Posted on Nov 18, 2008
Organic seo, also known as natural seo, is the attempt to build up your search engine rankings or serps for your keywords without paying for placement. Organic seo enables you to get visitors from search engines without having to pay for them. To be successful and benefit when it comes to organic seo, you must create and maintain a website that provides relevant information when it comes to your keywords. Organic seo can take a lot of effort to improve your serps, and the progress will likely be seen over the period of months. Some ways to improve your organic seo is to:
- Create a lot of relevant content
- Gain quality inbound links (due to this relevant content)
- Optimize markup
The benefits of organic seo is that it will provide stable, free, and relatively long term traffic for your website; however, the effort that is involved in optimizing organic seo is much more substantial than simply starting up a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign.
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Posted on Nov 17, 2008
Buying links can clearly get you a large amount of links in a short period of time as opposed to organically building these links as your website grows and develops. “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.” Although it may be tempting to buy links to gain an edge in seo, it will likely have greater negative effects than positive ones. Google has recently started to crack down on websites that buy and sell links. Websites can experience serious drops in pagerank and their serps due to improper link exchange. Of course Google will not punish for paid links if they do not find out, but Google is improving their methods for improper link exchange, and it is quite likely that your site will be punish if it engages in these activities. Instead of wasting time with paid links which will result in Google penalties, you may just want to effectively buy links by buying a website. Link exchange should be done in an organic manner as this will improve your seo naturally, and you will not have to worry about your website being punished for selling or buying links.
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Posted on Nov 15, 2008
User dependency on the search box is very high; search boxes enable users to easily find the targeted information that they want in a short period of time. The search box is no longer limited to Google and other search engines as many websites now employ the search box as a method for visitors to find the content that interests them. The search box provides a better user experience for the visitor as they can find information in a timely manner, but from a webmaster’s point of view it can lead to some issues. The search box itself will not hurt your website when it comes to search engine optimization, but improper reliance on the search box can lead to deep linking. It is extremely important to avoid deep linking from a seo perspective as all webpages should be accessible within a few clicks (3 should be considered the maximum). The reason for this is because search engine spiders crawl webpages through links and if many of your webpages are deep linked, then the search engine spider is unlikely to crawl these pages and index them. This can have a serious impact on your website when it comes to search engine optimization. Use the search box to give visitors a better user experience, but avoid relying on the search box too much when it comes to deep linking.
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Posted on Nov 14, 2008
Google recently released their SEO Starter Guide which discusses basic seo issues for webmasters who are just entering the industry. Some of the seo issues covered include:
- Page Titles
- Description Meta Tag
- URL Structure
- Site Navigation
- Creating Quality Content
- Anchor Text
- Heading Tags (H1s, H2s, etc.)
- Image Optimization
- Robots.txt
- Rel=”nofollow”
- Website Promotion
- Webmaster Tools
- Analytics
- More Resources
Although, most experienced webmasters should know all of the things that Google covers in this guide, many of the topics mentioned may need to be refreshed in our minds. Overall, it is a very useful guide that addresses seo topics in a direct and basic manner.
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Posted on Nov 11, 2008
Selecting a domain name that contains your keywords, remains memorable for visitors, and is actually open for registration, can be quite a challenge. Some people may choose a shorter 3 character domain name so that it is easily memorable for visitors, but a domain with your keyords is ideal for reaping the benefits of organic seo. For instance, if I want to create a website for watching House M.D. online, I might consider the keywords: stream, watch, house, online, or episodes. Obviously, many of the preferred domains have already been registered, such as watchhouse, watchhouseonline, watchhouseepisodes, etc. Instead of forcing myself to register a domain like houseonlineepisodesstream or housonlineepisodeswatch, which are both long and not in the preferred order for keywords, there is something else you can try. Combining the last letter of the word with the first letter of the next word; for example, the keywords watch and house can be combined into watchouse. Search engine will still recognize both keywords (watch and house) in your domain name, but you will be able to register a quality domain name that is actually open. I recently did this with the domain name watchouseonline.com. On Google it started to rank on the second and third pages a few days after registration with no promotion. After about a week of limited promotion, this domain started to rank on the first page for all of its keywords. Keywords in your websites domain name or url are obviously very important for serps (Search Engine Results Page), but you can’t always find the domains that you want open. With this tip you can combine your keywords in quite a few situations to be able to get a desirable domain name.
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Posted on Nov 10, 2008
Adsense text ads tend to blend into your website more, which results in a lower CTR; whereas, image ads stick out more against the content of your website, which results in a higher CTR. This does not necessarily mean that image ads are better than text ads. Generally, Adsense image ads are CPM ads; this means it might be a good idea to use these ads on webpages which are unlikely to get clicks. Depending on your website it may be beneficial for you to use Adsense text or image ads. In my experience with another blog of mine, I decided to switch from Adsense text ads to Adsense image ads; the results were surprising. I received ~25% more clicks while using the image ads, but the image ads paid ~50% less than the text ads did. Maybe this is because there is not as much competition for image ads in the niche, which would explain the lower amount paid per ad. The choice to use Adsense text or image ads really depends on your website. You should also consider individual ad positioning to see if certain placements are beneficial to image ads, while others are better for text ads and vice versa. You will not know whether text or image ads will actually perform better until you do a comparison between them.
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