

This works only internally and not across domains
Search engines treat this in a fashion similar to a 301 redirection, so you better be careful while using it.
Google mentions that “canonical” is a hint and not a directive, so they are not bound to abide by this.

For those of you using WordPress, Drupal or Magento Joost has already created a plug in for this tag.

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How to SEO for WordPress Blogs ?

digitalSRC — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:41:00 +0000

I wrote a post on how to SEO a blogger blog and my web analytic tells me that it is one of the most popular posts on my blog. Also through the comments on that post and the mails that I have received in reference to that post I have been asked a lot about WordPress blogs and how to do SEO for WordPress blogs. There are various WP Plug ins that are extremely useful and makes it really easy to SEO any WordPress blog without much of technical complexity. While any SEO enthusiast WP blogger can easily find about the plugins here are few tips that would also come handy for anyone looking to optimize their WordPress Blog.

So here are some tips to SEO your WordPress Blog..

a) SEO Friendly Permalinks – One of the key steps in optimizing your WP Blog. the default structure of WordPress Blog URLs are like www.yourblog.com/?p=5. You need to change it to a SEO friendly format. Go to Options > Permalinks. Chose the option “Custom” and put in /%category%/%postname%/ Your URL structure becomes www.yourblog.com/category/this-is-your-post-title . Isn’t that simple ?

b) Page Title Optimization – As with any other websites Page Title also plays a key role when you SEO a blog. The default page Title structure for a WordPress Blog is “Blog Title – Page Title”. While this is not bad, it can be much better if you have it as “Page Title – Blog Title”. As your post specific keywords are expected to be in your Post title it becomes really helpful for SEO.
OR Use this Plugin to optimize your page title and meta tags as you want

c) Optimize Category Names – This is a very simple thing that we often miss. In point (a) we have mentioned about including the category name in URL, so using keyword rich category names can actually enrich your URL. For example, in this SEO Blog if I am to create an category for Misc. for all my non-SEO posts instead of naming it as Misc or Miscellaneous I might as well call it Non-SEO or Other Than SEO.

d) Make your Post Titles Click-able – Yes, some WordPress themes comes with this customization, some of them don’t . It is pretty easy to do and is really helpful in making your WordPress blog SEO friendly. In your main template and the Page template you should be able to find the code

[h2][?php the_title(); ?][/h2]

Replace this with

[h2][a href=”[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to [?php the_title(); ?]“][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h2]

* note: We have used [] instead of used in the actual code.

e) Related Posts – Yes, here you would need a plug in and trust me the Word Press Related Posts plug in is a gem. Just install it and insert the code snippet in a suitable location ( generally after the post), you are done ! Related posts would start showing up against each post, this would not just enhance your internal site navigation but also add value for your visitors as they would be able to find al posts about the same topic in one place.

f) Site Map – Again it is advisable you use a Sitemap Plug in. If your theme is well planned and you have a few back links to your WordPress Blog, you should not have trouble getting your posts crawled, however, having a sitemap would cause no harm. Try using the WordPress Google Site Map Generator Plug in.

g) Content – This is probably the most important factor in optimizing your blog. Post regularly and ensure that you are sneaking in your targeted keywords within your posts wherever applicable. make sure your post titles have your keywords. Having said all that, a word of caution – Do not over do. If you would like read Characteristics of good website content writing.

There can be much more that you can do to SEO your WordPress Blog, however, if you are following the above tips you should be pretty set. Just build a few good back links and your WordPress blog should be well optimized.

In case you have any other SEO tips that you think would help optimizing a WordPress blog please feel free to add in comments.

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5 SEO Myths

digitalSRC — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:42:00 +0000

With the increasing popularity of SEO, there are more and more so called “seo experts” popping up in every corner of the web world and while the sources of proper SEO knowledge has substantially increased over the last few years, confusion still exists and the misinformation spread by these half baked just adds more to it.

Here are some SEO Myths that are most commonly found among clients as well as newbies..

a) SEO is a Sham – This is mostly prevalent among clients who have burnt their fingers once or twice with so called SEO companies. One of the key reasons for this is that these companies would often not tell you what exactly they are doing to SEO your website and would often explain the stuff they do with terms like “proprietory technique” etc and finally end up with no results. This myth has been substantially busted this days because more and more good seo companies are coming into the picture who would properly educate the client and provide absolute transparency. Also articles on SEO and search engine marketing published on leading magazines like Business Week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes have contributed to establishing the credibility of SEO.

b)It is better to go with a SEO company that guarantees ranking – It has been said time and again by authority SEO websites and even by search engines like Google to avoid SEO companies and consultants that guarantees ranking. Here you can check what Google says.
These guarantees generally work based on one or more of the following ..

These SEO companies would not care about a long term success but show you some short term boost in rankings and get the money out.
In most cases they would give you a large collection of keywords and the payment terms would be based on getting ranking for atleast few of them ( 5 keywords out of 20 should have first page ranking etc ) and in most cases they would have really long tail un competitive keywords included to cover these “5 keywords”. You wont get any traffic but they get their money by fulfilling the condition.
Some contracts require on going payment for continued ranking thereby reducing your marketing ROI. Whereas a good SEO campaign done for a proper period of time can go with minimum maintenance.
Also, most of those SEO companies would have some fine prints in the guarantee which if you read in details you are sure to sense the bad ethics of these companies.

If you want to find a good SEO company or SEO consultant try to evaluate them by their experience, portfolio and get references for their previous clients rather than going by a guarantee. Here’s an article on how to choose a SEO consultant.

c) You should Submit URLs to Search Engines – Yes, there are SEO companies that charge their client mentioning that they would submit the client’s website URL to a few thousand websites every week.This is absolutely NOT required. The modern search engines can easily find and index your website by following the inoming links and there is no need to submit them to the search engines. Also, other than the few major search engines, the other engines that are there would hardly ever drive any traffic to your site so it doesn’t make any sense submitting to those engines either.

d) Flash is bad – No, Flash is not bad however lack of text and complete reliance on flash is bad. Also, Google has announced about its flash indexing capabilities recently which is definitely a good news.

e) Meta Keywords tag is Important – Again a complete myth. Google has depreciated the Meta keywords tags and Yahoo might be using it for non-compeitive misspellings and similar variation of keywords but definitely not for regular keywords. It would not harm to have a Meta keywords tag on your web page but it would not help you tobbost your search rankings on proper keywords.

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Google Starts Indexing Flash – Aftrethoughts

digitalSRC — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:56:00 +0000

I have been thinking about Google’s recent announcement of their flash indexing capabilities. these are just some after thoughts on Google’s recent announcement of the Flash indexing and how it would effect SEO.

This document is made with the assumption that the readers are already aware of the recent announcement Google did about their capacity to index flash (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html ).

1) In regards to content derived from external source such as a Flash file loading content from XML or loading an HTML file – This would not hinder Google’s capability to index the flash file or the content, however, the flash file would be evaluated by Google sans the content.

Now this leaves a scope for the content to get indexed separately.

If the content is in XML format ( as most flash only sites prefer to use) the problem would be that XML has no given semantic structure and any XML found will not have any meaning unless it’s loaded, parsed, interpreted and displayed by executing the SWF. It could just be a config file or may be some proper text and it would often be useless to the users unless parsed properly.

2) Adobe mentions that they have provided Google and Yahoo with a player that can execute Flash somewhat similar to a human being. A significant percentage of Flash sites for various reasons use a bootstrap SWF which loads the main SWF. Given the fact that this new player allows Google to execute Flash, it should not be an issue , however , a search of “loading filetype:swf” in Google tells a different story.
There are numerous Flash sites that execute a SWF to reach the actual SWF with content. This means you will se no content at all except perhaps “Loading…”

3) Google has mentioned
“In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash web pages.” –

So ideally it should not be a problem to have a flash navigation as long as it is text.

4) In most flash websites when you click on links new page loads but the URL doesn’t change. Armed with the new technology provided by Adobe Google can now follow the links and index the content on all the pages in the flash site, however, if the URL doesn’t change Google would consider the entire content to belong to the same URL. This can lead to..

a. A site with different types of service offering would have content for all of them in different pages but Google would see them as all in one page resulting in dilution of relevancy and keyword strength.

b. While searching for some keyword Google might show a search result with a snippet from the content in some internal page of the flash site, however, when the user clicks on the link the flash would load from the beginning ( home page) and the user would not be able to find the content he saw on the snippet. He will have to search through all the pages to find the content. So this defeats the purpose of serving content efficiently.

For the best user experience and higher conversion rates from search, Flash developers should be careful to avoid this situation by creating distinct URLs for each piece of content. This type of implementation would also helps the Flash site be more viral as well and it would be possible for users to share the same via email, Digg, Stumble upon and other content sharing platforms.

5) Google says
” Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.””
SWFObject, one of the common methods to embed flash also runs using JavaScript, does flash loaded using SWFObject gets indexed?

7) Looking back, we often created HTML alternative of Flash websites for search engines – will these be considered as duplicate content in the changed scenario?

These are just a few questions and thoughts that we need to think about and probably some of them will get clearer with time. Share your views on these and any other points that you might like to add.

Related Posts:
Google Enhances Flash Indexing

Read more on SEO at SEO Consultant India Blog

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Google Seminar on Analytics, GWT and Website Optimizer

digitalSRC — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:13:00 +0000

After the recent JuneTune ( on 19th of this month) Google have now announced another event to help webmasters. Google Trifecta is going to be a free online seminars in which Googlers would be sharing information and answering questions about Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Website Optimizer.

TITLE: The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer
DATE: Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
TIME: 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. PT (16:00 UTC)

While most webmasters and SEO s are already using some of these tools ( particularly Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools aka GWT), it would definitely be useful and informative to see how these tools can be used more effectively to gain further insight into your website traffic, user behavior and more.

For the first time ever, the Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Website Optimizer teams will join forces to hold a free online seminar.

To attend this Google seminar you will need to doa registration here

Read more on SEO at SEO Consultant India Blog

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