How to create a Google Site Map

Posted by admin | White Label SEM | Thursday 23 April 2009 11:22 pm
Officially announced on June 6th, 2005 at Google’e Blog, Google Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for Google to crawl.
There have been many questions concerning the procedure of creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their site)
 
First, create a file named sitemap.xml
 
Use the following code in any HTML editor:
 
create-a-google-site-map
 
Here’s a breakdown of those properties:
lastmod -
This is the date the document was last modified and uses the following formats:

dd.mm.yyyy

dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm

dd/mm/yyyy

dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm
 
changefreq -
Tells Google Sitemaps the frequently that content of a particular URL will change.
Your options are “always”, “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “yearly” or “never”.
The value “always” should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value “never” should be used to describe archived URLs.
 
priority -
The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on your site.
You may select between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your website and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your website.
Add as many pages as there are in your website.
Google Sitemap supports up to 50,000 pages per XML file.
Once you’ve completed all of those steps, you’ll need to submit your site map page.
Submit to: (requires gmail account)
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
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What is SEO

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Wednesday 22 April 2009 11:55 pm
SEO- Search Engine Optimisation. Over the last ten years SE’s (Search Engines) have become an ever increasing important factor in business promotion. The four major SE’s generate in excess of 700 million search queries a day, an outstanding fact that really emphasises the importance of utilising the potential reach of the Search Engine.
Over 75% of people now use the internet when looking to buy a product or service. Websites in the top 3 pages of the major search engines gain 90% of search engine traffic. Basically, if you have a website you need to be on the first few pages of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) to get the traffic.so how do you do this?………. Its not quite as simple as many people believe. I am constantly being asked ” I have just had a website built but do not appear on Google.” Well firstly type in the URL (web address) of your website, if you still do not come up then your site has not been indexed. If your website does appear then previously when you said “I do not appear in Google” what you meant is- you typed in a keyword (a word related to your product/service) and your website did not appear in the top few pages. To be honest, this is very unlikely to happen. Unless you are selling a very unique product with very little competition then your website is likely to be on page 23 or worse!
Everybody with a website would love to be #1 on google for their main keyword, but it takes time and effort. You need to optimise your website for the best chances of achieving this.
After crawling the internet using robots called “spiders”, the SE’s use a complex mathematical formula to “rank” websites on importance and relevance to certain keywords. These formulas are known as “algorithms”. SEO describes the techniques that use a knowledge of how SE’s rank websites, to make alterations to a site so that it better “adheres” to the “algorithms”.
There are to main phases to the optimisation process- “on page” and “off page”. On page is the alterations that are made to the physical content of a website and the code that makes up each webpage. This includes intergrating keywords into areas of the site that the SE’s deem important. Off page optimisation is the process of building links to a website…… what this means is getting as many websites to have a link somewhere on their site to the site you are optimising. This is very important because a major part of SE’s “algorithms” is link popularity- the more websites that link to another, the more important it is considered by the SE’s and the higher up it appears in the SERP’s.
Of course there are many more technical issues involved with Search Engine Optimisation but i wont discuss these in this article.. One thing that you should remeber though when thinking about SEO is that it certainly is not instant. Due to the way search engines work it may be several months before the friuts of your labour are seen, in the form of higher rankings.Google currently indexes over 8 billion web pages and the ever increasing size of the internet means that the SE’s certainly have their work cut out.
Many companies manage their own SEO in house, this can work fine but be willing to put in the time to learn the technicalities. The “nity gritty” of it can be slighly overwhelming as it is quite a specialist, technical field.
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Beginners Guide

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Wednesday 22 April 2009 3:58 am
Search Engine Optimisation is the buzzword around at the moment. It is the art of getting a website to appear higher up in the “natural” results pages of Search engines like “Google”. Although I highly recommended SEO for any business wanting to push online sales or increase website visibility it does have a few limitations:
Time frame:
Due to the nature of how search engines operate and the vast size of the Internet it may take several months before you “see the fruits of your labour” with SEO.
 
Cost:
SEO is a very specialised field and this is reflected in the cost of hiring a professional seo company.
 
Black Hat techniques:
There are still many people selling SEO services that use “black hat” techniques in order to gain high rankings in the search engines. By “black hat” techniques I mean unethical techniques that cheat the search engines, for example “cloaking” or “doorway” pages. These techniques may cause a temporary rise in rankings for a website but you run the risk of being banned by the search engines.
 
Keywords:
It is very difficult to optimise a website for many keywords. You may be able to rank top for some of your keywords but if you sell thousands of individual products then that is only a small fraction of your market.
Another option available to businesses wishing to promote their website on Google is to use their Pay Per Click Advertising programme- Google Ad words.Google Ad Words allows a website to instantly appear on the first pages of Google for any keywords related to your product or service.
Your listing appears on the right hand side of the “natural” results as a “sponsored link”. The beauty of this advertising method is that it is highly targeted. What I mean by this is that your website is put in front of people who are as far into the buying cycle as possible, they are searching to buy a particular product or service. Compare this to more traditional advertising like listings in the press. Lets say you place an advert in a local newspaper on page Twelve. The newspaper has 100 000 readers weekly. So 90 000 read page twelve. 20 000 readers noticed your ad and of those readers 500 chose to remember your company name for future reference. Of these 500 readers 50 actually think of you next time they require your product or service. So from 100 000 readers you have gained 50 new customers. Now with Google Ad Words your advert only appears when someone types in a keyword related to your product or service. Its like everybody reading the newspaper seeing your advert plus you only pay when they visit your website.
There is no minimum budget for Google Ad Words. If you wanted to spend one pound a day then that’s fine. You bid on your keywords and set the price you are willing to pay for each visitor to your website. Average price per click is approximately £0.05 to £1.00 but it completely depends on the competitiveness of the market.
Where you are positioned in the “sponsored links” depends on two things- your bid price for your keywords and your click through rate (the number of times your listing has been shown divided by the number of times your advert is clicked.) The higher the click through rate the more “relevant” Google deems your advert and you are rewarded with being higher up in the listings.
Google Ad Words is used by millions of people every day promoting their websites and increasing traffic and sales. It is relatively straightforward to set up and operate so what are you waiting for……
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Link Popularity

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Saturday 18 April 2009 5:11 am

There is a term used in the optimisation industry- “content is king”. This is very true. SE’s (Search engines) love content, especially regularly updated content. With this in mind, you must remember that “links are queen”. Having inbound links to your website is a very important factor of the SE’ s algorithms, if you want to increase your visibility on SE’s then you must increase the amount and quality of the links that point to your website. For many small to medium companies the cost of paying for a full time link building campaign is far too expensive.

Companies, webmasters and web site owners should be constantly trying to improve link popularity (inbound links to their website), an increase in inbound links will cause an increase in visibility on the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

The times of “a link is a link” have however passed. Reciprocal links should only be arranged with websites that are about the same topic or share similar content. Websites that reciprocate links with websites that are not similar are deemed as artificially trying to increase link popularity by the SE’s. One way inbound links are more valuable than reciprocals, and remember that it is the quality of links that also bears more weight. One link from an authoritative site with high PR (Page Rank) is worth many links from that friend of yours that just built his personal website!

Anchor text- This is the word or words that are used to link to your website. e.g. “seo consultant ” is anchor text that actually points to my home page www.netztrack.com. This is often called the links “title”. Use the keywords that you would like a high ranking for as the anchor text.

For instance Smith LTD sell widgets of all shapes and sizes. They would like to rank well for the term “plastic widgets”. They start submitting their website for inclusion in free web directories. When asked for the anchor text or links title during submission it would be far more beneficial to use the text “plastic widgets” rather than Smith LTD.

With all this in mind you should start your link building campaign as soon as possible? Google will spider links to your website several times before accepting their importance, this process is known as “waiting for the links to mature”. This can often take several months.

So, here are my top 10 ways to get inbound links to your website.

1) Submit your website to free web directories. (Make sure you submit to the right category).

One of the most important free web directories to submit to is www.dmoz.org (the open directory) DMOZ is used by Google for all of the contents of their Web Directory. Many SE’s and directories also use DMOZ results for their directories. Google also gives a link to your site from DMOZ a lot of credit. Beware DMOZ is edited by humans and getting listed can take anywhere from 1-18 months, so the sooner you do it the better!

2) Submit your website to premium & paid web directories. (Make sure you submit to the right category).

3) Request website visitors link to your site.

Visitors to your website are there because they are interested in the content/products/services of your site. Ask them to link to your website, webpage. You can even supply the HTML code for them to link to your website. E.g. if you would like to link to this page please use the following code:

4) Write and distribute articles.

Write articles about your product & related services then submit them to article distribution websites. This is a very effective way of getting inbound links. The idea is you place a link to your website at the bottom of each article, then when webmasters use your article as free content for their website they must include the link at the bottom of the article.

5) Exchange links with other similar websites (reciprocal linking).

6) Contribute in forums.

Many forums allow you to place a signature at the bottom of every post. Place a link to your website with the use of anchor text and gain a link for every post you make. Also you may post links to your website in the main topic part of the forum. Do not spam though- Only post links when it is appropriate. It is better to be a good contributor to a forum than spam the forum with un relevant links.

7) Create a blog.

Create an informative blog about your product or services. “Bloggers” are linking fanatics. Get other “bloggers” to link/reciprocal link to your blog and then place links from the blog to your website.

8) Answer questions in Q+A websites.

It is easy to answer questions in places like Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources. (e g your website!)

9)Paid Links.

Some websites allow you to buy links from their website for a specific length of time.

Generally this is done from websites with high PR (Page Rank). And the purpose of it

is to increase a websites Page Rank.

10) Develop an easy to link to, informative site.

This goes back to “content is king”. If your website is of high quality, good information with no grammatical or spelling errors then web site owners will naturally link to your site.

Increasing results through Geo-Targeted SEO

All the factors now encompassed in the world of search engine optimisation are both varied and simple, however time and time again website owners fail to see some of the most recent ‘common sense principles’ behind an effective and successful SEO strategy. This article aims to bring to light the most recent change in SEO, GEO-Targeting.

There are a countless number of directories, information portals, articles, FAQ’s, Top 10 listings, and other resources that repeat each other about the most important factors of SEO and it’s benefits. Many of them however fail to explain some of the more recent changes in the ‘formula’ of successful optimisation.

It has long been the case that users will open a search engine, search for a product or service e.g. “Office Furniture” and make use of that company to make their purchase or gain information.

Over the past few years’ consumers and businesses have started to make many more purchases directly online, as the general attitude towards online transactions has changed quite significantly.

A change in trends

As the consumers and businesses have begun to accept making a purchase online as a normal course of action, the places that they look for these products and services has started to come under consideration.

If a company wants to purchase some office furniture they will no long simply search for “Office Furniture”. Why? Because the term is too broad, brings up many irrelevant results and often the companies listed are not in the same geographic region as the company looking for the furniture.

When searching for products that are going to be purchased online, the customer ideally wants to be dealing with a ‘local’ company or business. This helps them feel more ‘secure’ in making the purchase as they know that the supplier is covered by the same laws, easier (and sometimes cheaper) to communicate with, and other factors such as delivery costs and language barriers are far more manageable, making the entire purchasing experience more streamlined.

What is Geo-Targeting?

It is during these searches that geo-targeting comes in as a factor of the search. If a customer is looking to buy office furniture and they are located in the USA, it is very common for them to append ‘USA’ to their search, so instead of looking simply for “office furniture” they will search for “office furniture USA” or a similar variation on this.

The effect of this is that the search engine results returned with be mostly UK based as ‘UK’ is a term used within the sites on their contact details, delivery information pages, legal disclaimer, and often company description pages.

Geo-targeted searching is the act of refining your search by including the name of a location within the search term. Examples would be “office furniture UK”, “jewellers in Berkshire”, “UK Office Supplies” etc.

Why use geo-targeting in SEO?

As explained earlier, users are changing the way that they search for information to find results close to their location. Many sites that are currently indexed do not really have a large amount of information to help search engines deem them ‘relevant’ to the appended location term, often because they simply don’t have their intended geographic area for marketing mentioned on their site enough.

By including the intended geographic market in the keywords used with an SEO campaign and the optimisation performed on a site, it is possible to have a dramatic and successful increase in both top results, traffic to your website, and indeed potential customers finding your products.

It is very simple to include geo-targeted terms and phrases within the normal action of search engine optimisation and will go a long way to increasing the revenue a website can generate for it’s owner.

There must be something bad about doing this?

Alienation of potential customers is always possible. If a user in the US is searching for simply “Office Furniture” and your website happened to show up with “UK Office Furniture” in it’s title, it is more than likely that the searcher will skip visiting the website because it states that it is targeting the UK.

This can be seen as a positive in the sense that it actually has had the effect of qualifying your traffic even more. It just successfully stopped a user visiting your website that would have found out that your products are UK specific and that they could not purchase their requirements from your website anyway.

Of course this could also be a negative. If you ‘mainly’ target the UK but indeed sell to overseas clients this may have just lost a potential sale.

Should geo-targeting be used?

This brings us to an important decision. Should geo-targeting be used in an SEO campaign? The answer depends solely on the target audience or geographic region of the products and services provided.

Should your product be for a specific area or country, or you tend to only deal with local businesses then yes, you should certainly look to be geo-targeting your optimisation to increase your sales.

The second situation is that some of your products or services are available to many areas while others are not. In this instance simply use selective geo-targeted optimisation within each of the products or services sections.

Lastly, if your target market is not constrained by geographic regions and is available anywhere, such as online services or products that have worldwide delivery, then more than likely geo targeted optimisation is not an option. Of course, it could be that producing several “global market” sites that are tailored for your most prominent geographic regions could help improve sales as each of these additional sites can be optimised with geo-targeting separately.

The key is that geo-targeting an SEO campaign can make a tremendous difference to all factors of a websites success. It is simply a case of deciding if it is a viable option for the products and services the website provides.
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Ways To Improve Your Site with Google Analytics

Posted by admin | SEO Reseller | Wednesday 15 April 2009 6:11 am

Among all the free web site stats analyzer, I think Google analytics is the best solution for your site because of its utility, richness and depth analysis. You are able to make informed editorial, navigational and page design decisions to boost your site’s traffic and effectiveness with the data that Google gives you.
Signup & installation
Google Analytics was launched in 2005; growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now the waiting list has been removed and anybody can sign up to use this great service.
You just need to visit Google analytics and signup for free Google analytics account.
Once your account is set up, to get Google Analytics tracking your site’s page views, drop a snippet of JavaScript onto your site’s pages (much like Sitemeter.) The guide should help you find your way around the new system. You just have to copy paste the JavaScript in the pages you want Google to track.
E.g.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-1063593-**”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

If you’re a blogger, just include the Google Analytics code into all your blogging software’s templates.

Powerful report generating tool
Google Analytics has all the features you’d expect from a high-end analytics offering. It also provides tightly integrated AdWords support to view AdWords ROI metrics without importing cost data or add keyword tracking codes.
If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface. Google Analytics also calculates ROI metrics from automatically imported cost and keyword tracking data, by saving you time.
There are various ways to track your different needs for your site.
If your site allows downloads you can keep record of your downloads by simply adding a script in your site.
E.g.
<a href =”http://www.example.com/pdf/maps.pdf” onClick=”Javascript: urchinTracker (‘/downloads/map’);”>

Tracking ecommerce site
Tracking where your visitor come from is the most important thing you should know. You come to know from which search engine visitors come searching for your site.
Sales reports by traffic sources can be found under the “Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources” section of the menu.

table

Tracking your sales
To track your sales you will need to use server side script on your confirmation page (the page people see after they complete a transaction on your site) to populate a form in the following format:
code_3

Example
UTM:T|34535|Main Store|111108.06|8467.06|10.00|San Diego|CA|USA
UTM:I|34535|XF-1024|Urchin T-Shirt|Shirts|11399.00|9
UTM:I|34535|CU-3424|Urchin Drink Holder|Accessories|20.00|2

Once you have populated the form, GA will start tracking your sales right away.
Redesign of your site
If you are planning to redesign your site and want to keep your screen resolution according to the most commonly used resolution, according to different browsers or flash installed ask Google analytics for your queries. Just go to ‘web design parameters’ for all the valuable data you want!

Above listed features is only the scratch of Google analytics. According to me Google analytics is one of the best web sites analyzing report generating tool build so far.
If you have not used Google analytics yet try it and I am sure you will love its rich features.

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