If you want to do SEO for your company then never go for a cheap

Search Engine Optimizer.

It is true that economic condition through the world is a bit poor right now but that doesn’t mean that you will go for a cheap SEO that is never a good idea according to me. This doesn’t mean that you just go for the best SEO in the town and the most expensive one but surely the one who is good and gets you a proper return on investment.
Like anything you buy in the supermarket getting something dirt cheap usually means that either the product is about to expire or it really sucks and no one else buys it. Getting something dirt cheap on the streets, on the other hand, usually means that it’s either stolen or smuggled. Either way, it spells trouble. And the same thing goes for SEO.

Sure there might be some SEO providers out there that do give their services for a low low price but they are rare (I actually haven’t really encountered one but anything is possible right?). So what can you expect from low budget SEO? Simple low quality results or worse getting ripped off. They might just disappear after you pay. On the other hand if you do get results chances are they are helping you rank using questionable (aka black hat) methods, something you definitely don’t want associated with your site or business. Just remember if the SEO company is any good they will not be giving away their services for free (except to charity maybe).

For tips on choosing a good SEO provider read Gary’s post on finding the right SEO company.

It is necessary to update your news sites so as to get tracked by the goggle search engine spiders. Today I will try to bring some tips which you should use in your news websites to make it more SEO friendly.

These are some of the main things which should be kept in mind for getting a Google’s news rank boosters:

Keeping the article body intact – Don’t break the article body. Place ads and other stuff on the sidebar or at the bottom of the article but not in between paragraphs!

Put dates between title and body – This makes it easier for Google to determine recentness of your articles. This is also really useful in terms of usability. One of my pet peeves is having to look for the date/time stamp when reading online articles/posts, especially when reading older articles because I want to be sure I know how old or new an article is when citing that article.

Smart Titles – Titles matter so think about your titles really hard. It matters in SEO so make sure you squeeze in your most important keyword(s) in there. It also matters to readers so make sure it is both informative and catchy.

Separate original content from press releases – As mentioned in my previous post, Ranking in Google News, “opinions, editorials, satire, press-releases and subscriptions are not eligible to lead [story] clusters” so make sure you separate them and give them their own section/page. Of course you should place the original articles on the main landing page and not the other way around.

Publish informative unique content – When it comes to publishing, whether internet publishing or in whatever form, we will never tire of reminding everybody – Content is still and always be king!

The use of unique permanent URLs with at least 3 digits – This helps Google determine that the page contains an article and is not a static HTML page. This has roots in the traditional way news sites/publishers choose their URLs. However, if your pages does not have this kind of URL you may skip this and simply do the next tip.

Submit a news sitemap – News sitemaps are beneficial because it will make it easier for the news crawler to find your article and re-crawl that same article to look for updates (re-crawl happens in 12 hours).

Aside from this it contains the meta-data (i.e. keywords, publication date) needed by Google to help them determine not only relevancy of your article to their story clusters/categories but also determine the other ranking factors without having to rely on Google’s extractor.

Every major search engine lets you search for images and many times you must have noticed how you end up on a website while searching for an image. If your website has lots of images then your images too can be good source of quality traffic. In this post I’m going to list a few ways to leverage your images for traffic from search engines.
Give Proper Names To Your Images

It’s always better to name an image as “web-design-services.gif” than “image3098.gif” because the name helps the search engines index it for the search term. Use all your primary keywords as the names of your image, but try to keep everything contextual. Don’t name an image as “rose.jpg” if it shows a crocodile (unless of course the croc’s name is Rose).

Use Appropriate Text In The Alt Attributes

The alt attribute of the IMG tag has been in use for a long time. It makes a good anchor text if you use your images as links. A great way of using your keywords in the alt attribute is:

It’s not necessary that you only use the ALT attribute when you use an image as a hyperlink; you can use the ALT attribute when you use the IMG tag to display an image on your web page.

Use Your Relevant Text around Your Image

Use your keyword-rich content around your images. This helps the search engines figure out what the image conveys. Of course it goes without saying that don’t mislead the search engines by using all sorts of wrong keywords.

Remove Image Restrictions

Try not to display your images dynamically through JavaScript because then the search engines cannot access them. Also, make sure your robot.txt file is not stopping the crawlers from accessing your images folder because some robot.txt files do that.

So these are a few steps you can take to derive relevant traffic from search engines using images.

So… are you?
According to Urban Dictionary Google centric means having a view of the world centered on Google and Googling. In the example given it said that “My wife doesn’t belief that ____ exists because it wasn’t available on Google. She is Google centric.”

Of course so far I haven’t really searched for something that existed that I haven’t found on Google. I do believe though that if I sit down to think about it I WILL find something not on Google…or rather I will not find that something in Google.

Anyway the question came to my mind without really knowing that there was already a definition of the term. I was just thinking about how most SEOs are too focused on Google. I have posted the importance of not neglecting to optimise for other search engines before (back when Ask hadn’t changed their strategy yet) and I thought that I should reiterate the importance now. I guess we really all know why it is important to give other search engines at least some attention but then again it is good to be reminded every now and then. So here’s a short list on why we shouldn’t be focused on Google alone.

1. Other search engines bring traffic too – I guess this is the most important reason. No traffic should be discounted. So even if you don’t really strive to be on the top of other search engine’s SERPs you should at least make sure that you are indexed there!

2. Just in case scenarios – You should be visible in other search engines for days (rather seconds/minutes) when Google goes down. It may be just a few minutes but not being in other SERPs means
automatically saying bye to the few/many users who didn’t bother to wait for Google to go up and simply used another search engine.

3. Targeting specific types of users – While Ask may no longer be a full blown search engine you can bet that if your primary target users are married women then you should make sure you do well in Ask’s SERPs, after all that is their target market too. This doesn’t only apply to ask. Check out the conversion/retention rates of the traffic the different search engines bring although Google will definitely bring more traffic bounce rates may be the highest there. If you find that retention/conversion rates from a certain traffic source (not just search engines) are pretty good then put a bit more effort to ensure that you place well in that search engine’s SERPs.

Due to excessive exploitation of this tactic many webmasters, and even SEO consultants doubt the benefit of carrying out reciprocal linking campaigns. Reciprocal linking means exchanging links with slightly similar, complimenting websites for search engine optimisation. Search engines, especially Google, rank those websites higher that are linked to by various other websites. They assume that when people link to your website, they endorse the value you provide to their visitors.

Reciprocal linking goes back to the late nineties in fact. Many websites (called link farms) were created specially to facilitate reciprocal linking, but such websites were soon blacklisted by various search engines. But this hasn’t mitigated the significance of well-crafted reciprocal linking campaigns. In this post I’m going to list 10 things you should consider while engaging in reciprocal linking.

1. Choose your linking partners carefully: Some websites have a bad reputation. Links going to them from your website and links coming from them to your website can significantly harm your rankings and can even get your website blacklisted. I’m not going to mention what sort of websites are disreputed because the idea of disrepute differs from person to person.

2. Choose websites that add value to your website: There is no use exchanging links with websites that are in no way related, even remotely, to your website’s theme. For instance, if you are a web design company and you don’t offer SEO services it would be OK to link to SEO websites and get links from them but linking to escort services websites or car rental websites wouldn’t make any sense (if they are your clients you should have their links on your portfolio page).

3. Have a clear-cut policy on your website: Dedicate a separate page to your reciprocal linking policy and state in the policy what sort of links you can accept and from what kind of websites you would appreciate incoming links.

4. Make sure proper anchor text is used: It’s very important what anchor text the linking websites use when they link to you. If you are a web design company then the phrase “web design” or something similar must definitely be a part of the anchor text otherwise the incoming link is of no use. If you are using an image request then to use the phrase in the ALT attribute of the image tag.

5. See that the page is not dynamically generated: Hand-coded links are better search engine optimised compared to dynamically generated pages. Some webmasters use JavaScript (a client-side script) or other server-side scripts to generate the page on which they display reciprocal links. There is no use exchanging links with such websites.

6. Exchange links with highly ranked websites: This is often a difficult task but not unattainable. When you approach webmasters for reciprocal linking offer check the page rank (although it’s not a perfect indicator of a website’s popularity). Links from highly ranked websites carry more weight compared to low-ranked websites

7. Be patient: It’s not that people will start exchanging links with you the moment you send them an email request. It may happen that even after more than 20 emails nobody responds or even if they respond they politely (or rudely) refuse your offer. Don’t feel daunted; everybody goes through this. Unless you are very popular very few people will exchange links with you readily. It will take time, so practice patience, lots of it.

8. Have great content, and a great website: Provide an incentive to the others to link to your website. It’s very difficult to get people to link to you if you have a lousy website with meager content. Some websites are so well-maintained and have such rich content that people love linking to them. You’ll always have an upper edge if you have a great website with lots of content because then everybody knows that sooner or later you are going to rank very high on all major search engines.

9. Reply to as many link exchange requests as possible: Treat people as you would like to be treated. Politely reply to all link exchange requests even if you are not interested in exchanging links with the requesting party.

10. Avoid page that have hundreds of links: The more reciprocal links a website has, the less is the impact of the inbound links you get from it (unless that website is a niche online directory). Make sure the page containing your link doesn’t have more than 25-30 links.

This basically encompasses all the things you should keep in mind while carrying out your reciprocal linking campaigns.